Square-Enix’s 2D-HD system has been a godsend for traditionally styled Japanese RPGs. After struggling through years of questionable visual updates and smoothing filters, we finally have a visual style that feels respectful to the genre’s forebearers while looking eye-poppingly pretty on modern machines. It all began with Octopath Traveler and it’s fantastic sequel, but since then many games have employed the style, both new and old.

The latest series to get the HD-2D treatment also happens to be a massive blind spot in my personal game experience. Dragon Quest 3 2D-HD Remake, aside from being an absolute mouthful of a title, is a stellar example of how to bring an almost forty-year-old game to the current day. With a gorgeous visual overhaul, a moving orchestral soundtrack and thoughtful quality-of-life features, this 2D-HD remake respectfully allows the original source material to shine.

Our story begins with our protagonist waking up in their single-parent home. We learn that their father left on an adventure some time ago to save the world and never returned. Despite this, our character feels like having a coming-of-age moment and leaving on a similar adventure. Their poor mum must barely make it through the day because of the worry.

You learn of a big bad guy you must defeat and head to the local tavern to assemble an adventuring party to save the world. This is the first moment where you’ll see how free you are to build a party just as you like. You can recruit up to three other party members at a time. You decide their name, appearance, and, most importantly, their vocation. From warrior and priest to more oddball options like gadabout and monster wrangler, you have immense freedom in building out your party.

Here lies one of the aspects of Dragon Quest 3 that impressed me the most. Its job system is incredibly flexible, and with a little thought, it’s easy to build a wildly versatile team with which to take on the world. At a certain point in the game, you’ll get the option to change the classes of your party mates. When you do this, they go back to Level 1, but they keep all the spells and abilities they’ve learned so far, as well as half of their currently built-up stats. Building them back up to level with the rest of the party is pretty painless, and when they get there, they have stats above what they could have had at the same level without re-classing. They also gain all the new abilities of their new class as they grow.

THE CHEAPEST PRICE: $89.95 WITH FREE SHIPPING ON AMAZON

Normally multi-classing systems put me off a little, I’m afraid I’ll absolutely goose it and end up with a totally useless party member. The way it’s done here means that almost no matter what you do, you’ll end up with better stats than you started with. It made me much more willing to play with the system. In doing so, I went from a pretty standard mage, priest and warrior combo to a party with immensely useful thief and monster-wrangling skills. Each party member became more well-rounded with buffs and heals as well, so if one party member fainted, it was rarely game over. The job system in Dragon Quest 3 is great fun to play with.

The battle system is pretty straightforward and will be familiar to anyone who’s played a turn-based RPG. You’ll take turns to fight with weapons, items, magic spells and special abilities – attacking, defending and manipulating the stats of your party and your enemies to your advantage. Things can be quite difficult to begin with while you’re building out your party’s abilities but I found that if I did a little extra exploring and made judicious use of buffs and debuffs I was usually able to prevail against tough early bosses without too much trouble.

I touched on the 2D-HD overhaul earlier, but it’s worth going into a little more detail. I’m sure it will become old hat at some point, maybe verge on overuse eventually, but for now, I’m still utterly enthralled by the visual style and how it brings NES/SNES-era RPGs to life. Characters and monsters maintain a flat pixel-art look, while the environment around them is rendered in loving 3D detail. A shallow depth of field sells the look even further – it’s like looking into a diorama of little miniatures going about their adventure.

Similarly, the audio has had a respectful revamp that maintains its classic sensibilities while taking advantage of modern hardware. The entire soundtrack is luxuriously orchestrated and feels like a realisation of what was being composed in the NES/SNES era without the shackles of the sound hardware of the time. I’ve enjoyed the soundtrack so much that I’ve gone back to listen to the originals to compare them, and you can hear the distinct flavour of the originals in the new orchestral recordings. Some sound effects have remained from the original, tastefully melding the old and new.

While great effort has been made to keep things traditional, several new quality-of-life additions have made things more palatable to a broader audience. Objective markers can point you to the next major story location to ensure you’re never aimlessly wandering, though wandering is still worthwhile to find little events and items that add flavour to your adventure.

Three difficulty levels are available to tailor your experience to your preference. Dracky stops anyone in your party ever getting below 1HP, and Draconian ramps up the difficulty while reducing EXP gained per battle. Auto-battle options aren’t entirely new to the series, but are an incredibly useful tool when grinding levels or dealing with easier fights that don’t need particular strategies. All of these features are entirely optional, and I didn’t feel they got in the way of playing the game ‘as intended’. Mostly, they just prevented me from looking up a guide when I couldn’t quite recall where to go next.

The post Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake Review – Gaming Comfort Food appeared first on Press Start.

I remember seeing Euro Truck Simulator have a sudden burst of popularity with players and streamers some years ago. I never understood it. How does the drudgery of realistic long-distance road haulage make for a fun time? Why would someone come home from their job and think to themselves ‘time to simulate a different job on my computer?’

To really test out the TSW Truck Wheel from Moza, I decided to embrace my inner truck driver and go all in on American Truck Simulator.

Getting everything physically set up was pretty straightforward, especially since I already had the wheel base and pedals from the R3 kit. I got sent a new mount to use with this wheel (a separate purchase, it should be noted) that allows you to mount the wheel nearly fully horizontally or adjust anywhere up to nearly vertical. If you have a favourite truck cabin layout, you can probably replicate the steering wheel position.

THE CHEAPEST PRICE: $519 FROM SCORPTEC 

Initial software setup was a little more complex. Firmware updates are easy enough with the Pit House software, but given the wheel base mounts upside down, I had to recalibrate to make sure the neutral position of the wheel was the right side up. Setting up all your buttons and pedals will depend on the game, but I found things pretty manageable in American Truck Simulator.

Back to the wheel itself, there is a useful set of buttons adorning the centre of the wheel, useful for things like indicators, headlight controls, trailer management and even controlling in-game radios. Each of the buttons is RGB backlit and can be set up with precise detail in the Pit House application. There’s a useful RGB array at the top of the wheel’s central area which can be configured to react to your engine RPM. If you’re going full on manual transmission in your simulated truck, this can be a really helpful indicator along with engine noise to help you know when to switch gears.

Alongside the buttons are some smart clicky directional pads (a little like the 3DS Circle Pad but with a pleasant click when it actuates) and some scroll wheels. The directional pads come in especially handy for menu navigation, while using the scroll wheels to tune the radio and control it’s volume felt just right.

Having all these extra controls was one thing, but steering these big rigs is of course the main event when it comes to a simulation steering wheel. Having a wheel of this size and orientation really sells the weight of the massive vehicle you’re driving. The way you can spin the wheel several times before hitting the steering limit lets you get really fine with control while also helping with the illusion that there’s a big set of tyres under you.

The materials feel super durable. It’s wrapped in a microfibre leather which gives great texture for grip and a pleasant plushness for comfort in long driving sessions. The buttons have a hefty click to them and feel like they could survive years of simming.

With an RRP of $549, this isn’t an impulse buy. You’ll want to be pretty sure you’re heavily into truck simming before entertaining a purchase like this – especially given it needs a wheel base at least to be functional. The wheel should be compatible with most wheel bases on the market with appropriate adapters which is a nice touch. I didn’t get to test this, but the fact that Moza isn’t locking it’s gear to it’s own ecosystem is laudable. This stuff’s expensive and nobody wants to feel like they picked the wrong brand and have to start again just to try a different wheel.

The post Moza TSW Truck Wheel Review – On The Road Again.. appeared first on Press Start.

There was a time when you could hardly step foot in a game store without finding several rally games vying for your attention. Rallying in the real world was at it’s peak of popularity in the 1990s and rallying games were a dime a dozen. Colin McRae and Tommi Mäkinen may not be household names anymore, but Polish dev team Pixel Perfect Dude want to take us back. Approachable rally with depth to keep you playing, Drive Rally is for the most part a pleasant way to revisit rally’s glory days.

The key to any rally game’s success is the driving experience. In this aspect Drive Rally excels. Each of the driving surfaces like dirt, snow and tarmac have a distinct feel. Driving in snow at speed feels exhilaratingly dangerous, your ability to slow down severely hampered by the near total lack of traction. Dirt isn’t quite as slippery, but still poses a challenge. Transitioning from a slippery to dry tarmac is a real test of good road-feel in a rally game and to me Drive passes this test swimmingly. It feels so good to slide into a corner and shoot out the exact direction you intended once the grip of bitumen grabs you.

Throwback games like this sometimes choose to go for a low-res, low-poly look reminiscent of the original hardware. Drive Rally instead goes an entirely different direction. It takes the best aspects of the flat-shaded look and combines it with some wonderful lighting and high resolution sharpness to great effect. Cars are bright and colourful with sharp shadows to make sure they look at home in their surroundings. The environment shares the well-lit flat look. On higher graphics settings, sunny tracks are bathed in a dreamy haze that really drives home the nostalgic feel the game strives for.

None of the cars are officially licensed, but I really enjoyed their designs. They are clearly modelled as tributes to rallying greats, and it’s fun to see recognisable design elements among the stylised cars.

Championship mode is where I spent most of my time, and it’s the primary way you progress through the game. Each championship is set in a particular location. Snowy terrain, arid deserts and dense rainforest are on offer. Each comes with an associated set of cars to gradually unlock and a co-driver to help you along the way. Championships are linear sets of races. As you progress you’ll unlock car customisations and new cars, and gradually ramp up the difficulty in both track complexity and vehicle speed. I found myself getting better at handling the vehicles in various terrains as I went along, eventually leading to me absolutely nailing sections of tracks that felt fantastic. It’s pretty bare-bones as far as a career mode goes, but does it’s job in letting the actual racing take centre stage.

The co-pilots however, drove me mad. Intended to bring a little personality to proceedings, I found they mostly detracted from the experience. You have four to choose from currently, each a paper-thin stereotype. From Hans who speaks like a Schwarzenegger impersonator to Emma whose personality seems to be ‘being an airhead’ and getting randomly angry at you while giving cornering advice – each of the co-drivers were grating in their own special way. Sometimes they even just straight up missed giving me the details of upcoming corners because they were too busy making some quip about Deutsche Electrik company. Comedy and character can come down to taste, but to me at least they were bad enough that I wished I could do without them.

I also encountered some display bugs, like the names of the championship stages showing up as placeholder text. The cornering advice I mentioned before could be improved as well. Even when they don’t miss them entirely, your co-driver doesn’t really communicate well when turns lead into one another. Even as simple as adding “Left 1 *into* Right 2” would make it so much easier to understand the upcoming twists – much like a real rally co-driver giving pace notes.

I’ve been assured by the dev team that the display bugs and pace notes issues are known and that they’re planning to tackle them before release. Given it’s releasing into Early Access, bugs like this are hardly unexpected. Aside from the aforementioned cornering advice issues and text issues, I had an overall stable experience with Drive Rally.

The post #DRIVE Rally Early Access Review – A Return to the Golden Era appeared first on Press Start.

There have been attempts to bring real time strategy to a console, which relies on a controller without a direct pointer or anywhere near as many keys as a computer keyboard. Some like Halo Wars scaled down the complexity of it’s game systems to account for the controller as primary input. Age of Mythology takes a different approach. Retold rather maintains the full complexity of the PC-only original game while finding a way to cram it all into the inputs provided by a standard Xbox controller, and it works better than I expected.

Some of the most interesting new features I found when playing on console were that for certain common commands you can now tell the game your intention and it will take care of the detail for you. As an example, you can choose to select a villager, give them a command to build a structure. They’ll complete it and then wait for your next order. Alternatively you can select a building and place it. The game will grab a nearby villager who will work on the structure until it’s finished then return to whatever they were doing beforehand. You maintain full control of what you build and where, but takes some of the micromanagement out of your hands.

In a similar vein, you can manage your resource collecting by simply telling the game what you want to collect. You are given a radial menu of smart presets designed for different stages of the game or specific goals. Stuff like gathering more gold in later stages of the game or more wood when you’re focused on expanding your navy. Once selected, any idle villagers under your control will assign themselves to collecting resources according to the ratio you’ve specified. You can manually specify the ratio of wood, food and gold too if none of the presets meet your specific needs. I love the way Retold lets you communicate your intent and have it faithfully carried out, as it lets me focus on the things I love most about Mythology like military management and town design.

These features make playing on a controller way more manageable, but are so useful in how it lets you focus on the aspects of the game you enjoy most that I’m going to keep using them even when I get to play the game with a good old mouse and keyboard.

Outside of these smart automations, there’s still a *lot* in a game like Age of Mythology to map to a controller. There is nothing I found I couldn’t do compared to a mouse and keyboard, but the limited inputs on a controller mean that things get very complex very quickly. Your commands are found in layers of radial menus. Hold LT to show a command menu, select Buildings and you’ll see a series of building radial menus from which you can select the building you want and then finally place it. The aforementioned villager automation options are behind a LT + RS combo. Your God powers are behind LT + X. The menu that appears when you pull LT is dependent on the context. It will show a different menu depending on which unit or building you have selected, or whether you have nothing selected. In order to have a place for all the options that would normally be accessible with a mouse pointer on a controller, things get super complicated.

This complexity can be intimidating. Even as someone with a great deal of experience with the genre, I found that I struggled to map what I wanted to do to the commands on the controller that would let me do it – especially at first. I found things got more manageable as I got used to the controls, but even several hours in I found myself whiffing my inputs because I didn’t realise I had a unit selected or just couldn’t remember the specific button combo to get the menu I wanted.

Commanding your army involves some smart shortcuts, but I often found myself simplifying my strategy because I just didn’t want to do more complex battle commanding with the controller. You can select your entire military with the left d-pad, or specific portions of it with LT + a d-pad direction. When I play strategy games on PC I’ll often assign subsets of my army to different command groups based on their function. One for slower siege weapons, one for cavalry, and so on.

Command groups are difficult enough to manage that I just found myself relying on commanding my entire military as a single group. It works fine for simpler skirmishes, but is definitely not ideal. Even the options to select just ranged units or just cavalry with the d-pad while nice additions, select *all* of that unit type. Units waiting at your base will gradually come traipsing to the front. Complex management is absolutely possible, don’t get me wrong, but I found that even with the thoughtful shortcuts it felt like the controller was holding me back from putting my plans into action.

For all it’s faults, it’s impressive that the team managed to find a way to map the incredibly complex options of a computer based real time strategy entirely to a controller. They’ve made smart additions to controls and overall gameplay options that help manage complexity regardless of how you play. While impressive, I still don’t find that a controller is a first-class input method for this game. It’s manageable for base building and simple skirmishes but gets in it’s own way as the game becomes more complex.

It’s a fine way to have a nostalgic dip into an old classic, but I’ll be sticking to my desk when I can.

The post Age of Mythology Retold Is Impressive But Flawed With A Controller appeared first on Press Start.

The world of sim racing gear is intimidating. I’ve often thought it could be something I’d enjoy but the complexity, expense and space requirements of a proper sim racing rig kept the idea well out of my mind. Then along came MOZA with its R3 Wheel and Pedals bundle for Xbox and PC, offering everything you need to get a racing sim going with just a desk and a game console.

The unpacking process for the R3 was admittedly a little intimidating. There’s a bit of assembly required – but this means the system is flexible enough to fit both desk mount and sim cockpit. Everything goes together in a reasonably straightforward way. Screw the reassuringly hefty wheel base to the desk clamp, lock the wheel on, wire up the pedals and plug everything into power and your games machine. Within about half an hour I had gone from the box appearing on my doorstep to being hooked up.

While setting up, I encountered one of my rare gripes with the kit. While the part of the desk clamp that sits atop your desk is nicely padded to protect the surface, the pieces that push against the bottom of the desk to hold it in place are bare metal. Without some padding it would damage the underside of a nicely-finished desk. It’s nothing that a spare cloth or some rubber lying around can’t solve of course, but worth calling out nonetheless.

Setup is finished by hooking the wheel up to a PC or smartphone and checking for firmware updates. Each part of the kit can have it’s own firmware to update but MOZA’s Pit House applications make it easy to check for and apply updates to the entire setup at once. We’re almost ready to race now.

Hooking up to the Xbox once everything’s powered on was as simple as connecting a USB cable to the console. The standard buttons on the wheel worked straight away to navigate the dashboard and game menus. Depending on the game you might be asked to do some calibration, and I found that it’s worthwhile to take the time and make sure movements in game and on your wheel line up perfectly. Not all games will offer this, however.

Now with all the setup, updating and calibration done it was finally time to put this thing through its paces. I’d been keen to try out the new Forza Motorsport and trying a sim racing kit seemed the perfect way to do so.

I started one of the early races and immediately noticed the hefty force feedback of the wheel base. The amount of feedback and the granularity of that feedback during a race is remarkable. You can feel the way tyres are gripping to the road with every bit of rubbery friction they can muster as you corner at speed. Undulations in the road translate to your wheel moving underneath your hands requiring effort to maintain control of the vehicle. The wheel adds a visceral element to racing that even the haptic feedback of the PS5’s DualSense can’t get close to.

GET IT HERE FOR $729

The wheel comes equipped with paddle shifters mounted to the back. These move with it, making gear changes easy to achieve as long as you keep your hands at 9 and 3 o’clock. They feel solid and chunky, with a satisfying click when actuated. I’d never played a racing game in manual mode for any serious amount of time before, but between having a proper wheel and the satisfying feel of the shifters here I went manual and never wanted to go back. The wheel itself is wrapped in a soft feeling PU Leather (so, plastic) which has a nice, quality feel.

The other major piece you get in this bundle is the pedals. While they’re not as exciting as a wheel with force feedback they form an essential part of the sim experience. Both pedals are smooth to operate, with appropriate resistance to allow for fine control of throttle and braking. Their ability to stay in one place while just on the floor was a weak point, however. For me, whether I had them sitting on carpet or a hard plastic chair mat they would slide around while I was driving. During a moment of hard braking, the last thing you want is the brake to move out from under you or not be where you expect. This would be solved by properly mounting them – but for a desk setup it might be worth finding something they can sit against to keep them in place.

It’s worth noting too, that this wheel bundle can evolve along with you if you enjoy the sim racing life enough to commit more money down the track. It can mount to a dedicated cockpit, and you can expand your options with clutch pedals, gear shifters and handbrakes that all plug into the back of the wheel base. While I think it’s a perfectly serviceable kit right out of the box, it’s nice to know that if you want to level up from here you won’t have to start from square one again.

If you’re considering this bundle, you should definitely peruse MOZA’s compatibility page before committing. While the manual says it should work for nearly any racing game on Xbox, I found I just couldn’t get it working with F1 23. I could launch into the game from the dashboard but nothing in the game responded to wheel button inputs at all. Not sure if it’s an Xbox issue or a game issue, but if a game isn’t on the rather large official list I’d be checking to be sure the game you want to play will work. The good news though is that F1 23 was the only problematic game I found. Forza Horizon 3 and 5, Motorsport, and EA WRC all worked wonderfully.

The MOZA R3 Wheel & Pedals bundle is my first serious attempt at using a sim-racing style controller setup, and it has changed realistic racing games for me. I took driving so much more seriously with a proper wheel in my hands. Doing practise laps of a new course to learn its lines, learning the appropriate gear to be in to approach and remain in the right torque band to zip out as fast as possible. Being behind a wheel made me take racing more seriously. I felt like I was getting better at racing by feeling the feedback from the car and track, and seeing my lap times improve as I learned to adapt to track conditions and to better my technique was a thrill.

The post MOZA R3 Wheel & Pedals for Xbox/PC Review – I Am The Wheelman appeared first on Press Start.

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is about a down-on-his-luck duck hitting rock bottom as noir gumshoes often do. He receives a mysterious note from an anonymous client – someone’s lunch has gone missing from the work fridge and they want the services of Eugene McQuacklin to crack the case. But what starts as a simple missing lunch launches into a spiral of wonderfully written office-themed intrigue that lets you truly feel like you’re deducing your way to the bottom of things. Developers Happy Broccoli Games have produced a quick, self contained detective story that makes for a wonderful afternoon mystery.

Duck Detective takes place in a reasonably small area, spanning the rooms of a local bus transport head office. You’ll meet several characters and begin using your skills of de-duck-tion to understand their motivations, vices and relationships amongst one another. To begin your investigation you’ll be given a statement with actions, actors and motives blanked out. Investigation involves paying attention to your surroundings, looking in detail at objects of interest and talking to each character about their thoughts on the current goings on. Once you think you have a handle on what’s going on you can fill in the blanks and have your “Eureka!“ moment. This pushes the story along and gets you just that little bit closer to solving the mystery.

That mystery is wonderfully well-written and intriguing to the very end. Each character you meet has some involvement with the story, lousy with connections or motives you wouldn’t guess at first glance. Nothing is quite as it seems and the way Duck Detective is structured from a game mechanic and writing standpoint makes it thrilling to slowly unravel your way to the ultimate truth of the matter. The world itself is superbly realised too. Things like postings on noticeboards or messages on unlocked computer screens are used to add humour and flavour to the world, working in concert to subtly push you in the right direction and have you feeling like a top-tier PI. Humour is subjective of course, but Duck Detective had me regularly grinning to myself while I was unraveling the threads of intrigue laid before me.

Duck Detective’s visuals are cartoonish first glance, but like the mystery Eugene is sent to unravel hides detail upon closer inspection. Viewed from an almost isometric camera, characters appear like flat cardboard cut outs, waddling around the office as though it were a giant tabletop game board. This childish exterior belies the complexity of the world which is brimming with detail to investigate. The whole things plays wonderfully on Switch where I noticed nary a chug.

Every line for every character is voice acted, which is much appreciated in a game where someone’s manner of speaking could be an indicator of their intentions. Each is voiced in a way that compliments their character. The music is of particular note as well, consisting of wonderfully written pieces that give that perfect noir detective mood. I couldn’t say conclusively, but I feel that the luxurious noir jazz increased my detectiving skills.

While I enjoyed Duck Detective for the most part, there were some moments I felt marred an otherwise fantastic little experience. Despite a welcome and generally well implemented hint system where Eugene will ponder clues and vaguely gesture at what might be useful to find out, I found one or two situations where I felt like a sap despite having found every clue and having had every conversation. Especially toward the end when the fill-in-the-blanks got longer and more complex, even if I had a good idea of what was going on, I couldn’t quite work out precisely the phrase the game wanted me to complete. Falling back to trial and error at times felt like I was fighting to prove to the game that I had worked things out. I’d have loved a little more nudging with the deduction sections to save resorting to trial and error.

The post Duck Detective: The Secret Salami Review – Hard-boiled Deductions appeared first on Press Start.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants (referred to as Wrath from here out because geez what a mouthful) is a port of a 2017 arcade game from prolific licensed arcade game maker Raw Thrills, that has you picking from one of the four iconic Turtles and mashing through legions of enemies until you finish or run out of continues. Ostensibly inspired by the classic Turtles in Time, Wrath is a mindless trial of repetition that gets stale even within its roughly hour-long runtime.

Things look positive to begin with. Up to four player local co-op play is easy to set up and can make for some fun carnage. You begin by each choosing a turtle – the choice doesn’t matter all that much, the attacks look a little different but they’re all pretty much the same – then choosing a level from the five initially available (with one more unlocked afterwards), and walking from left to right beating up every baddie in your way.

The gameplay is extremely simple; you can move, jump, and attack, though I found myself yearning for a dodge or block button. Avoiding damage requires you to stop attacking and walk away from an enemy about to attack. Compared to an active block or dodge, walking back feels like I’m slowly meandering away from combat rather than participating. More often than not I just found myself mashing attack and accepting the hits. There is some strategy to be found in learning which coloured enemies have which weaponry – dealing with blue enemies first is a good idea because their electric zap attack is incredibly annoying if it hits, for example.

As you land hits you’ll fill a meter under your health, and when it’s full you can unleash a ‘Turtle Power’ attack. Each Turtle’s power looks different, but they’re all functionally the same – a flashy screen-clearing attack. You’ll occasionally find icons in the world that summon friends to do another kind of screen clearing attack with a slightly different animation. Again it adds some modicum of variety, but once you’ve seen them all they’re just another variation on the same.

There is some much-appreciated visual variety in the levels at least. While they’re all populated with mostly the same small selection of enemy types, the backgrounds and hazards in each level help break the tedium a little. You’ve got New York City, a sewer level that apes the neat sewer surfing level from Turtles in Time, Dimension X with its wild, bright pink and white sci-fi setting, among others. Levels have two bosses apiece as well, each with some personality and attack patterns to learn. Even though the actual gameplay is turn-your-brain-off mindless, I still found myself having fun bounding through the levels to see the sights and fight bosses.

Visually the game is pretty unremarkable. We’re well past the time when arcade hardware outclassed what we can have at home. Design wise I don’t find the characters terribly appealing, and technically there are a lot of strange looking low resolution textures to be found. It barrels along at a smooth-seeming 60 frames per second on PS5 even with a lot of chaos on screen which is notable, but overall looks a bit cheap.

Wrath of the Mutants does have some degree of a storyline, but it’s told in uninteresting, unvoiced motion comic style scenes that had me switching off. April O’Neill has been kidnapped, you’ve gotta fight legions of baddies and save her. To be fair, not many people are gonna be playing this for an engrossing story.

Wrath of the Mutants is a thoroughly unremarkable game. Four player local co-op play can elevate even the most mindless of games to be decent fun, but underneath you’ll mostly be moving around and mashing attack until you finish enough levels to hit the end. As an arcade game it’s designed to be easily understood, but even just a little more depth to gameplay would have helped prevent the quick onset of monotony.

The post Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath Of The Mutants Review – A Repetitive Romp appeared first on Press Start.

The newest entry in a series with a spotty past, WayForward is once again taking the lead with the latest Contra game – Contra: Operation Galuga. A thorough re-imagining of the original NES and Arcade Contra game, Galuga keeps the core gameplay and setting of its namesake while modernising the presentation and gameplay systems, adding new characters and throwing in a storyline to tie it all together.

There are a few modes to play with in Galuga, but in all you’ll be running, jumping and shooting your way through eight levels, each with legions of bad dudes and boss encounters to deal with. Story Mode is pretty standard fare, allowing you to run through the game’s levels and continuing from checkpoints when you get a Game Over, eventually seeing through the whole story. Arcade mode is similar, but challenges you to complete as much of the game as possible without hitting a game over. You can still continue, however your score will be higher if you complete more levels without failing.

There’s also a challenge mode which sets you specific parameters to meet in levels as a fun way to eke some more gameplay from the core experience. The action is chaotic with shots from enemies and from your own weaponry routinely all over the screen. Being able to track your own position and move your character around the chaos is a skill you’ll absolutely need to develop for success here.

Thankfully as chaotic as things get, the game controls with fantastic responsiveness so once you have the hang of things you can mostly command your character precisely where you want them to be. You’ve got a fairly straightforward repertoire of jumps, double jumps and a character specific move like Bill’s dash, but keeping it relatively uncomplicated means controls rarely get overwhelming. Given how much else you need to keep track of, it’s good that controls are simple and reliable.

THE CHEAPEST COPY: $69 ON AMAZON

There’s a small but focused supply of special weapons you can collect during missions, all classics from Contra heritage. There’s of course the well-loved Spread Shot which fires multiple projectiles in an arc in front of your character. There’s a flamethrower which has limited range but does high damage, a Homing weapon which launches volleys of missiles around the screen which all home in on whatever target is closest and a few others. Each weapon can be upgraded by picking up a second icon of the same kind, boosting firepower or changing its behaviour slightly. In this Contra you can pick up two special weapons at a time and switch between them at will, a welcome addition compared to the one-weapon-at-a-time limitation in the original game. It adds a welcome layer of strategy and choice without overcomplicating things.

One of the other gameplay additions in this new entry is the addition of special weapon overloads. At any point while you have a special weapon equipped, you can choose to destroy it in exchange for a special attack. The spread shot fills the screen with shots which are fantastic for clearing a busy area, the homing weapon creates a couple of little flying drones that help out with firing at enemies for a while, others give you temporary shields, and so on. The game reminds you regularly to use these, which is good because I often forgot they existed. When I did remember though they came in super handy. You never have to worry too much about losing a special weapon either as they’re generally in regular supply during stages and bosses.

Contra is well known as a series with a high level of challenge, however this new entry has made some changes so that more players might have a good time. You can choose to have multiple hit points per life rather than the old one hit kill, and if you do this you can purchase perks as you play which give you more hits per life. You can play with a boosted amount of lives, purchase other perks to selectively boost characters or weapons according to your preferences, and adjust the overall difficulty. There are also characters you can unlock as you play who will have their own unique moves and even adjusted weapon behaviour. There is still an immense challenge to be found here, but if you’d rather a more casual, fun experience you’ll find something to like here too.

I found I had mixed reactions when considering the game’s presentation. The characters read to me almost like moving action figures, which looks decent enough but I didn’t find them particularly inspired personally. I loved the level designs though. It was always exciting to get to a new level to see the fresh environments I’d be barreling through. Particular highlights for me were later stages, a full bio-mechanical H.R. Giger-style Alien homage full of off-brand face huggers, xenomorphs and other horrifying creatures that look right at home in an alien invasion.

The bosses too are a highlight. It’s awesome to see designs from various Contra classics re-imagined for this new visual style, and they were great fun to learn and overcome. Music to my ears takes a bit of a back seat, given my attention while playing was focused on the chaos of what was going on, but if you find a chance to listen you’ll find some fun renditions of classic tunes. The electric guitar menu intro for example sets the tone brilliantly.

Multiplayer is a massive pull in Contra games, and the same is true here. Up to two players can play the game locally and co-operatively in Story mode, while Arcade mode allows for up to four people to join the fray. Enemy layouts change depending on the amount of players, and it seemed like boss endurance scaled up as well to keep the challenge reasonable against increased firepower. If you’ve got a mate and an afternoon to spare, Operation Galuga would make for an awesome way to spend it.

The post Contra: Operation Galuga Review – Runnin’ And Gunnin’ appeared first on Press Start.

It takes a lot to get me interested in an exploration-focused platform game (or Metroidvania, if you prefer). I’ve grown weary of games billing themselves as Metroid-likes that just don’t really get what made the progenitors of the genre great. What a pleasant surprise it was then to have Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown come across my desk.

Not only does it have the considered world design and structure that a game of this genre needs to succeed, it adds fluid movement and combat, well-considered accessibility options and some genuine innovation to the mix, resulting in one of my favourite entries to the genre in a long time.

The Lost Crown has you play as Persian warrior Sargon. After a plot to disrupt the kingdom results in a kidnapping, Sargon follows the perpetrator to the mysterious Mount Qaf, a once-beautiful place that has been taken over by a curse. Alongside a squad of immortal warriors, you’re set on a quest to recover the kidnapped prince and ensure the betrayer comes to justice, with plenty of compelling twists and turns along the way.

Traversing the world in The Lost Crown feels fantastic. Returning to Prince’s side scrolling roots, The Lost Crown presents a fairly huge world to explore filled with some pretty devious puzzles and secret passages. Sargon is an effortless and agile character able to move his way around the world with ease and grace.

Your repertoire of traversal abilities grows gradually over the course of the game, but even early on just the act of running and jumping makes moving around the world as Sargon compelling. When you add in air dashes, double jumps and the like you feel like you can get just about anywhere with smart use of his abilities.

You’ll absolutely need to be smart with those abilities to get past some of the fiendish platforming challenges you’ll be presented with, as well. I was reminded of 2010’s Super Meat Boy at points – demanding platforming situations, lots of sliding, wall jumping and air manoeuvring, one hit deaths if you touch the wrong surface, and near-instant respawns if you biff it.

Between the design of the challenges and the sublime way Sargon moves about the environment, I loved pitting myself against these sections and getting a little closer to success each time. The most demanding of these challenges are for extra collectibles, though there are still some tricky segments along the main story path of the game that will test players.

While I found the challenges utterly rewarding, The Lost Crown has some features up its sleeve to make sure you won’t have to miss out if they’re not your cup of tea. One of the game’s suite of accessibility and difficulty options allows you to skip these sections entirely – turn on the relevant setting and portals will appear at the start and end of challenging platforming sections that are essential to progress in the story. Activate and enter one of these portals and you’ll be whisked straight to the end without penalty.

If you’re like me and enjoy the challenge for its own sake then these portals won’t get in your way, but they’re a fantastic option if you want to engage with everything else great about the game. I also found them super convenient while doing some post-game exploring.

Continuing in this theme, The Lost Crown has several other options to tailor the experience to your preference. There are normal and ‘Guided’ modes for the map screen. Normal just shows areas you’ve seen, while guided adds icons to indicate story-progression related pathways that you’ve come across and shows whether they are open or closed based on the abilities you have.

I started on Normal mode, but when I gave Guided mode a try I kept it on for the rest of the game. For the times you remember coming across an impassable section but can’t quite remember where it was it’s a lifesaver and in a way that I feel didn’t stop me feeling like I was exploring on my own terms.

There’s one exploration-related innovation in The Lost Crown that I immediately wish every other game of its type had – the Memory Shard feature. When you come across something in the world that seems curious but you can’t deal with yet, you can press down on the d-pad to instantly take a screenshot. The game then marks your location on your map and pins the image to it. This way when you come into new abilities later on you can scan your own map and the screenshots you’ve taken and know exactly where it was you saw that breakable wall or strange grapple point. It’s a simple but brilliant feature that I’ll miss in any game without it.

As someone who enjoys character action games with engaging combat, I was surprised to see The Lost Crown incorporate some elements of that genre into its own combat. While it’s no Devil May Cry, you’re encouraged to knock enemies off balance, to launch them into the air and follow up with a flurry of air attacks and to use all of your movement options to get the upper hand in battle.

This makes regular enemies enjoyable to fight, and really comes into its own with bosses. Bosses, at least on the standard difficulty mode I played on, were delightfully challenging. They demand split second reactions and a good understanding of your movement options to avoid damage and deal it back in return. Like a good boss in Metroid Dread they would take me a few attempts, but the challenge usually felt fair and engaging in a way that kept me coming back after each defeat.

Not everyone wants this kind of gameplay though, so The Lost Crown’s myriad difficulty options again let you tailor the game to your liking. There are several built in presets with good explanations of how they affect the game, as well as a fully custom difficulty option that lets you set sliders to precisely adjust aspects of the game.

Exploring Mount Qaf no matter what difficulty options you choose is compelling. As well as the aforementioned platforming challenges you’ll find plenty of puzzles that will test your grey matter and secret entrances you can uncover with subtle environmental cues.

I really missed having an on-screen map, though. It would have been so much easier to confirm I’d taken the right passage, or confirm I’m exploring a new area if I could see a little portion of the map somewhere on screen, Metroid style. As it is, I had to flip to the map screen often to make sure I hadn’t gone off course. It’s a minor annoyance, but one that did bother me somewhat through most of my play time.

The Lost Crown’s visual style has ups and downs. It has a kind of stylised, simple, not-quite-cartoon, not quite clay sort of look that didn’t particularly light my fire – though there are some awesome animations and visual flairs during boss battles that I loved. Performance on PS5 where I played was close to flawless, though. I don’t have the means to test but Ubisoft claims the game runs at 2160p and 120 frames per second, and as someone pretty sensitive to frame rate drops I noticed nothing but buttery smoothness.

The post Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown Review – A Fantastic New Take On A Classic appeared first on Press Start.

Some of my most treasured multiplayer gaming moments have come from games about racing little cars around ridiculous tracks with friends. From Micro Machines to Mashed, the miniaturised car racing category is always reliable for a quick burst of fun. Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged from Milestone continues this tradition of scale-model mayhem by building on the features of it–s predecessor with new modes, driving abilities and a story-led campaign, but doesn’t quite hold up when played outside those quick bursts.

What caught my eye immediately upon jumping into a race in Unleashed 2 was the sheer attention to detail in the cars themselves. Tiny details like the moulding lines from their manufacturing process and realistic-looking materials for painted plastic and metallic surfaces make it look Milestone just ripped a toy car from its packaging and threw it onto my screen.

They even damage realistically – cars at the end of a race have little chips and paint wear that looks exactly like most of my little toy cars did when I was a kid, after they’d been smashed together a bunch. There’s a great variety of vehicles on offer too from iconic original Hot Wheels designs to models of real life cars, including everything from sedans to tanks.

The environments and track on offer are also worthy of note. Tracks can be set in one of five environments and each lends a particular personality to the race. Racing out in the backyard might be the most nostalgic setting for me, as someone who whiled away countless hours flinging little die cast cars along the patio. Other settings like a dinosaur museum and 80s style pizzeria/arcade are great fun too. Full of appropriate hazards and landmarks, the racing environments in Unleashed 2 are a treat.

AMAZON HAS PRE-ORDERS FOR $69 INCLUDING FREE SHIPPING

Unfortunately, the positive presentation party ends when it comes to what’s being pumped from your speakers. While engines sound wonderful, varied and appropriate to the car being driven, I found the choice of music for the game pretty grating. Uninspired and repetitive, the music in Unleashed 2 had me reaching for the Spotify app on my PlayStation. Using the turbo boost while driving emits a high pitched whine that is unpleasant too, unfortunate given how essential boosting is to victory here.

Boosting is just one of the useful abilities you’ll have at your disposal to deal with the competition in Unleashed 2. New to this game are the jump and strafe abilities which can be used to reach new paths in races as well as to smash your opponents around a bit. The strafe can be especially fun – similar to the side swipe attack in F-Zero, your car suddenly shunts to the left or right and knocks anyone next to you aside. It can be particularly fun to use a larger, heavier vehicle to absolutely slam a small bike into the oblivion of the backyard garden. Each of these abilities uses your boost meter, which can be built up by drifting around corners, slipstreaming behind other cars and doing general Cool Stuff.

These abilities combined with the design of the tracks available give some great freedom in how you approach a race. As long as you pass through certain checkpoints in order, it doesn’t matter the precise path you take between them – and Unleashed 2 gives you plenty of opportunities to leave the beaten track. Whether you enjoy this will be down to personal preference, but I found this level of freedom mostly frustrating rather than rewarding. Not noticing a gap in the track ahead and falling off rather than jumping to the next section is annoying, even if respawning is reasonably quick. For a game designed with kids in mind, it gives a lot of opportunity to irreparably ruin your place in a race by missing a jump or drifting off-course.

Your solo experience of these races will likely begin in the campaign mode. Here, you traverse a top-down map view to select from available events. Each has a minimum requirement to pass, and an extra requirement for further rewards. There’s also a story happening throughout, though outside of the motion-comic style character scenes you’d be hard pressed to notice. Aside from boss levels, events have very little relation to the animated storyline. Boss battles were my least favourite events in the campaign, simply involving racing around a track solo trying to hit a series of targets. Miss one, and you basically have to start again.

Despite the story being barely relevant, the campaign is at least a decent way to explore the different race types available and earn currency to buy and customise your cars. A store is available with a constantly rotating selection of cars to purchase – with rarer ones appearing for sale less regularly. It’s definitely a friendlier way to build up a collection than the loot boxes of the previous game, but it’s a bit boring. I’d much prefer a more classic style of unlocking vehicles with challenges or milestones rather than just checking a store every 40 minutes to see if a rare car is available. Thankfully none of the currencies in the game require real money. Everything can be unlocked simply by playing the game a whole lot.

Multiplayer is the other major portion of Turbocharged, and there’s plenty to play with here. Heaps of quick race modes give plenty of different ways to play with friends as well as work your way through the global leaderboard ranks. Cross-platform play should make finding a match way easier, though it’s an (understandable) shame that Switch is left out of the cross-platform party here. I struggled to find many matches during my review time with the game, though given not many people have the game yet that’s probably to be expected. Local play is limited to two player split screen which is a bit of a shame given how much fun racers like this can be with a group.

I’d be remiss not to mention the in-depth track and livery editors. I found both tools a bit intimidating at first, but the sheer variety of pieces and customisations available is impressive. You’ll even unlock more as you play the game. Liveries and tracks can be shared with the online community too. It’ll be very cool to see some no doubt impressive user-created stuff emerge in the coming months.

The post Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged Review – Die Cast Thrills appeared first on Press Start.

Detective Pikachu Returns is an intensely strange game. It stars a deep-voiced Pikachu with a penchant for solving mysteries and a fondness for black coffee, and has a storyline which heads to some unexpected places. Returns is definitely a game designed with children in mind, but it’s well-made and can definitely be enjoyed by Pokémon fans of all ages.

Detective Pikachu Returns follows Tim Goodman and the aforementioned coffee-enthused Pikachu two years after the events of the previous game. Tim and Pikachu have become local celebrities after their exploits solving the ‘R’ case where Pokémon were going berserk and causing all kinds of commotion.

The story of Returns plays out over six episodes, each with their own core mystery to solve which also serves to propel the overall story along. Our characters put back on their sleuthing hats when a jewel heist occurs, with someone breaking into a mansion and stealing a precious jewel – the Aurora Drop. Pokémon seem to be acting strangely again as well, and it’s up to Tim and Pikachu to get to the bottom of what’s going on.

In each episode, you’ll explore the area, talk to people, look closely to find clues, and use all that you’ve learned to deduce the answers to little mysteries that add up to the truth of what’s really going on.

For reasons still unknown, Tim can understand what Pikachu is saying. This comes in useful since Pikachu can talk to Pokémon to get their view on events, in addition to Tim talking to people for the same reason. The whole thing plays out a little like a point and click adventure game in how you explore an area and chat with people to gradually uncover the story.

Tim and Pikachu can also engage the assistance of certain other Pokémon to help during their investigations. The sensitive nose of a Growlithe comes in handy to track the location of people and objects of interest, while Luxray’s ability to see through walls is incredibly useful while trying to evade capture by enemies in stealth moments. These abilities add some welcome variety to the proceedings.

While investigating in each episode you’ll also come across characters with odd jobs for you to do. These tasks don’t add to the mystery you’re trying to solve, but bring a little extra colour to proceedings. It’s generally stuff like ‘find my friends who are playing hide and seek’ or finding specific Pokémon in the area for a newspaper reporter. These tasks don’t seem to serve much purpose beyond padding the game and adding to the newspaper you can read at the beginning of each episode, so they felt a little like a waste of my time.

I mentioned earlier that the game was made with children in mind, and this is most obvious when it comes to the logical problem solving elements of Returns. While investigating you will note specific pieces of information that pertain to the case in your notebook, and later use these to come to a conclusion. I found the process of solving mysteries interesting in that they created moments of drama during the story, but found the revelations were obvious from a mile away.

Returns hammers home anything it wants you to work out to make sure that even a child’s logical reasoning ability will come to the right conclusion. This isn’t a bad thing necessarily, just be aware that if you’re older it likely won’t exercise your problem solving ability.

I enjoyed the soundtrack of Detective Pikachu Returns a lot. It’s got some great jazzy detective tunes in some acts and some unexpected dance pop style beats in others which I really enjoyed. The visuals though, I found pretty average.

The Pokémon themselves look fantastic – I loved the attention to detail in Pikachu’s animations in particular which leads to some great comedic moments. However, the humans have all the visual style of something you might see in a Cocomelon video. Pokémon games in the past have had some truly inspired and visually interesting character designs so it’s a shame the characters here look a bit naff by comparison.

The post Detective Pikachu Returns Review – A Simple And Charming Detective Adventure appeared first on Press Start.

The Crew Motorfest wants to take you on a holiday. Your destination is O’ahu and your itinerary is attending the Motorfest – piloting all sorts of cars, planes, boats and bikes across the incredible Hawaiian landscapes. The festival even has tour guides! Like any trip away you’ll be tempted to spend more money than you expected, and not every attraction you check out will blow you away, but you’ll try some new things and have a good time at the end of it.

Motorfest is an open-world racing game that gives you a fairly massive island to drive, boat and fly around. Think Forza Horizon in Hawaii and you’re part of the way there. It’s a fantastic choice of setting with picturesque beaches, volcanic valleys and muddy off-road tracks to explore. While it’s a downsize compared to the entire map of the USA from previous games, the focus on a smaller area has allowed for more intricate, handcrafted detail. The island can look rather gorgeous at times. Driving detailed cars with the sun high against a blue sky, it can be quite impressive to look at.

Moving around this setting is the most important part of a driving game, and I’m happy to report that Motorfest controls fantastically. Each car, and especially each category of car, feels quite distinct in how it drives. EVs are fast in a straight line but are harder to corner at speed given their weight. Supercars somehow combine ridiculous speed with great handling. Off-road driving is wonderfully slip-slidey. Even though different vehicles handle so differently, they all have a pick-up-and-play feel that means you can have fun with them immediately. There’s certainly some depth to the handling. Learning and improving your technique will net you improved results to a point. This isn’t a simulation though, it’s all about hanging out and enjoying the drive.

Motorfest structures its core gameplay around a series of Playlists. These are sets of themed races usually with a short storyline, designed to show you around different aspects of motor culture. There’s likely something here for any kind of car enjoyer, and the way the Playlists welcome you to explore new aspects of cars you might not have known about makes them really fun to check out. I loved one particular Playlist that took me on a journey through cars and culture throughout the decades from the 1950s to today – complete with vehicles, challenges and music appropriate to the time period. Collaborations with real-life car culture personalities like Donut Media and Liberty Walk add some character to the game as well.

In addition to the Playlists, there is a series of rotating events on what’s called the Main Stage. These are again groups of activities around a theme, but are available for a limited time and being constantly added to. This is the ongoing service aspect of Motorfest, and where the online community part of the game comes in.

Main Stage offers race events like the Playlists, and also gives you the option to show off a car you’ve customised. Participating in these car shows and events contributes to a limited-time progress bar that can earn you exclusive unlocks, extra XP and things of that nature. I found the events lacked some of the personality that the Playlists have, but they should be a way to make sure the game keeps on offering new and fresh things to do long into the future.

Having new fresh things to do should serve Motorfest well, since it’s a game I enjoyed simply hanging out in. It’s as difficult as you want it to be with a smart system that suggests upping the skill requirement if you’re winning races consistently, or offers to drop things slightly if you’re not doing great. The difficulty system is granular, so it’s easy to find a level to your preference. I found myself having the most fun with the difficulty set to give me enough of a challenge to be interesting, but not so much that it was ever frustrating. It made it easy to just hang out, have a good time and have some fun races in a cool environment.

Though I had a great time hanging out in O’ahu, Motorfest isn’t without some issues that took away from the fun. There are boats and planes to pilot in addition to cars but they really felt like an afterthought, mostly confined to one Playlist later in the game. I found the Plane events quite dull overall. Simply flying through floating rings and never having a real sense of speed doesn’t make for a particularly thrilling time.

And then there are the ever-present microtransactions. To the game’s credit, I never felt like it was withholding rewards to goad me into spending real money, but the fact the option is always there while searching through the vehicle store feels a bit gross. Making things worse is the fact that many Playlists require you to purchase a specific vehicle to enter, but you don’t actually use that vehicle in the Playlist since you get loaned vehicles for every event anyway. I had enough money through regular play to buy the required vehicles until late game, but at a certain point I was faced with either throwing real money at the game or going back and grinding challenges on Playlists I’d already completed. That feels crummy in a full-priced title, and really killed the game’s otherwise pleasant vibe.

Motorfest’s online play can be fun, but is a bit of a double edged sword. I enjoyed the Grand Races and Demolition Derbies, on the occasions I could find enough players to start one. The always-online nature of the game allows it to get fresh new content over time like I mentioned, but it comes at the cost of it being entirely unplayable without an internet connection. One time while playing I got a notice that the server was entering maintenance in 10 minutes. The moment that maintenance started, I got kicked from my race and just couldn’t play anymore. Considering a large portion of the game is played against AI opponents, it’s a shame that there’s no way to play when servers are unavailable.

The post The Crew Motorfest Review – Summer Holiday appeared first on Press Start.

The post The Crew: Motorfest Is A Welcoming Invitation To Car Culture appeared first on Press Start.

Cast your mind back to the late 2000s when party games were all the rage. Buzz had us smashing buzzers in a quiz show, Singstar had people doing karaoke in their houses and Rock Band had everyone wailing on plastic guitar controllers in front of their TVs. Playing Samba de Amigo: Party Central took me right back to this era of party-charged social gaming.

At its best with a crowd, Samba can be a riot to play with a group of friends competing and having a great time along with great music and silly motion gameplay. It’s a game built for the party atmosphere – with zany characters, silly mini-games and demanding moves that will inevitably make anyone playing look a little goofy (in a fun way).

Taking a step back for a moment, Samba de Amigo is a game about being a monkey shaking maracas in time with music. Little bubbles will float from the centre of the screen out to one of six circles around your character, and you need to shake the Switch Joy Cons as though they were a pair of maracas in the direction of that circle around your character. Depending on the song and difficulty you choose this can be fairly easy to keep up with, or deviously difficult. Between these note shakes you’ll also be sometimes asked to hit particular dance poses or more complex moves. Your combination of shake accuracy, poses and dance moves combine to end up at your overall score at the end of the song.

Things are spiced up some more with the Roulettes, a spinning wheel that can appear during songs to completely change your objective for a short while. Instead of shaking to hit notes you might suddenly be flailing your arms to give a series of high-fives to characters flying at you or smashing a baseball with just the right timing to hit the scoreboard. No two sessions of Party Central are quite the same.

You can play along with any of the 40 included songs in the standard rhythm game mode however there are some other modes that really shine with friends. Love Checker is a fun novelty that decides how compatible two players are by examining how in sync their movements are. Showdown is particularly silly, it plays like a regular rhythm stage until the winner is decided. The loser then has to choose a task from a roulette like ‘clap for the winner until your hands hurt’ or ‘bark like a dog’. The winner decides when they are satisfied with the loser’s performance. It’s all very silly and helps the game shine in a casual environment.

The soundtrack is core to the enjoyment of any rhythm game. Whether you like this soundtrack will be down to personal taste, but there’s a good amount of variety. There’s a bit of Latin music like the ever popular La Bamba, a good amount of contemporary pop from the likes of Carly Rae Jepsen and Icona Pop, dance classics like Macarena and some Sega tunes like Escape From The City. The variety means hopefully there will be something here for most anybody to enjoy music-wise.

There is again a wealth of single player modes here for lone players to keep things interesting. There’s the StreamiGo! mode where you complete a series of challenges (think ‘get a note combo of 100’ or ‘hit 40 quick shakes’) and are rewarded followers when you do well – with the ultimate goal being to become a social media star. There’s also the online World Party mode, where they’ve somehow turned a monkey shaking maracas game into a battle royale. Forty enter, each round the worst performers are eliminated to a black hole (of immense pain if the anguished screams of the fallen are anything to go by) and one emerges victorious. However, despite all the variety, some fundamental issues become apparent when you’re playing with a less casual mindset.

When I was trying to hit high scores rather than have a silly fun time, I noticed the motion controls’ clumsiness became an impediment to playing well. The game is quite generous with timing but even so I found hitting the left and right facing notes unreliable. It’s sort of par for the course with motion controls I suppose, but its a shame to be knocked out of a World Party when it feels like the controls let you down.

Even with all the different single player game modes, I found myself getting a bit tired of it all quicker than I hoped. All the extra modes like World Party and StreamiGo are essentially contextual variations on the same core rhythm gameplay – and while that rhythm gameplay shines in friendly settings it got repetitive fast when playing alone.

Party Central can be played with regular controller buttons instead of motion controls, which is a nice option. In this mode it plays quite similarly to the Persona rhythm games – but I found the note layouts in Samba more suited to motion controls. I got in my own way more often trying to use buttons and sticks to match the motions the game wanted. Regardless, it’s good to have the option.

I guess the name of the game says it all. Samba de Amigo: Party Central shines brightest in a casual party environment. The wealth of novelty silliness anchored around a fun core rhythm game creates silly situations for revellers to have fun with. It is a shame that playing alone made me more aware of the motion accuracy shortcomings that are easier to forgive in a casual get-together setting, but I suppose that’s why it’s not called “Loner Central.”

The post Samba De Amigo: Party Central Review – Shake, Shake, Shake! appeared first on Press Start.

I don’t know how it happened, but I played Red Dead Redemption on Xbox 360 back in the day, got about 90 minutes in and dropped it entirely. I wish I could explain why, but I just don’t know. When the Switch port came along though, I thought it might be an opportunity to give this game another try – I like the Wild West as a setting, it’s got action, politics, human stories and some real depth to explore that I might appreciate more now than I did a decade ago.

After finally playing through Red Dead Redemption in its new Switch version, what I’ve found is a technically-strong port of a game from 2010, with all the baggage that comes from a game that’s now thirteen years old. It’s one I’m glad I finally got around to playing, but that wasn’t without its issues.

Red Dead Redemption drops you right into the declining American frontier of 1911. The Wild West idea is still alive, but is threatened by a looming ‘federal government’ and industrialisation. The feds have asked our protagonist and ex criminal gang member, John Marston, to hunt and kill the gang mates of his past life in exchange for the safety of his wife and child. As John, you’re unleashed onto the expansive open world of America amidst a time of great change, where cars and factories are changing the world.

While the game’s Grand Theft Auto DNA is immediately apparent in the way characters move and the mission-centric structure to its open world – Red Dead’s setting lends it quite a different feel to its modern forebears. The overall play area is fairly vast, being set near what is now the USA-Mexico border and allowing you to explore a pretty sizeable (especially for the time) area full of towns, cities and other locations of interest.

The feel of actually playing Redemption though is the first hint that this ground-breaking game from 2010 is beginning to show its age. Moving John feels rather clunky, he has a certain heft to him that makes small movements feel overly heavy. His animations (and those of pretty much every human in the game) look positively wooden by modern standards. Movement on a horse feels a bit more natural, but when combat is mixed in can become a bit messy. Combat generally is fairly imprecise, though this is helped out massively by the generous auto-aim which is on by default. It’s nothing bad enough to kill my enjoyment of the game, just something to get used to.

Redemption’s story was a little all over the place for me. I quite liked John Marston as a character. He’s ineffably cool in any situation and willing to do what must be done to complete his mission and ensure the safety of his family. The open nature of the story can introduce some real strange dissonance in his character, however. A major part of the story involves two warring factions in Mexico, a group of revolutionaries and a military force they oppose. RDR has John helping them both out – it’s a little bizarre to go from one mission helping the revolutionaries fight their oppressors and build relationships with important people in the revolution, but then the very next mission start murdering the very revolutionaries you were helping a moment ago without the slightest acknowledgement by the game of how utterly strange this is.

The overall arc of the game’s core characters is damned compelling though. The main antagonists especially get a chance to shine as people who made a name for themselves in a world that is rapidly disappearing. Seeing giants of the old west manage their identity through the death throes of the way of life that defined them is a highlight.

I found myself getting pleasantly lost in Redemption’s rendition of the American frontier. It’s an intriguing setting that allows larger-than-life characters to shine and show how they either adapted to a changing world or were left behind by it. Riding across vast deserts, helping people in distress, assaulting gang compounds and just taking in the beautiful environments of America and Mexico was great fun.

Even with this vast environment to explore, I found the Switch port never missed a beat performance-wise. It’s a 30-frames-per-second presentation, but that 30FPS felt solid and consistent throughout, making gameplay pleasantly smooth and responsive as a result. I did encounter occasional bugs that forced me to close and re-open the game to progress, which is disappointing, but a generous auto save meant I never lost too much time.

The post Red Dead Redemption (Switch) Review – Once Upon A Time in the West appeared first on Press Start.

Driving around a huge open world with ridiculous vehicles is a recipe for fun, this we know. I recently visited Ubisoft’s Australian offices to play a preview build of The Crew Motorfest and see what it has to offer – and it left me wishing I could play more. It captured the ridiculous joy of driving cars around a picturesque location with handling that was easy to pick up but felt like it had some depth to learn.

The handling model can make or break any driving game. From the couple of hours I got to spend driving various vehicles around Motorfest’s gorgeous Hawaii location it felt like the team at Ivory Tower might have nailed this aspect of the game.

Pre-Order at Amazon for $89 (current gen) / $79 (last gen) with free shipping.

Cars are straightforward to pick up and drive, but it’s rewarding to spend time with the vehicles and work out just how they want to be driven. You can jump in a Honda NSX supercar one race, a Ford Bronco off-roader the next, and then something as wild as an airplane or speedboat. Each is easy enough to get to grips with, but will handle totally differently. Learning to wrangle these different kinds of vehicles and adapt to them is one of the core joys of racing games for me, and it’s great to see from the short time I had with the game that there will be a wide array of challenges in Motorfest.

One particularly nice touch I found was that the challenge will offer to adapt to you. I was pleasantly surprised after playing my first few events and handily finishing 1st in each of them by the game noticing this and offering to turn the AI skill up a notch. I kept accepting this prompt and ratcheting up the difficulty until the game noticed I started doing pretty terribly in races and offered to turn things down instead.

I love when a game adapts to the ability I bring and lets me stay in control of the experience with timely prompts like these. You can tell the game to stop asking if you just want to stick with a particular setting as well – it’s totally up to you.

The main kinds of objectives I was able to check out in Motorfest are the Playlists – each a series of car events based around a theme. Some, like Made in Japan, are little stories where you jump in with an established crew of Japanese car enthusiasts and work your way into their good graces by winning races and other car events while getting to know the crew and a little more about their cars along the way. Others have you leisurely driving a ridiculous modded VW Kombi van around Hawaii’s sights while a tour guide tells you about places and stories of local significance.

The playlists I played each gave me a car to use for the events so I didn’t have to worry about building or buying a car to meet a spec which made jumping into these mini-campaigns frictionless.

Maintaining an extensive garage can be fun too, because Motorfest looks fantastic. Cars are as detailed as you’d expect for a modern racing game, and there look to be extensive customisation options for anyone with a creative urge. Environments are awesome to drive through, from natural Hawaiian volcanos and lush greenery to night-time neon-bathed slick streets, Motorfest definitely left a striking visual impression.

I’m very excited to spend some more time with Motorfest. While the preview showed vast amounts of game to play, the ongoing appeal will depend on how well the online aspects are implemented and how the game is supported with updates longer term. What I did play though looked fantastic, handled wonderfully and showed a huge scope for different kinds of events, vehicles, and ways to have a great time driving around.

The Crew Motorfest releases on September 14 for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC. Pre-Order at Amazon for $89 (current gen) / $79 (last gen) with free shipping.

The post The Crew Motorfest Hands-On Preview – Holiday in Hawaii appeared first on Press Start.

When The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum was revealed, it had more than a few people questioning who had asked for a game starring Gollum. It’s me. I’m that person who finds the idea of a game following the little weirdo quite appealing. He’s a strange little guy, sure, but his life has been utterly consumed by the Ring and the power it represents, and he’s instrumental in the overall narrative arc that is The Lord of the Rings.

I went in hoping that Gollum could be a window into this character that hadn’t been shown by film or game before. Disappointingly, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum really wasn’t that. It’s a game that feels precariously held together, lacks polish, feels horrible to play and is both technically and aesthetically dated.

The moment you gain control of Gollum you’ll probably notice his movements and actions feel strange. His repertoire consists of running around, sneaking, jumping and climbing using clearly marked handholds. I imagine the developers wanted him to play quite differently to the average athletic video game protagonist but rather than sneaky and agile, controlling Gollum feels clumsy and haphazard.

A majority of the game involves climbing to reach an objective. Sometimes you’ll latch to handholds like they’re magnetic, sometimes Gollum will fling himself with such ferocity that you overshoot the platform you wanted to land on and fall to the abyss below. I was fighting against the controls rather than using them to overcome a challenge, and as a result never felt accomplished once I got to where I wanted to go. Everything about moving through Gollum’s world is a slog.

So much of what the game asks you to do is utterly uninspired. I don’t know quite what I expected gameplay-wise from a Gollum title. A lot of sneaking, maybe some exploring. I certainly didn’t expect a game full of tailing missions and fetch quests – but that’s a lot of what I got. Seriously, the opening chapters are full of annoyingly-long fetch quests tasking Gollum to go and collect tags from corpses in a mine or herd a bunch of aggressive Mordor-cattle into cages.

Things don’t improve as the game goes on. There’s a little more variety, but lengthy insta-fail stealth sections that consist of mostly hiding in grass and waiting for enemies to turn around don’t exactly lift Gollum from gameplay tedium. It’s full of gameplay tropes that we’ve moved past for a good reason. It might be okay if somehow Gollum was a particularly great example of these tired game styles, but it’s definitively not.

A world that is exciting to explore and enjoyable to look at can elevate even the most mediocre of games. And yet, with all of Middle-Earth available as a possible environment, half of Gollum’s chapters are spent in a dull brown mine in Mordor doing prisoner work – every bit the dull brown trend that was tiresome in the Xbox 360 era. It makes the drudgeries you’re tasked with all the more mind-numbing.

Things do improve markedly in the latter half of the game, going from dull brown to a lush green palette. These later environments created occasional moments that had me stop to admire the view and made the still rather uninspired gameplay tasks a little more tolerable, but not by much.

The overall presentation here has more lows than highs. I do appreciate the voice work behind Gollum. The studio has managed to give him his own sound that does some justice to his warring personalities while avoiding sounding like an impression of Andy Serkis’ work in the franchise films. Gollum’s character design too is a high point, with his face being hugely expressive. There are also occasional musical moments that help to elevate the experience.

The same can’t be said for the game’s overall visuals which are hugely lacking in polish. Character models wouldn’t look out of place in a game from 2007, animations are very strange, and things like faces reverting to a default state in an instant after a character stops talking are minor in the grand scheme but make a rough looking game look even rougher. Gollum has a suite of graphics options on PS5 – performance, quality, quality with ray tracing, and the most interestingly-named option I’ve seen in a while, “Gollum Hair Simulation.”

The ray tracing option makes puddles and such ultra reflective, but strangely didn’t apply to an actual mirror I found in the game. Performance mode is where I spent most of my time and somehow despite looking like an early-generation PS4 game it still had plenty of hitches and performance hiccups while running on a PS5.

The one possible saving grace for a franchise like this could have been the story. Gollum is a hugely important character in The Lord of the Rings and his role outside of accompanying other characters has been rarely explored in film and games. Disappointingly, the story here is pretty threadbare. Nothing of great consequence happens across the game’s overall story arc and things finish with Gollum in a position to take his role in the established story. Gollum’s story could have made for something compelling, but what we get instead is a narrative justifying a smattering of video game tasks that does nothing for his character or the world he inhabits.

Early previews didn’t show it in the best light, but I still had some hope for this game to deliver some good moments for fans. Gollum is a compelling character and the world of Middle-Earth has so many interesting possible places to explore, but instead we spend most of our time enclosed in mines and woodland cities. Environments are devoid of life and full of unpolished, sharp edges. It looks like an average game from another era, and learns none of the gameplay lessons from then either.

The post The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum Review – Uninspired Drudgery appeared first on Press Start.

As a franchise, Samba de Amigo might have flown under your radar. It definitely flew under mine. Starting out on Sega’s ill-fated Dreamcast and eventually being ported to the Nintendo Wii, Samba de Amigo is a motion-controlled rhythm game where you shake maracas as a little monkey on screen dances along to the music. The series is returning with a new entry, Samba de Amigo: Party Central on Nintendo Switch, in August this year and I recently got the chance to take the joy-cons in hand and shake along to this upcoming release.

My hands-on session began with Party Central’s core Rhythm Game mode. Here, six circles are placed on screen around your character and markers emerge from the centre, moving towards the circles in time with the music. With a joy-con controller in each hand, you’ll shake them like maracas around yourself, following the moving markers to dance along in time. The game is pretty loose with how accurately it requires you to be moving the Joy Cons around – I swear I nearly missed some inputs but still got 100% accuracy ratings. I think it’s tuned more for party fun than intense skill which fits the overall vibe of the game. It feels pretty good to play, shakes of the Joy Cons translate to visuals and sound from the game that reflect your movements in a satisfying way.

Occasionally, songs will be interrupted with special actions like striking a pose or a or a temporary mode change to the gameplay. These mode changes can be as simple as a speed boost to the song or as wild as a random baseball mini-game in time with the music. These twists kept me well and truly on my toes – it’s a simple premise that’s easy to pick up for some casual fun but can get physically and rhythmically demanding very quickly depending on the difficulty you choose for yourself.

The Cheapest Pre-order: $49 At Amazon With Free Shipping

The song list is hugely important for a game like this. If you can’t find a song you vibe with, chances are you won’t have a great time. Party Central has a pretty eclectic list of 40 songs in the build I played and they ran the gamut from Miley Cyrus and Kesha to La Bamba. I was drawn to the multiple Carly Rae Jepsen tracks, and was amazed to see Rina Sawayama on here as well. It’s very pop-focused but there’s some rock in here too. Sonic Adventure 2’s Escape From The City is a highlight, complete with a giant truck in the background going absolutely ham just like in the game. I found a lot to like in the track listing, but as with anything music-based your taste is going to be a huge factor.

Multiplayer will obviously be hugely important for Party Central, so I tried every multiplayer mode I could. The regular rhythm mode can be played with two players, each competing for the best overall score. There’s also a ‘Love Checker’ mode which plays pretty similarly to the normal rhythm game but with lots of love hearts decorating the screen as you play, and at the end of the song you’re given a compatibility rating so you can really know if your dance partner is worth staying friends with.

My favourite of the modes was the Showdown mode which again presents you with the regular rhythm gameplay – but at the end of the song the loser will be given a task to complete, and they must do it until the winner decides they are satisfied. I lost my match, so the game asked me to jump around the room while barking like a dog. Thankfully my host was generous enough to let me off the hook for that one. It might be a mode fit for a gathering of friends more than the workplace! I’m told the other options that come up encompass varying levels of potential shame and embarrassment.

Not just a game for groups, the main meal single-player mode of Party Central is StreamiGo!, a mode that lets you pursue the life of a social media personality, dancing along to complete specific tasks to gain new followers and unlock new challenges. I only played a couple of songs in this mode, but I get the impression this will be where I’d spend the most time when I’m dancing on my own.

Rounding out the modes on offer is World Party, the online mode that I wasn’t able to try since there’s nobody out there to play with – but I was able to check out some footage and got the idea. It’s a three-stage knockout tournament where the top players go on to the next round and the lowest scoring players are banished to a black hole – complete with pained screams. It’s very strange. It does look like a fun way to play against others when you don’t have people around, but it remains to be seen how well the rhythm gameplay will go online and how many people will be online to have tournaments with. A bit of a wait and see mode, this one.

I came away from my time with Samba de Amigo: Party Central excited to play more. It looks like there are enough options to keep things from getting stale whether you play alone or with others and the soundtrack is full of hits that I can see myself trying to defeat on harder difficulties. It’s going to be a long wait for the August 29th release date but I’m looking forward to shaking my maracas some more when the time comes!

Samba de Amigo: Party Central comes to Nintendo Switch on August 29th. The cheapest pre-order is $49 at Amazon with free shipping.

The post Samba de Amigo: Party Central Hands-On Preview – A Fair Shake appeared first on Press Start.

Scars Above is out now on PlayStation, Xbox and PC. It’s a challenging sci-fi action adventure set on a mysterious alien world, with rewarding combat and a compelling story. Learn more here.

Scars Above, the new sci-fi adventure from Mad Head Games and Prime Matter, can look a bit intimidating. Its alien world is full of hazards and its creatures often want to beat, crush or slice you to parts and pieces. But fear not, traveller! With the power of science and these tips on your side, you’ll have a good chance of conquering the challenge ahead of you.

The post Our Top Tips For Surviving Scars Above’s Harsh Alien World appeared first on Press Start.

Initially revealed at Gamescom last year, Scars Above is a challenging action game set in a science fiction-inspired world full of places to explore and creatures to survive. In truth it’s a little bit Souls, a little bit Metroid, and a lot of fun, elemental combat. It’s a lot smaller in scope than any of the games it seems inspired by, but Scars Above is a decently exciting romp through an alien planet, acquiring knowledge and burning things on your quest for truth and the scientific method.

Scars Above put you in the shoes of scientist Dr Kate Ward, one of a team sent to investigate a strange object in space. Soon enough though, things go awry and Kate finds herself stranded and alone on an alien planet searching for her colleagues and struggling to survive. You’ll encounter a strange, ghostly being that seems to be encouraging you to explore this strange planet, beckoning you to discover how it came to be as it is.

The game gives you three main ways to engage with its world – explore, do science, and fight. Exploration is fairly enjoyable, but don’t expect something as complex or rewarding as Metroid or Dark Souls on that front. Areas are structured around big alien objects called pillars. Think of these like checkpoints – you’ll start at the last pillar you checked in at if you die, and all the creatures you’ve defeated will return, but you’ll also reload your ammo reserves and restore your health.

Between pillars there is usually a path forward, and side paths that you can explore for collectibles and occasionally to open shortcut paths. Both are worthwhile. Finding a shortcut can help you get to areas more easily after dying and returning to a pillar, and collectibles are useful for upgrading your character and weapons for combat. Environments are varied enough to remain interesting, and you generally don’t spend long enough in any one place for things to feel stale. Exploring in Scars never really gets more cerebral than making sure you go down each fork in the road to find the goodies at the end, but it helps keep the pace brisk.

Science and the pursuit of knowledge as a theme is something that sets Scars apart, even if it is mostly set dressing. A few times during the game you’ll encounter situations or mechanisms you need to visually analyse to find important elements and then come to a conclusion about what happened or how a device functions. You don’t earn experience by defeating enemies like in most games, but by gaining knowledge about the world around you. This can be done by scanning the bodies of defeated creatures (only once per creature though, so there’s no grinding) and in a way that ironically engaged my ‘brain off’ mechanism – by finding ‘Knowledge Cubes’ littered around the environment.

The science theme is an interesting one and it’s used mostly to good effect. Your character becomes stronger through knowledge rather than strictly through violence and training. Just try not to think too hard about cubes that make you smarter.

Combat, then, is the other major piece of Scars Above’s gameplay, and it’s where the game shines brightest. Your main weapon is initially not a weapon at all, more a general science tool, but it unsurprisingly finds usefulness in combat. You can use different elemental projectiles which all have some effect on enemies and the environment around them. A lot of enemies have glowing weak points and some have moments of weakness you can exploit if you pay attention to their animations. Your initial weapon fires bolts of electricity and you’ll soon see the effect this can have on enemies that are wet or standing in water.

Later elemental upgrades like fire are used to set enemies or areas alight, and ice can slow quick enemies down to give you a chance to collect yourself. Throw in the gadgets you unlock throughout the game that give you even more options (highlights to me were capsules of flammable liquid that can set groups of creatures alight and a gravity well that can hold enemies in place for a short while) and you get a combat system that is easy enough to grasp but rewarding to experiment with.

Visually, Scars Above has it’s ups and downs. Cutscenes in particular bring things down quite a bit. The animation is quite wooden in both general movement as well as faces – it reminded me of scenes in the first Mass Effect and it feels a generation or two behind compared to its contemporaries. Once you’re through the cutscenes though, actual gameplay looks quite decent. There are some definite standout creature designs that I really enjoyed and some varied, well-realised alien environments to admire and move around in.

Sound design has some highlights as well. Music generally is pretty sparse during the experience, but some particularly cool moments are accented by fantastic sci-fi synth music that bring scenes to life.

I had a pretty fun time with Scars Above. Its themes of science and the pursuit of knowledge are a neat idea and the story goes to some interesting places that I found fairly compelling and even timely given recent advances in AI technology. The elementally-infused combat is engaging enough to feel fresh throughout and environments are varied enough that the exploration doesn’t get stale until a section in the late game that I found killed the pace a bit right as things were getting interesting.

Scars Above is out now on PlayStation, Xbox and PC. Amazon has the game for $59 with free shipping.

The post Scars Above Review – The Pursuit of Knowledge appeared first on Press Start.

Persona 5 was a huge success for the series. Heaps of people jumped into the series for the first time and loved what they found in Atlus’ stylish and somewhat dark JRPG/visual novel hybrid. Until now, you needed a PC or an older PlayStation console if you wanted to go back and play the earlier titles in the series, but no longer! Versions of Persona 3 and Persona 4 are hitting current platforms and in doing so bringing these games to a whole new audience.

If you liked Persona 5, I think you should absolutely give Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4 Golden a chance. I’ve spent a decent chunk of time with both games on PS5 and they’re each great for a lot of the same reasons Persona 5 was so good.

Balancing high school life with dungeon crawling

The core gameplay loop of balancing school life, social life and supernatural dungeon crawling is here in each of these earlier games. Building your relationships in the regular world to explore interesting character stories and have bonuses on the dungeon side of things is as enjoyable as ever. Persona 3 Portable is particularly noteworthy as you can choose between the original male protagonist and a female protagonist who was added in this revision. A whole set of different social options will open up if you do so, giving the game a big boost to replayability.

High-stakes turn-based battles

The battles in Persona 5 were exciting thanks to the battle system that let you really apply pressure to enemies when exploiting their weaknesses, while trying to avoid the same happening to your party. It’s not ultra deep, but straightforward enough to pick up quickly and exciting enough to keep from getting boring. The same system exists in both P3 and P4 and keeps things exciting. It’s an exciting cycle to knock down enemies with weaknesses or critical hits, then finish them off with a Co-op or All-out Attack.

Supernatural teenage drama

The same Persona formula is here for the story too. If you enjoyed the idea of a bunch of high school kids gaining supernatural powers and having to balance regular teenage life with the fate of the world, you’ll be happy to know you’ll get much more of that in the earlier games too. Persona 3 involves a so-called ‘Dark Hour’, an hour that occurs at exactly midnight but is only consciously experienced by a select few, and a mysterious dungeon called Tartarus that holds shadows to fight and secrets to uncover.

P3 is particularly dark in tone, heavily involving trauma and with character animations that simulate suicide on a regular basis – so please take this as a warning if this is a concern for you. Persona 4 is a bit lighter in tone than 3 or 5 with the cast exploring a world behind a TV screen – but still has it’s moments of darkness and drama. Both 3 and 4’s stories are enjoyable in their own ways, and both offer 70-ish hours of twists, turns and dungeons to delve through.

Effortless style

From music to menu animations Persona 5 exudes style. It turns out this was the case with both 3 and 4 from years ago. Each game has it’s own core colour that defines it’s personality. That personality is expressed musically as well. Persona 3 brings with it a pop/hip-hop style while Persona 4 is more a rock infused pop vibe. Each soundtrack is primarily composed by Shoji Meguro who was also responsible for the amazing acid jazz soundtrack of Persona 5.

Some things to keep in mind, though…

While they share many similarities with Persona 5, it’s impossible to ignore the fact these games were originally designed for the PSP and PS Vita. Character models in battle definitely look simple, clearly designed for far weaker hardware than you’ll play these versions on. Persona 3 Portable also lacks the ability to freely walk around outside of dungeons – instead opting for more of a point-and-click interface. Honestly I find it quite efficient and enjoyable to use, but it’s definitely an adjustment from the usual roaming around areas you might be used to from Persona 5.

Since the games have been ported from lower-resolution originals some elements hold up better than others on a larger screen. Character art is wonderfully sharp even on a large TV, as are text elements – but background artwork hasn’t fared as well. Artwork in Persona 3 Portable especially looks pretty blurry when upscaled to TV size. Understandable given they were designed for a 480 x 272 resolution screen, but noticeable nonetheless. It’s absolutely not a deal breaker, but might give the Switch version a bit of an advantage since the upscale will be less noticeable on its handheld 720p screen.

All up though despite these minor shortcomings, as long as you can deal with graphics that were originally made for a PSP or Vita then I think it’s so very much worth going back to these earlier games if you jumped on the Persona train with the latest entry. Each offers a similarly engaging story, characters and gameplay while going in different directions with tone and style, and each is very much worth your time if you were at all a fan of Persona 5.

The post Persona 3 Portable And Person 4 Golden Are Absolutely Worth Revisiting On Modern Platforms appeared first on Press Start.

I used to adore the Need for Speed games. Underground on the GameCube was my obsession for a time with its combination of slick, night-time visuals and great-feeling arcade style racing absolutely slathered in early 2000s tuner culture. This time around we’ve got a full open city area full of events, traffic, collectibles and cops to escape; a hip hop laced soundtrack and cel-animation inspired visual flourishes. Need For Speed Unbound has some great aspects and absolutely kept my interest for the length of the campaign with new and faster cars to drive as I progressed – but a few annoyances dragged Criterion’s NFS experience down from greatness for me.

Unbound didn’t make a fantastic first impression on me. Likely due to my lack of experience with modern NFS games, I was expecting near Mario Kart levels of easy drifts and high speed races. I found the game much more demanding of control finesse. Especially in the fairly high powered car you get initially it was very easy to lose control around corners if I expected to just hold the accelerator and drift like it was Ridge Racer. Once I came to terms with actually needing to learn the racing model, adjusting handling of cars to suit my style I found keeping the car under control much easier. Challenging enough to feel rewarding (especially when the game rewards you with boost and a sweet visual flourish for nailing a corner) but still more forgiving than say Gran Turismo. Driving in Unbound feels pretty fantastic.

THE CHEAPEST PRICE: $78 WITH FREE DELIVERY

The game’s campaign is split into four weeks of driving in Lakeshore, each day split into day and night sessions and the week culminating in a qualifier event to eventually enter the Lakeshore Grand – the ultimate race to earn glory and fame. Each day and night will have a wide variety of events to compete in like races, drift events and takeovers (where you show off combos of drifts, jumps and target smashing) allowing you to pick your preferred way of competing. I really enjoyed the way the game is split into calendar days. It meant I could play for just a day, lock in some wins and reach a logical finishing point – or I could play an entire week in a play session if I felt like it.

It’s important gameplay wise too, as the more events you do in a single day, the more attention you’ll get from the cops. Racing for big rewards increases your heat level so there’s a constant risk/reward going on that keeps things tense. Winning big bucks only to lose your entire days winnings when you’re busted by the cops in the evening feels horrible, but is an effective way to encourage you to find better ways to lose the cops or maybe be a little more considered with how many events you participate in on a particular day.

The cops though, are one of my main annoyances with Unbound. They’re just so damned persistent. Things get easier as your car gets faster and more capable, but in the early days if you build up a decent heat level it can feel damn near impossible to lose the fuzz. Even when I had a fully upgraded, top of S+ tier car it was still more annoying than fun to lose cops given that the moment a helicopter flying overhead or a patrol car driving a nearby road spots you it’s fully back on with the map suddenly peppered with all terrain vehicles and police helicopters. Things get a little more manageable on the relaxed difficulty mode at least, but even there the police’s ability to spot and rain hell upon you at a moments notice gets tiring when all you really want to do is start the next event.

Unbound’s aesthetic is something that I think will be divisive, but personally I love the way it sticks to a very specific vibe. The visual style is semi-realistic with cel-animation flourishes which I think look fantastic, and the music is 100% hip hop. As someone who listens to quite a bit of the genre I recognised quite a few names, but there were some artists I’d never heard before. While I think I wore out the soundtrack by the time I finished the campaign, I love that the track choices had the breadth to introduce me to new music. The characters and dialogue you need to listen to while driving around though, I definitely found grating. It was hard to have all that much sympathy for a bunch of kids tearing up the streets, smashing up people’s cars and then getting on their high-horse about the cops daring to try breaking up their street races.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the Lakeshore Online mode of Unbound. It is entirely separate from the campaign, with a separate money balance and garage but functions in a similar way. You jump into an online city, drive around to events and invite the other players in the city to compete. I think if you enjoyed the campaign and wanted more, this could be a way to keep the whole thing going. I can understand why they’re totally separate garages, but it was a bit of a bummer to have to start from scratch again in the online mode for me.

There’s a lot I liked about NFS Unbound. I love that the game doesn’t expect you to come first to progress, and often I wasn’t even close. Higher places are in most cases just a slightly bigger payday so continuing on a 4th place still gets you some cash to upgrade and hopefully do better next time. I loved the commitment to modern car culture aesthetics, events like the takeover are a great addition along with the distinct visual and musical style choices. While I found the cops mostly tedious rather than exhilarating, once I lost them and got back to the racing I had a great time climbing the ladder, upgrading my cars, learning the city and eventually nailing the corners in races.

The post Need For Speed Unbound Review – High Stakes Racing appeared first on Press Start.

Gungrave G.O.R.E. looks like it would have a heap of ingredients for a great game. Stylish gunplay, slick combos, a cool early-2000’s era property and mountains of bad guys to deal with – it almost sounds like Devil May Cry with a heavier focus on gunplay. I wish that were the case. While there is some fun to be found in developer Iggymob’s Gungrave G.O.R.E., it thoroughly outstays it’s welcome and ends up being a tedious, repetitive experience.

The setting is classic video game – you play as Grave, an undead near invulnerable soldier wielding dual pistols and a giant coffin for close-range bashing. You’re introduced to a series of mob bosses in an opening scene and then let loose to beat them one by one, area by area. It’s a story that harkens back to an earlier time in games, mostly serving as an excuse to blast a bunch of guys.

And blast you will. I hope you’re not prone to RSI symptoms if you want to play Gungrave because you’ll spend nearly the entire time pulling the right trigger to repeatedly blast wave after colour coded wave of bad guys the levels throw at you. There are a couple of neat systems that help make things a bit more engaging than just mindless blasting. There’s a ‘Beat’ meter which tracks your consecutive landed attacks while contributing both to your end of level score and your Demolition meter. Demolition moves use this meter to pull off flashy attacks which do big damage and refill some lost health.

You have a shield which recharges if you avoid damage long enough and you can help boost it back up by performing an execution move on a stunned enemy, Doom-style. This can be combined with a whip that you can use to pull stunned enemies to you, or zip yourself to them as a way to move around the battlefield. You’ll gradually unlock more close-combat moves which can be used to break enemies with shields, as well as Destruction moves and general character stat boosts like extra health and gun damage.

Even with this variety of actions and unlocks though, I found the game stopped being all that interesting after the first few levels. Each factory, warehouse and city street setting begins to blend into the next – to the point where it felt like a breath of fresh air once I reached a level with some vegetation. But more than the repetitive environments, the repetitive enemies and combat encounters really began to grate well before getting to the end. New enemy types are introduced so gradually, and half the time don’t really demand a different method of play to anything you’ve encountered before. Mash the trigger, use the Destruction moves as they charge, and dodge when you can.

Every time I played I got the distinct impression that the Gungrave G.O.R.E. needs a bunch more polish. I found some consistent bugs through my play through like a door that was supposed to open after an encounter just… not opening. Walking into a room, being blasted back through the door just as it automatically closed so I was stuck in a hallway until I restarted from the checkpoint. Music that doesn’t loop properly, instead just reaches the end of a track and begins again. And maybe most annoyingly, cut scene audio was consistently blown out. Volume was considerably higher than the regular game audio with voices sounding like they’d been amplified to within an inch of their life. This persisted even after closing and re-opening the game. Level and encounter design was messy as well. Bosses that are just sudden difficulty spikes, and some regular level encounters just threw an unreasonable amount of tanky enemies in an extremely uninteresting attempt at creating difficulty.

Having done some research on the original 2002 Gungrave game, it makes me wish Iggymob had borrowed from it’s cel-shaded anime-like visual style. While G.O.R.E. looks technically impressive, it definitely doesn’t have the same personality with it’s lightly stylised visuals. On PS5 it held up a consistent 60 frames per second in performance mode even with waves of enemies and objects in the scene breaking all over the place. There’s a quality mode which turns on ray-tracing at the expense of a 30-fps cap, but

I found the less fluid movement didn’t suit an action-focused game like this. I didn’t do any Digital Foundry style pixel counting, but in performance mode everything was super sharp on a 4K display. Things can look pretty spectacular when you’ve got the environment smashing around you, enemies coming from all directions and shots flying every which way – it’s just a shame the environments and enemies are so repetitive and soulless.

There is absolutely some fun to be found in Gungrave G.O.R.E. The over-the-top combat is spectacular to watch at times, and blasting at waves of various colour coded enemies is definitely fun for a while. Sadly, it is only a short while. For the majority of my 7-ish hours of play time I just found myself going through the motions. The story didn’t do much to invest me in the world and the environments and enemies were just so repetitive.

The post Gungrave G.O.R.E. Review – Two Tickets to the Gun Show appeared first on Press Start.

I’m mainly a console gamer these days. My daily computer is a light, speedy little MacBook Air. It can’t do much gaming, but it doesn’t really need to. As far as portable computers go, the Lenovo Legion 5i Pro is about as far as you can get from my little daily machine. It’s hefty, it’s got a stonking great battery and a powerful gaming-centric CPU and graphics combo that eats most games I throw at it for breakfast. At the same time it’s high refresh rate, high resolution screen combined with a pleasant keyboard and great trackpad make it a nice machine for productivity and time wasting as well. It’s a machine focused on gaming that won’t get in your way when you need it for other things.

This Legion is smartly designed, with just a little bit of the aggressive gamer-aesthetic you might expect from a gaming laptop. When it’s closed you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a much more boring machine. The lid has little ornamentation aside from a big LEGION logo at the top, however looking closer you’ll see the industrial looking exhaust vents that hint at the gamer focus of this machine. Open it up and turn it on, and you’ll know this is no business machine. An RGB backlit keyboard shimmers in a rainbow pattern, and a high refresh rate screen just begs to be gamed on. It’s a very attractive design, just enough notes to let you know it’s a gaming laptop without going over the top.

That screen though is quite a thing to behold. The 2560 x 1600 resolution 16-inch screen makes text and game elements look razor sharp. It’s not quite a 4K resolution, but I think this is a great middle ground where you get markedly better performance from the hardware than you would if it had a 4K screen. It’s a high refresh rate display as well, topping out at 165Hz. Everything is just *nicer* with this fast display. Playing games at high frame rates makes things just feel ultra responsive, and even just doing basic Windows things like using the Start menu and scrolling in a web browser feel ridiculously smooth. It even supports HDR400 and Dolby Vision so watching shows and movies in supported apps like Netflix looks fantastic. The speakers on the computer make for an adequate, if not spectacular experience. They’re a little thin sounding without a huge deal of presence – somehow the speakers in my ultrathin Mac sound deeper and fuller. They will do the job for Netflix in bed, but I definitely preferred a set of headphones when I could.

THE CHEAPEST PRICE: STARTING AT $2,899 AUD

Powering all these sights and sounds is a pretty capable set of hardware. The model I tested had a 12th Gen Intel Core i7 paired with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070Ti graphics chip – and it blew me away with how well it played games I threw at it. Maxed out Forza Horizon 5 and I was getting 80-90fps, between 110-190 in Deep Rock Galactic, 60fps with Fortnite maxed out and an easy 100-130fps with a couple of tweaks. The high refresh rate screen is well paired with this graphics chip since it can push frame rates well in excess of the standard 60 without sacrificing visuals in many games. While you’re doing all this gaming the fans will spin up to be audible. I’ve heard much more jarring fans in other gaming laptops for sure, this one isn’t an annoying kind of fan noise – just loud enough to be noticeable. While doing less intensive tasks like web browsing or watching videos I found the fans barely audible.

As a tool for getting things done, the Legion is pretty great in most areas. The keyboard is a pleasant kind of spongey with a pleasing amount of key travel and a nice tactile feel. The trackpad is large and feels great to use. My fingers would glide over it’s surface with just the right amount of friction, and it’s among the nicest trackpads I’ve used with Windows’ multi-finger gestures. It’s got about every port you could reasonably expect on a portable machine including a full Thunderbolt 4/USB4 port which is fantastic for docking stations, some USB C ports, USB A ports, a full-sized HDMI 2.1 for connecting to the latest TVs, an ethernet jack for wired networking and a headphone/mic combo jack. It’s even equipped with Wifi 6E radios so if you have the absolute latest in Wifi you can make full use of it here. As far as equipment goes, it has about everything you could want and then some.

About the only downside I found with the machine was its battery life. It has a whopper-sized 80 watt hour battery, but with the power demands of the Intel and Nvidia chips on board even it can’t keep them fed for all that long. Doing regular non-gaming tasks like web browsing, watching video on YouTube and playing music over Spotify drained the battery in a little over 3 hours – though using Microsoft Edge rather than Chrome or Firefox helped eke a little more time from the battery. Coming from a laptop that I can do the same things with and not need to find a charger all day, the difference was noticeable.

While gaming the system has a host of features designed to limit performance and get some more life from the battery, but having games limited to 30fps or less felt like a last resort, definitely not the way I’d like to play if I had any other choice. Thankfully the machine charges quickly with the supplied (absolutely huge) AC adapter. Lenovo claims 80% charge in 30 minutes and I found my experience to be pretty close. With the performance on battery being severly limited I consider this a laptop that is easy to move between different desks but not one I’d regularly use for gaming on battery. Even doing pretty tame tasks you’ll be looking for a power outlet by lunch time.

The battery life is really my only frustration with this otherwise fantastic machine. It’s conservatively styled but can be customised to be a bit wild with it’s lighting if you want that. The keyboard and trackpad are delightful to use for productivity and general use and the screen is fantastic. The high resolution and refresh rate elevate everything you do from high-intensity gaming to moving windows around on the desktop. It’s a damn good display. The amount of game-focused hardware Lenovo have crammed in here makes for a wonderfully capable gaming machine as well, showing no signs of struggling under any game I threw at it.

The post Lenovo Legion 5i Pro (Gen 7) Review – Take Power With You appeared first on Press Start.

It’s been a long time since mascot platformers dominated the gaming landscape. 20 years ago when the original Pac-Man World was released platform games were king of home consoles, and the king of arcades wanted in on that action. For better and for worse, playing Pac-Man World RePac took me right back to my weekends playing random platformers I rented from the video shop on my PlayStation back then. I

t feels dated in level design and general gameplay but as someone who enjoyed games like these growing up I definitely developed a soft spot for the way it so faithfully recreated a style of game that isn’t much in fashion anymore.

RePac opens with Pac Man returning home to a party in his honour, only to find that his entire cast of family and friends have gone missing. So begins our spherical hero’s quest across a bunch of themed platforming worlds to collect letters, waka-waka some pellets and defeat the forces of Toc-Man to save his friends. It’s not exactly an inventive story, but it only really ever intends to be set dressing for the main focus of the kid-friendly platforming so I won’t hold it to too high a standard.

The platform gameplay on offer feels pretty ancient, which makes perfect sense when you consider the original game that forms the mechanical basis for this one is over 20 years old. The platform game was on top of the world, but was still very much designed the way it had been in the 2D age – just with some extra depth to play with.

Pac-Man World RePac faithfully recreates these old worlds with a layer of modern paint, without changing the way it plays in any significant way. You’ll need to play through a series of mostly side scrolling levels, maneuvering your way to the end of the level using Pac-Man’s jumps, butt bounces and charge moves, dodging or dispatching of enemies to progress. A range of optional collectibles add a fun and necessary twist to the otherwise pretty dull A to B.

Collecting fruit adds to your score and can unlock some doors, finding floating letters to spell P-A-C-M-A-N unlocks a bonus round after the level, and you can even find special classic style Pac-Man mazes which give some extra variety to play. Collecting all of these things will require some back tracking to doors that are now unlocked. None of it feels particularly interesting, but I will admit that it tickled the collector in me. Knowing there’s an A sitting somewhere in the level that I’ve missed was enough to make me want to explore every crevice of the levels to find it even if it felt like a cheap way to extend your time in a level sometimes.

Boss levels add some welcome variety to proceedings, as well. It’s a relic of the past where games seemed to pack in seemingly random gameplay one-offs but much appreciated here. Cute touches like a Galaxian-esque shooter boss and a grand prix kart race against a line-up of circus clowns are surprisingly fun. Fleshed out just enough to be fun for their quick one-time levels, they make for a nice break from the regular platforming levels.

While the game plays very much like the PlayStation original did, the presentational overhaul makes a huge difference for the game and brings it much closer to modern expectations. Everything is presented in lovely high resolution graphics, environment and character models completely overhauled while staying mostly faithful to the original game. Visual design stays pretty similar as well and as a result looks really nice at times (the beach area comes to mind) but can be horribly garish at others like the Funhouse area. I found the funhouse maze levels particularly bad, the garish colours and unclear design made it difficult to see what was a maze wall and what wasn’t.

Music too has been fully re-created and for better and worse is fully based on the original compositions. Expect some very short repetitive loops that will, if you’re anything like me, slowly drive you batty.

The PS5 version if this game was played for the purpose of this review.

The post Pac-Man World RePac Review – A Platforming Relic appeared first on Press Start.

Xenoblade Chronicles has been on a bit of a roll on Switch. The Wii and Wii U somewhat limited the audience for the series in the past, but Switch being the sales behemoth it is has helped propel Xenoblade to a much wider audience. I enjoyed Chronicles 2, but truly fell in love with the series with Xenoblade Chronicles Remastered. It’s expansive worlds, light-hearted characters and engaging combat mechanics hooked me for the long haul. While I don’t think it quite hits the highs of XC Remastered for me, Monolith Soft’s third game on Switch, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (XC3) is another fantastic action RPG romp.

First things first – the story in XC3 is way darker in tone than I expected. While the series has never shied from conflict, XC3 shows us a world locked in a never-ending war. People are born to fight as young adults, and either die in battle or reach ten years of life and expire. The two sides of the conflict are each split up into various colonies, each fighting to kill as many of the other side as possible to fill their Flame Clock. This in turn determines their rank among other colonies and the kinds of support, resources and food they’ll recieve from higher-ups. Something seems off about this situation immediately, and the story really begins with our characters questioning this status quo. It’s a compelling premise, and one that kept me wanting to play to find out where the story will go next.

For me at least, the characters in a Xenoblade Chronicles game are a huge factor in whether I enjoy the game overall. Given the more serious tone of the story then, it maybe makes sense that the characters you’ll accompany on your journey are themselves a little less easy-going than you might be used to from other entries. I found myself missing the happy-go-lucky mindset of Shulk and pals, but Noah, Mio and the rest of your crew in XC3 do develop interesting relationships over time. It’s just a bit more of a slow burn.

Much like the story and characters, the visuals of XC3 are probably a bit gloomier than you might expect from the series. There are patches of light and colour to be found but a huge amount of your time will be spent in grey battlefields and brown deserts. It’s missing a certain liveliness that I missed from previous entries. Technically though, XC3 still looks fantastic. Character models are sharp and detailed, well animated (including lip sync for the English voice track which is nice!) and battles are as flashy as ever. Resolution takes a noticeable hit in handheld mode with everything becoming visibly blurry, especially as things move further from the camera. It’s not a huge hassle and in fact I played most of the game handheld – but it’s an issue the series has had all along on Switch and still a bit of a shame the system can’t keep up with the scale of world XC3 wants to present without lowered detail.

You’ll mostly be spending your time in XC3’s world doing two main things – exploring and fighting. The world to explore is suitably massive, and exploration is rewarded with items, special enemy encounters and side quests. The game gives you a line to follow if you want to go straight to the next story objective, but I always found myself exploring to find cool new items and enemies to fight – a sign of an engaging world in my opinion. The combat system will be familiar to anyone who has played a Xenoblade Chronicles game before, but has it’s own flavour to differentiate itself from the rest of the series.

You have six core party members to assign classes and equip with accessories, skills and special moves. On top of those you will often have a seventh party member that can be dictated by the story situation or sometimes freely changeable. Classes are split into Attackers, Defenders and Healers which broadly decides their role in battle – however there are so many different classes within each of these roles that you’ll find countless ways to customise your team to fit your preference, playstyle or situation. During battle you directly control one party member, while the rest are competently controlled by the game’s AI. Depending on the role you control you might need to focus on positioning for maximum damage, drawing attention away from your attackers or healing your team when they need it. The scope for building your team is immense, and being able to play any of these roles means you get heaps of variety if you want it in battles. Big damage comes from using certain attack types in order (for example Break, Topple then Daze) and the AI companions are smart enough to participate in these combos when the time is right.

Combat gets even more interesting the further you progress in the game. Giving away as little story as I’m able, characters are able to fuse together temporarily into strange, Evangelion-looking forms to use more powerful moves without a cooldown timer. This form has it’s own skill tree which can be customised as you progress. There are also Chain Attacks which are crucial to doing massive damage to bosses. In this attack your characters take turns to perform actions which build up a tactics meter, do this smartly and you can keep attacking over and over to rack up huge damage and even further special attacks. It’s a combat system with a lot of complex moving parts, but the game is good at explaining it’s systems and giving you opportunities to confirm your understanding through training drills. It’s a great combat system that looks super slick and is great fun to play with.

The post Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Review – A Darker Expansive Adventure appeared first on Press Start.

I’ve had a rocky experience with Xenoblade so far. Chronicles 2’s characters really did their best to push me away, but going back to Chronicles 1 with it’s remake I fell in love with it’s pleasant cast of characters, gorgeous vistas and engaging combat systems. I was keen to try Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (XC3) just to find out where it would land on the scale for me, and based on my first hours with the game things are looking good.

Chronicles 3 begins with a much darker tone than I had expected. XC3’s world is one of endless, meaningless war. Of fighting enemies without much reason beyond them being from different colonies and to fill up your colony’s Flame Clock – each kill extracts the life force of the dead to boost the score of your colony. It’s quickly apparent that there’s something sinister at play here. The story caught my interest pretty quickly, and has me excited to see where things go. I do hope things get a little brighter for our heroes though, as it’s a bit glum in mood so far.

That glumness is present in the environments as well. The opening sections of the game are full of sterile greys and drab browns. Even the characters spend the opening hours in mostly black outfits. After the lush environments and bright costumes of past games in the series it’s all a bit dreary. Thankfully, characters do get some interesting colourful clothes after a while, which links directly into an interesting new mechanic in the combat system.

Characters outfits are directly related to their class, which in XC3 can be changed anytime outside combat. And you’ll want to change them regularly – as your characters fight with a particular class equipped they will increase their rank within that class which unlocks new skills, some of which they can keep equipped even when they’ve changed to a different class later on. You can customise your team to your heart’s content with classes, gear, combat abilities and other equippables. A new mechanic called Interlink is introduced a little while into the game and gives you even more to think about on top of the already dynamic and somewhat complex battle system. Characters can kind of… fuse together on command into a form called Ouroboros where for a limited time they can use special abilities without a cooldown timer. It adds another layer to an already engaging combat system that feels fantastic to master. As complex as the system might sound, it’s well tutorialised. I felt I could understand how to work within it fairly quickly – a distinct improvement from XC2 where I felt the game barely explained its own mechanics and never really gave an opportunity to confirm your understanding.

The characters themselves are super important to whether I enjoy an RPG, after all I’m going to be spending tens of hours with this bunch and if they get on my nerves immediately it can get in the way of enjoying anything else the game might have to offer. I’m glad to report that while I haven’t found any of the cast endearing themselves to me anywhere near as much as Shulk and the gang, each of the characters in XC3 are interesting to begin with and it seems like they might have room to grow into beloved characters as time goes on.

All in all, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 has left me with a positive impression so far. As someone who absolutely loved the first game but felt a bit let down by the second, I’m really glad that the team have learned lessons from 2 and seem to have made 3 a much more appealing game. With an interesting cast, flexible but well explained combat and character customisation systems and a story that starts with a strong premise and promises to go in some interesting directions – my play time so far of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 has me wanting to find extra time in the day to play as much as I can to see where it goes.

The post Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Hands-On Preview – A Compelling Start to a Massive Adventure appeared first on Press Start.

Everyone you ask has a different opinion on what is a remake versus a remaster when it comes to games. For films it’s an easy distinction, but thanks to gamers and marketing teams alike – the distinction is rather messy when it comes to video games.

The recent announcement of The Last of Us Part 1 makes for an interesting discussion. This new version is billed as a full remake, though reading discussion online you’ll probably find the general consensus is that this is yet another remaster. To get to the bottom of this, I think it’s useful to give a my personal definition of what each means.

Remaster

This is the one that generally has the least difference between the new game and the source material. A remaster keeps the vast majority of the game intact and unchanged, but allows for the power of newer technology to present the game in higher quality. A higher rendering resolution, higher audio quality and higher frame rate caps are all common features of a game remaster. You could cynically think of remasters as making console players pay for a game again to get the benefits a PC player gets just by turning up the settings – and a lot of the time this isn’t too far off the mark.

Often though you’ll find things like updated character models or graphics options (see Spider-Man or Tomb Raider) which can help justify the price of entry, but generally the game will be pretty close to the original, just closer what you’d expect from a game on a more modern platform. Often publishers allow a free upgrade for remasters, especially now where they don’t need to print new discs to adjust graphics options and frame rate caps – it can often just be a patch. It’s a new coat of paint over an existing game, rather than being rebuilt from the bottom up.

Remake

This is the next step beyond a remaster and generally means you’re using an original game as a basis and making it mostly all over again. I like to think of a remake as a developer saying “If we were making this game today, with all the technology and game design lessons we’ve learned until now, what could we do?”.

An important distinction to make is that a remake is not a purely visual change. Environments, characters, artwork and gameplay systems are totally rebuilt. It’s not a coat of paint, it’s demolishing the house and building it again.

Shadow of the Colossus is a particularly interesting example of the difference between a remaster and a remake since it’s had both. The remaster, Shadow of the Colossus HD, is for the most part the PlayStation 2 game running on a PlayStation 3 at a higher resolution and more consistent frame rate. The game plays exactly as it did originally on PS2 but with improved visuals. The remake on PlayStation 4 on the other hand rebuilds the game from scratch. Characters, environments and bosses have been entirely remade using the original game as a reference rather than a base. As a result, gameplay is noticeably different and adheres more to what modern players expect. The fact that it plays differently as well as looks better is an important factor to show that it is a remake and not a remaster.

When it comes to remakes, the Resident Evil series is both the most remade series I can think of as well as a shining example of how to do a remake right. 2002’s Resident Evil on GameCube came out six years after the PlayStation original and made it into something immediately recognisable as Resident Evil, but with graphics and gameplay that felt like a generational leap forward. Much later on, Resident Evil 2 and 3 took things even further – adapting those PlayStation, tank-controlled originals to third person action horror games that keep the soul of the games they were based on while making them much closer to what gamers want today. Resident Evil 4’s remake coming next year looks to continue this tradition. While it is keeping the third person action style of the original RE4, it looks like the story and gameplay will be much more in line with games from 2022 than 2005.

So is The Last Of Us: Part 1 a remake or a remaster?

To be blunt, we don’t know anything more than the trailer has told us. The answer seems clear as long as you believe the marketing which explicitly states that Part 1 is ‘rebuilt from the ground up for PlayStation 5’. To me, this reads as a full remake. Taking the original game as a point of reference and making it all over again as though it was made on PS5 to begin with, along with all the improvements and lessons from later games in the series.

It’s easy to see why people lean straight to the “it’s just another remaster, why bother when the PS4 version looks good already” conclusion, cynical as it may be. The trailers so far haven’t really shown gameplay, and people have jumped on comparison shots showing how little difference there is in specific scenes but I like to think that’s missing the point. If this game plays exactly like the original did on PS3 I’ll be very surprised. I can’t see PlayStation and Naughty Dog going to the effort of making yet another version of the game if they don’t bring it up to the standard of Left Behind and Part 2. I fully expect that while the story will hit all the same beats, the opportunity will surely be taken to improve areas in storytelling, level design and moment-to-moment gameplay control.

It’s interesting to note that it will have been nine years between The Last of Us in 2013 and the remake when it comes out later in 2022 – even longer than the time between Resident Evil and its remake. While game visuals haven’t changed as drastically as they had in the years between Resident Evils, a remake of The Last of Us has the potential to be refined with all the lessons the developers have learned in the meantime in the same way Resident Evil was.

What the game ends up being we’ll just have to wait to see. Until then, it’s really up to you whether you think it’s a cynical, low-effort cash in to push people to a $120 full priced game over an older and therefore cheaper remaster or a worthwhile reimagining of a highly regarded game. Until we know more, it’s just speculation – but I’m keen to find out.

The post Remaster Or Remake: What’s The Difference And How Soon Is Too Soon? appeared first on Press Start.

Diablo has always been about the loot cycle. Explore, kill enemies, find sweet new gear, then explore some more to begin the cycle anew. It’s a loop that has kept gamers hooked for decades now across PC and console platforms, and now makes its way to the most ubiquitous platform of all – the smartphone. It’s also going free-to-play. Both concepts can instill fear in the minds of gamers used to premium console and PC titles, but how does Diablo hold up? From my couple of hours playtime so far – pretty decently!

I’ve been playing mostly on an iPhone, probably the most challenging device size to adapt the sometimes complex Diablo experience to but likely the one the vast majority of people will be using to play Immortal, and the experience has been generally positive for me. Tapping anywhere on the bottom left of the screen gives you a pleasant virtual stick (pleasant as far as virtual sticks go, at least) to move your character around, and the right side of the screen has a series of buttons for your attacks and abilities. Your standard attack is a big button in the centre while your skills are smaller buttons surrounding it. I never found it difficult to hit the ability I wanted to and aiming them by sliding your thumb from the button in the direction you want to use the skill is easy as.

Immortal has full support for Bluetooth controllers as well, so I decided to hook up a Dual Shock 4 and see if the experience held up to Diablo 3 on console control wise. It mostly does, with your abilities mapped to the face and shoulder buttons – but menus can be a pain since they use a pointer you move with the analog stick. Using a pointer with an analog stick has sucked in every game I’ve played that uses it, and this is no exception. At least you can still use the touch screen to navigate menus with a controller connected, and it’s what I ended up doing most of the time.

My biggest concern going in to this game was how invasive the microtransactions would be. Free to play mobile games can do this well, but when done poorly they can sour even otherwise fantastic games. During my early access period in-app purchases were disabled, so I can’t really give a definitive answer on this, but I can say that in my short time with it I never felt like I wasn’t getting decent gear through regular playing so that’s promising. Immortal has the full suite of free-to-play engagement machines you’ve probably seen in other games. Daily login bonuses, side quests to unlock bonuses – you’ll never log in to the game and have nothing to work towards.

The quest for loot and bonuses hooked me in just as it has for past mainline Diablo games. There’s a big overworld to explore, dungeons you can take on with a party of friends as well as designated solo areas. Challenge dungeons make their way from Diablo 3 as well as a way to test your character build and go for the sweetest gear.

Graphically I was impressed with the game on an iPhone 12 Pro. I was able to turn the frame rate limit up to 60, and adjust other graphics settings to high and while it ate my battery for breakfast doing so, it looked pretty great and maintained a solid frame rate. Even playing with my Necromancer with a screen full of enemies, summmoned ghouls and projectiles going everywhere, things never obviously chugged or slowed down for me.

The always online nature of the game, along with it being mobile means it’s hugely important that the game holds your place if you close it suddenly. Thankfully I was able to just close the app at a moment’s notice, and when I came back I was pretty damn close to where I left off. You won’t have to worry about losing progress if you go through a tunnel and lose connection, or if you have to suddenly close the game because someone came up to ask you an urgent question on your work break.

This is only a very early impression, but to me it’s promising. The core exploring, fighting and gear grabbing gameplay of past Diablo games is just as fun here, the controls even on a relatively small phone are responsive and easy to use. There’s controller support if that’s your preference (and of course the PC version as well). I’ve had a great time levelling and fighting with my Necromancer so far, and am super excited to be able to play the game with friends when the game is released for everyone very soon. As long as the monetisation strategy doesn’t get in the way of the game being fun to play, I think this could be a game I get hooked on for a while.

The post Diablo Immortal Review In-Progress – A Slick Adaption to Mobile appeared first on Press Start.

I came to the conclusion in my Galaxy S22+ review that Samsung has finally made a great default phone. One that has most everything you’d expect from a smartphone and not much else. They haven’t left people in search of the ridiculous high end in the dark though – if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want the standard, who wants every feature but the kitchen sink in your phone, the S22 Ultra is here for you.

When you first pick up the phone, the size of the screen and the device itself is immediately apparent. This is one chunky slab of phone. With a screen measuring 6.8 inches corner to corner, 1440 x 3088 pixels of resolution, 120Hz refresh rate and with HDR10 capability – this screen has about every spec you could feasibly want out of a phone. And it looks as great as the specs would lead you to believe. It’s bright, punchy and scrolling is smooth as hell. HDR video in particular looks damn incredible.

Given how fantastic this screen is though, it’s a real shame it’s shaped the way it is. Similar to Samsung’s displays dating back to the S6 Edge, the screen cascades off the sides in a way that looks awesome in photos but in use does nothing but make the experience of using the phone worse. Text and images warp as they wrap around the edge, light catches the curve in a way that can obscure what you’re looking at on screen, and compared to the standard S22 the curved edge makes the phone way harder to actually hold on to. With a phone this big you want every bit of help you can get, and this curved screen just made me worried I was gonna drop the phone every time I used it. I really hope Samsung moves past this Note style shape for the next Ultra – it really adds a whole bunch of problems to what otherwise is one of the best screens you can get on a phone.

I try not to get too hyperbolic in my reviews, but far out – the 10x zoom lens on this camera system is something I will miss in every phone that doesn’t have it from now on. Most phones with ‘telephoto’ lens options go somewhere between 2x and 3x, which is nice but often you can get similar shots by just taking a few steps closer to your subject. The 10x lens though? It let me get shots that I just literally could not have got otherwise. Sitting on one edge of a football oval and getting perfectly clear shots of the scoreboard over a hundred metres away blew me away. To be fair, the shots from the telephoto often don’t hold up quite as well as ones from the standard ‘wide’ camera – but it’s just so nice to have an entirely new tool in the kit for getting new and interesting photos from a phone.

The other cameras in the set take fantastic photos as well – like the standard S22 the wide camera uses Samsung’s  Adaptive Pixel tech to take photos with the massive high-resolution sensor (108MP in this case) and then bin them down to 12MP to get more detail and better lighting in your shots. Even the selfie camera is overkill at an absurd 40MP, but this kind of phone is where the absurd lives. Your selfies will be more detailed than they’ve ever been.

While it’s not technically a Galaxy Note, the Ultra has clearly been passed the Note torch. It’s a Note in shape, a Note in size, and carries along with it the most Note-defining accessory – the S Pen. It’s an accessory I’ve always been curious to try but never figured I would find much use for. Samsung has given it some near useless gimmick features – does anyone really want to wave a stylus like a magic wand to turn up the phone’s volume? – but alongside this is some genuine utility you won’t find anywhere else. Tap the screen with the Pen while the phone is asleep, and you’ll start taking a quick note that will be saved to your Notes app. You can use the pen to select portions of the screen to screenshot and easily mark up screenshots or documents. It surprised me by being useful as a mouse cursor for remoting into a desktop computer at home – having a hover state and a click makes it a pretty great way to interface with non-mobile optimised interfaces like a home server, something I would never have predicted to be as useful as it is.

While I could pretty universally recommend the S22+, the Ultra needs a bit more nuance. It’s way more expensive, and you get an array features for the extra cash that run from outright gimmick to genuinely useful – but it’s not a home-run of a phone. The physical form of the phone to me is worse in most ways that matter compared to the S22. From the curved screen obscuring content and making the phone harder to hold to the camera package just kind of jutting out of the phone – the physical design choices made with this phone feels clumsy compared to the other phones in the S22 lineup.

You can find the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra on Amazon with free delivery, or check out the full Samsung Galaxy S22 range at the Samsung Store.

The post Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra Phone Review – Worthy Of Note appeared first on Press Start.

Screens that cascade over the edge like a waterfall, cameras with adjustable apertures, iffy retina scanners – Samsung is no stranger to adding oddball features to it’s Galaxy line of phones to see what sticks. The S22 is almost strange in that it doesn’t really have a novel tentpole feature. Instead of focusing on a party trick this year, the S22 phones are refreshingly regular. It makes for a dependable default, the kind of phone that does most everything well without being weighed down by extra guff. It’s got everything most people could want out of a phone, and should last a long time doing it.

The screen is the first thing that hits you with this phone. It’s bright, vivid and fast. It’s a 6.6 inch 1080p AMOLED with a 120Hz refresh rate that makes scrolling loaded feeds look smoother than on standard screens and text and images easier to see clearly while scrolling. By default the screen is a bit too vivid for my tastes, like a TV in a shop that’s got all it’s colours turned up to max – but thankfully you can switch it to a ‘Natural’ colour profile in settings. A feature that almost feels silly to mention but makes a world of difference is that the screen on the S22+ is totally flat. Your content is all visible, no awkward reflections or content flowing over the edge, and you won’t have to spend absurd amounts to get decent screen protectors. It’s a return to normal that I’m glad Samsung chose to make.

The S22+ is a big phone, but it’s design makes it as easy to hold as I could imagine for a phone of this size. The flat screen means you’re not worrying about false touches while trying to hold it and the subtly curved side rails make for a phone that nestles comfortably into the hand. It’s rather fetching in looks as well. The camera bump is integrated into the side rail in a way that looks like it’s properly part of the phone rather than kinda bolted on like the cameras of many other flagships.

That camera takes fairly fantastic photos. Using a technique Samsung calls Adaptive Pixel it takes adjacent pixels from the 50 megapixel sensor and combines them in to one – letting each of these combined pixels take in more light when needed to get a brighter, more pleasing and more detailed 12MP picture. You can choose to take full 50MP photos if you want to, but this will result in worse performance in lower light and much, much larger files. All this is when using the middle ‘Wide’ camera, there is also a 12MP Ultrawide camera for when you want to capture more of a scene, and a 10MP 3x Telephoto lens for when you just can’t get close enough to a subject and need to zoom in.

Each of the lenses is capable of the Night Mode photography feature, and I found this resulted in pleasing low-light shots as long as the subject was relatively still. Shots from the 10MP selfie camera on the front are crisp and detailed too, once you turn off the default smoothing filters. The video camera can record in 4K at 60 frames per second, as well as a wild 8K at 24 frames per second. There does seem to be a bit of shutter lag which is unfortunate. It’s tiny, but can make it feel like you’re missing a shot even if you tapped the shutter at the right time.

The heart behind all this screen and camera is more than powerful enough to keep things moving at a good pace. I never noticed the phone missing frames, navigation was silky smooth. Playing games like Legends of Runeterra or Need for Speed No Limits never seemed to stress the phone out. With this high performance chip I was worried the battery life might take a hit, but I found it able to get through a day of my very heavy usage pattern of constant music streaming over mobile to bluetooth, some occasional gaming and scrolling social feeds, and not hit the 20% mark until I’d had about 4-5 hours of screen time. I found it lasts an extra couple of hours compared to my year-old iPhone 12 Pro, which is not entirely surprising given how much bigger it is but a useful point of reference nonetheless.

One thing I was looking forward to most was the nice level of customisation offered by OneUI and Android 12 with ‘Material You’. The idea is that you can coordinate your interface and icon colours with your wallpaper so it looks cohesive and really yours. In my experience, this works well enough but not quite as well as I’d hoped it would. It themes standard Android elements wonderfully – the Quick Setting pull down, dialer and supported apps will all take on your chosen colour palette. Unfortunately the option to theme app icons doesn’t work nearly as well since almost no third party apps support it. Material You doesn’t quite live up to the promises it makes of personalising your entire phone, but it is lovely to have supported apps and screens all consistently coloured according to your chosen vibe.

You can find the Samsung Galaxy S22+ on Amazon with free delivery, or check out the full Samsung Galaxy S22 range at the Samsung Store.

The post Samsung Galaxy S22+ Phone Review – A Great Default appeared first on Press Start.

Much like Octopath Traveler before it, Triangle Strategy started out as a silly sounding codename that just ended up sticking, and even after playing all the way through it still strikes me as a strange name. Is it about the chain of strengths and weaknesses of unit types? Maybe it’s referring to the three powers vying for control of the land? It could be many things, but of one thing I am certain. Regardless of what the triangle is, Triangle Strategy is an utterly compelling strategy RPG that manages to toe the line between challenging and approachable in a way that made it hard to put down.

Triangle Strategy places you into the furred jacket of Serenoa Wolffort, heir to House Wolffort and loyal ally to the kingdom of Glenbrook. Glenbrook is one of the three kingdoms in the greater land of Norzelia in a time of seemingly lasting peace – but as you might guess, the peace in this realm is not a lasting one.

When the fight begins, Triangle Strategy places you in direct command of your chosen group of combatants, placed onto an isometric grid-based combat area, tasked to outwit and outlast the opponent in pursuit of victory. Triangle’s battle system is eminently approachable, but can be deceptively deep. The rules of this system are many but easy to understand. You’ll need to contend with attack directions, weather conditions, terrain effects and the like – complexity comes when all of these rules are mashed together in combat situations. While playing you will gradually learn about weaknesses in your strategy through momentary mistakes or sometimes full-on defeats, but I never felt that Triangle Strategy crossed the line into punishing territory.

There is no permanent death for characters for one, they simply retreat from battle ready for the next. Even a total loss is a gain of sorts since any experience your characters earned in the battle remains for your next attempt. More often than not, between retrying battles with slightly stronger characters and adjusting my strategy based on my experience with how it went last time I never found myself feeling overwhelmed by a challenge that felt insurmountable. It’s a fantastic balance that leaves room for demanding tactical challenge, while making each attempt naturally a little easier than the last without doing anything as crude as suggesting you turn the difficulty down. It’s a super smart balancing system that made triumph feel like it’s own reward. That said, there are difficulty modes you can choose from at the beginning of the adventure, and are free to change throughout the game without consequence if you want to tailor your starting point.

The cast of characters fighting alongside you and existing in the world around you are worthy of note. Each feels fleshed out with their own motives and personalities, their own deeply held convictions about what they want to do for themselves and the people that matter to them. They have each had their own experiences of the world and their own pre-existing relationships. It feels like my character’s story is taking place in a fully realised world, alongside people with deeply felt justifications for their convictions.

The path Triangle’s story takes is largely directed by decisions made by not only you, but your group as a whole. House Wolffort is staunchly democratic which leads to one of the most interesting aspects of Triangle Strategy – all major decisions made by your group are made by majority vote. You as a player cannot directly decide the direction your house will take, but when a major decision needs to be made you are given an opportunity to gather information and talk with your companions to attempt to convince them to see things the way you do. You have no guarantee that they will come around to your perspective, and it will entirely depend on whether you make an argument that is convincing to them in particular. It all cumulates in a vote where your group’s future will be decided.

I found this decision making process utterly captivating. Most of the decisions you need to collectively make will be difficult – there are rarely easy answers here. You will have to wrangle with yours and your group’s existing allegiances, consider risky proposals, and even your own personal convictions to arrive at a decision. At times characters even convinced me to change my mind after I tried to change theirs, presenting a new viewpoint I hadn’t properly considered until then. The process of gathering information beforehand and making an argument feels almost like a lite version of an investigative visual novel, and made an already engaging story full of unexpected twists and turns feel even more personal. This story can go off in wildly different directions based on your collective decisions. Having to think carefully and fight to convince your group of your viewpoint made the voting process nerve racking and the outcome genuinely impactful.

This story of kingdoms in turmoil unfolds against a striking visual backdrop. Utilising the same 2D-HD style as Octopath Traveler before it, Triangle Strategy is both an homage to past strategy RPGs and a contemporary technical showpiece. Battle situations are easy to read at a glance owing to the simple look while effects like lighting and depth of field make the game look unmistakably modern. The only drawback I found visually was what seemed like a particularly aggressive resolution scaling system, which during relatively static story scenes could give the sharp edged characters and environment textures a strange scaling look which can be a bit distracting if you notice. Triangle’s music is worth mentioning as well. Like the visuals it toes a line between resembling music from RPGs of another era while sounding beautifully contemporary with it’s instrumentation.

The post Triangle Strategy Review – A Strategic Achievement appeared first on Press Start.

I have fond memories of being a teenage Car Guy the early 2000s. Going to car shows, reading car magazines, watching Fast & Furious movies and of course – playing the heck out of whatever racing games I could get my hands on. Some of the most memorable times were in front of Gran Turismo, utterly failing license tests in 2 and wondering if games would ever look better than Gran Turismo 3. It’s been a while since then, but playing Gran Turismo 7 has rekindled the same enthusiasm for cars that I had all that way back. The passion the developers have for cars and car history is infectious, and it’s hard not to catch the enthusiasm while playing through this intricately detailed driving simulation.

Gran Turismo 7 is eager to take any little bit of enthusiasm you have about cars and nurture it. More than just a driving simulation, GT7 wants to be a car enthusiast club and an interactive car museum. Playing through the game you’ll work your way through different styles of car from different areas of the world, learn about how the industry developed from its very beginnings and how different companies pushed the envelope in their own ways. I found the whole process super interesting and I’ve definitely come to appreciate more kinds of cars and the sheer effort that goes into developing and designing these machines over decades. GT7 teaches you all this in a way that is friendly and approachable whether you’re a die-hard car fan or totally new to the scene.

The main event so to speak, the actual driving of the cars, is pretty incredible. I can’t necessarily speak to realism since there’s not a lot of cross over between cars I’ve driven and cars available here, but the sheer level of detail Polyphony have captured in this simulation is impressive. The way your tires react differently in wet conditions, the way a turbocharger affects specific RPM ranges of your engine, even the different grip levels of different kinds of tires is noticeable. The sheer amount of factors you can tweak in your car and the environment is massive, and the fact that even a fair-weather car-guy like myself started to understand the differences when I made those tweaks is testament to how friendly and helpful this game at helping you learn.

One of the aspects that is difficult to replicate in driving simulations is the tactile feel. Past games have tried to replicate road surfaces through controller rumble for example, but Gran Turismo 7’s use of the DualSense haptic features really elevates the experience in a way I didn’t expect to appreciate as much as I did. I found myself unconsciously reacting to my tires slipping on a wet road as I felt the accelerator trigger slipping under my fingers and the way different sides of the controller gave haptic feedback depending on the road surface under each tire – they sound frivolous individually but add up to really feeling how your car drives more than I expected. I was amazed at how informative the haptic feedback was to my driving.

You’ll need every intuitive sense you have to wrangle some of these cars. Even the more tame, lower powered vehicles require patience and learning to get around a track. I found myself having an adjustment period for every new car I drove. It was a challenge, but it also makes every corner you get around without spinning out feel like a little victory. Thankfully, GT7 is super generous with the assists available so you can tailor the driving experience to exactly what you need to get the most out of it. You can start from one of three presets, and then drill into the specifics from there to get your experience exactly as you like. I found I really benefitted from on-track racing line and braking guides, but turned off the auto-accelerate and auto-brake options and this created a great balance of approachability and challenge for my needs. You can change these assist options at nearly any time. The game does softly encourage you sometimes to see if you might have outgrown some of the assists you’re using – but never forces the matter nor punishes you for your choices.

The World Map is where you’ll find most of the game’s ways to play. You can buy used or new cars, tune them to your heart’s content (with friendly advice from the mechanic so you can understand what each modification will do), enter races, or even take your car to one of hundreds of ‘Scapes’ for a photoshoot. The amount of content on offer is almost overwhelming – but thankfully the Café in the middle of the map provides some direction in what to do next if you’re unsure. Acting like a campaign of sorts, the friendly person at the Café will give you a series of Menu Books which act as gentle objectives to progress through the game with a gradual difficulty curve.

The objectives are usually about collecting cars through purchases or winning them in races, but over the course of the game will introduce you to all the core features available. It takes you through things in a logical way, encouraging you to get familiar with a particular type of car or part of the world for a while before moving on. I found the feeling of catching up with a friend at a cafe to talk about what I’d done, show off my cars and have him ramble on about history a lovely way to add a personal touch to what could have just been a sterile list of objectives.

Gran Turismo games have always pushed the envelope of what is technically possible on their respective consoles, and 7 is no exception. Every car is meticulously modelled inside and out down to the shape of the air-con vents and the tiny logos moulded into the headlight covers. Dynamic weather and time of day can change even during races, changing the driving conditions on the road as well as having an effect on visibility. There are two options for graphics modes in gameplay on PS5 – one which gets you a target 60 frames per second, and another that adds Ray Tracing at 30 frames per second. Both modes look fantastic so it’s down to how much you value more frames to decide which way you’ll prefer. I never noticed dips from the 60fps target, the driving experience was silky smooth. The game switches into the quality mode for non-gameplay scenes so you can appreciate the highest possible graphical detail where smoothness isn’t the biggest concern.

If there’s one thing that bothers me about GT7, it’s that your progress in the main game mode requires an internet connection at all times. The internet requirement enables some cool features like open lobbies at tracks to chat and have casual races, but being locked out of everything aside from quick race style events if your internet drops out sucks, to put it bluntly. I found if I dropped connection mid race the game wouldn’t save my progress, and I’d have to do the race over again. It stops you gaming the system by playing around with save files and the fact you can buy in-game currency on the PlayStation Store surely factors into it too – while it doesn’t ruin the game for me it’s a factor I think everyone should be aware of when looking at the game.

The post Gran Turismo 7 Review – Approachable Simulation appeared first on Press Start.

Ahead of the Elden Ring Closed Network Test going live this weekend for specific users, we had the change to go hands-on with it a little early. Elden Ring feels familiar, yet different and here’s what we learned during our time with the game.

This world feels huge

The worlds of From Software’s Souls style games have always been sprawling and intricate, but this feels totally different. Rather than connected paths between areas – Elden Ring’s preview area is expansive, full of roaming monsters and dotted with caves and decaying architecture to explore. My fears of wide open fields of nothingness between interesting areas have been mostly put to rest – as much as the world has expanded it still seems deliberately designed.

There are heaps of options to get around

Walking, running and awkwardly jumping are what you’d expect from a Souls style game – but with this expanded world comes new ways to move about. Some time into the Network Test area you can acquire a spectral steed named Torrent. They’re basically a ghost horse and you can summon them any time you’re out in the field to explore the world quickly or get yourself out of a nasty situation. You can even fight on horseback, though you have to be careful not to be knocked off!

Bosses aren’t always confined to boss rooms

While you’re exploring you will have to keep your wits about you. Besides the more run of the mill creatures you’ll find on your travels you might run into devastatingly powerful named bosses just out wandering their areas in the world. They’ll chase you around the area once you catch their attention.

Combat is a bit faster paced than a typical Souls

Souls games are known for their slower pace to combat, with every move carrying heavy weight and potentially a heavy price if mistimed. Though the same is true of some combat in Elden Ring, the addition of an honest-to-goodness jump button changes things up considerably. Taking a leaf from Sekiro’s book, you can jump around to avoid attacks and to set up overhead attacks to catch some enemies off guard. There’s a little taste of Bloodborne too with the option of a quick counter-attack after a successful block.

Easier to experiment and customise equipment

Unlike most Souls games, in Elden Ring you can customise your equipment without permanently locking in your choice. During your journey you’ll come across Ashes of War, items that can be attached to your equipment to change it’s properties anytime you rest at a Site of Grace. You can give your blades elemental, magical or other special qualities, and each Ash seems to come with a special ability as well. I came across moves like lightning strikes, healing circles and quick multi-thrust attacks – it seems like there will be a lot of room to play with move sets and weapon properties.

Some systems have been made more approachable

Alongside the more lenient weapon upgrade systems, Elden Ring has made some changes to make the game generally more approachable. You can fast-travel from anywhere in the open field to any Site of Grace. These Sites will shine a light in the direction of where you should next consider heading, giving some general idea of where to go. Your healing flasks can be replenished not just by resting at Sites of Grace, but also by clearing groups of enemies. There are statues around the map that can serve as respawn points if you die – they’re not as useful as a full Site of Grace but help cut down considerably on time to retry difficult encounters after dying. It’s lots of little things, and I don’t think the magic of Souls is lost with them from what I can tell – it should just take out some of the bigger pain points for some players.

From what we’ve seen in the Network Test – I still think the soul of Souls is here in Elden Ring. It’s interesting to see, like we did in Sekiro, the Souls formula being experimented with and going in unexpected directions. Based on this small taste, I’m very keen to see what From Software have in store for the full game in February.

The post We Played Elden Ring And Here’s What We Learned appeared first on Press Start.

One of the big questions when thinking about remastering a game is whether it needs to change at all to be viable in the current market. For Diablo 2: Resurrected, Blizzard has stayed absolutely true to the original game while giving it a complete visual makeover.

Diablo 2: Resurrected is an action heavy RPG built around choosing from one of seven distinctly varied character classes, exploring dangerous places, slaying innumerable monsters, gathering new items and using the experience gained to improve your character’s stats and unlock new abilities so you can explore ever more dangerous places filled with ever more dangerous monsters. It’s a compelling hook – one that had me enthralled for years in it’s original form and which inspired more caffeine and sugar fueled dungeon crawling nights in my past than I can count on two hands. That hook is well and truly still here, and as potent as it ever was.

It’s important to understand exactly what kind of re-release Resurrected is. While Resurrected gives Diablo 2 a humongous graphical and audio overhaul, transforming the characters and environments into full 3D, the game running underneath it all is Diablo 2, same as it ever was. Aside from some inventory management improvements and reasonably good controller support, Resurrected plays exactly as Diablo 2 always has – evidenced by the fact you can switch back to the original visuals at any moment. Doing so was quite a shock to me. It’s hard to remember just how Diablo 2 looked twenty years back – and being able to directly compare gives a real appreciation for the remastering process here.

The graphical overhaul is quite phenomenal. It looks just how my rose tinted memories of Diablo remember it but in sharp, high fidelity. Things move at a smooth and consistent 60 frames per second on PlayStation 5 (if you switch to Performance mode at least) and characters keep the late 90s 3D animation vibe while looking entirely modern at the same time – like they’ve jumped off the cover of a fantasy themed rock album of the time and on to the screen. Environments have had a complete overhaul as well, and generally stay true to the original’s aesthetic however I feel they lose some of their charm and texture. Things have become minutely detailed as is expected in the 4K era, but the punchy contrast of the past environments is sometimes lost in the transfer. It’s minor and absolutely not game breaking but I found things like paths much less clear than they used to be.

Music and audio have been revamped as well with more spacious sounding recordings that, for me, still kept the personality of the music from the original game that’s been seared into my brain for all these years. The prog-rock inspired music that accompanies your exploits in the first act is just awesome to hear in either remastered or legacy form – staying mostly ambient but always evoking the perfect mood for horror fantasy dungeon crawling.

Under the hood, Resurrected is Diablo 2 for better and for worse. Movement, combat, character building, AI – it’s all exactly as it was in 2001. I do consider Diablo 2 to be a milestone for the genre especially for it’s time but if you’re well experienced with it’s follow-up Diablo 3 you’ll definitely notice some quality of life improvements that were made there that are missing from 2.

The most impactful for me personally is the lack of couch co-op. While it’s understandable that the original Diablo 2 was made for PC where the idea of sharing a screen is nigh unheard of – I felt it’s inclusion with the console releases of Diablo 3 transformed the game by making multiplayer infinitely easier to organise. It would have been nice to have some degree of same-machine multiplayer but given it wasn’t in the original its absence is understandable. Be prepared for other challenges as well like dropping your entire inventory on death, requiring a tense unarmed dash to retrieve your stuff. Your character skills and stat bonuses are locked in the moment you choose them as well – which might come as a shock to people used to Diablo 3’s more flexible ability system. This will all be second nature to people forged in Diablo 2’s hellfire but are changes worth noting for new players.

Resurrected brings with it a full suite of online features, many of which existed as an option in the original release but which gain prominence in today’s more connected world. The default way to make a character is Online – these characters will be able to participate in online parties, join in ladders and can use cross-progression systems to play across multiple platforms. The catch being that in Online mode you’re playing on Blizzard’s servers. This won’t necessarily be a problem for everyone and the benefits of cross-progression and online multiplayer will be well worth it for many – but this all comes with the caveat that your character cannot be used without an internet connection, and playing online brings with it other issues like short pauses while buying, identifying and managing items.

During pre-release and post-release I found my game lagging behind the server regularly enough for it to become bothersome – often I’d walk into a room teeming with monsters and start dealing with them only for the game to zip me back to the entrance, surrounded by the monsters and with a good portion of my health gone. This could be improved as time goes on, but it’s a less than perfect experience currently. There is of course the option to create an offline character if you only want to play locally (on your own system or through a local network), but offline and online characters can never mix – so if you ever want to use a character online with friends then offline isn’t an option.

While I’d have loved couch co-op to find a way in to the console version and the server issues are a nuisance, to me they don’t truly mar the game underneath. The gameplay is a little dated and might be a shock to people used to Diablo 3, but the fact I still found myself mashing monsters for hours on end is testament to the compelling core gameplay hook that was present in the original and is still very much here underneath the beautiful high-resolution veneer.

The post Diablo 2: Resurrected Review – Once More Into The Den of Evil appeared first on Press Start.

Bandai Namco’s Tales series has a long and storied past. Always second fiddle to the Final Fantasies of the world, it nonetheless has a dedicated following for it’s unique approach to action combat in the JRPG genre. After the longest break in releases in the series’ history (the previous game in the series, Tales of Berseria, came out in 2016), Tales of Arise has the weight of a long wait on it’s shoulders. As someone who has only dabbled in Tales in the past but generally loves JRPGs, I found Tales of Arise to be so enjoyable that I’m questioning why I haven’t paid more attention to this series until now.

The first thing that really stands out about about Tales of Arise is the high production value. The whole production looks and sounds like it’s had a lot of care, passion and money poured into it. The game begins with a slick 2D anime introduction sequence, complete with extremely anime intro music, and the high production value continues into the game itself. Characters have interesting designs and are well animated, both in cut-scenes and in-game – some of the fight scene choreography especially was breathtaking. Music beautifully accompanies dramatic reveals, exciting exploring and high-energy battles – running the gamut from orchestral choruses to string laden metal. The pivotal dialogue between major characters is fully voiced and really adds to the energy of any scene. There is far more character pop-in than I’d expect from modern game however, which detracts a bit from an otherwise stellar presentation.

That presentation makes the story of Arise great fun to take in. We begin with a mysterious masked protagonist, without memories or even a name. He lives among a group of people called Dahnans who for three hundred years have been oppressed by a ruling class in their home of Dahna. Dahna is ruled over by the Renans, a group from another planet who have asserted themselves as rulers. He comes across a group of resistance fighters who want to fight back against the Lord that rules over their region, along with a mysterious woman who has her own reasons for wanting to remove the Lord from his perch – and thus begins a tentative alliance.

Arise’s narrative moves at a quick pace, and while you can spend as much time as you like dawdling and pursuing side quests, there is always an exciting development in the overall story just around the corner. Along the way you’ll meet new characters, many of whom play an integral part in your quest, some of whom share your goals enough to join your group for the long haul – each bringing a unique perspective to conversations and the quest overall with their varied motives and interesting backstories. While the story doesn’t explore it’s themes in huge depth, the quick pace means it’s always enticing to see what’s coming next.

The world in which you meet these characters is joyous to explore. Landscapes vary from vast green fields to snowy mountains and intricate cities. Between the safe havens of cities and towns you’ll explore more dangerous areas populated with monsters (curiously names ‘zeugles’) that must be reckoned with to progress. There are no random battles here, so generally fights can be taken at precisely the pace you desire. If you’re feeling more like exploring you can sprint past and avoid battles for the most part – and when you feel like taking on battle after battle, Arise has a smart system to make it worth your while.

Winning battles in quick succession causes you start to building a multiplier for outcomes like experience and items. This means that if you’ve been avoiding battles you can easily make up for lost time by smashing out a bunch of them in quick succession and reaping the benefits of multiplied rewards. It’s a clever system that doesn’t let you avoid battles entirely but lets you have more agency over when you want to engage in them.

And engage in them you will. The battle system is reasonably straightforward but requires some skill and understanding to take full advantage of. Battles are fast paced and have you control your party in real-time action. You directly control one character, while the AI controls the others according to your preference. You can use one of a few pre-defined useful behaviour patterns like focusing on attacking or healing – or you can go super in-depth and define more specific parameters about when you want characters to use certain abilities or items. You can even limit the pool of abilities your characters can use so they focus on exactly the ones you need in any situation.

Battles are kinetic and action-packed. Your character has a standard attack, a dodge that allows for a quick counter when timed perfectly and an array of special ‘artes’ mapped to the face buttons. Each has different effects on the enemy you’re attacking, and costs energy to use. Your other party members can be called upon to unleash a Boost Attack as well, which can turn the tide of battle by stunning an enemy or breaking it’s attack – while also recharging your artes. Using all of these abilities in concert is key to success – and it’s a winning formula for battles that are exciting to play, if more than a little chaotic when more than a few enemies are involved.

Thankfully even during the most intense of battles, performance was smooth, with nary a stutter to be found. I found the difficulty on Normal to be just right for me. Some bosses necessitated a few tries, but generally they could be overcome by changing up my equipment or taking mental notes on how to break certain attacks. Difficulty is adjustable at any time, so if you prefer an easier time in combat or extra challenge it’s just a menu away.

The post Tales Of Arise Review – A Solid Entry appeared first on Press Start.

Finally, I thought, the perfect way to get into the original Xenoblade Chronicles. I’d been wanting to play this so-called classic for years but the concept of playing a low-res Wii version or tiny 3DS version didn’t really inspire. While this Definitive Edition did take a while to grow on me, now that I’ve played all the way through Xenoblade Chronicles I finally understand why the game was looked upon so highly in it’s time.

In Xenoblade’s fantastical world we learn that two massive titans called the Bionis and Mechonis fought in ancient times, and have laid dormant ever since – long enough that generations of creatures have come to call their bodies home. We learn that those inhabiting each of the titans are in a long-standing conflict – with the biological creatures of the Bionis titan warding off attacks from the mechanical entities of the Mechonis. It’s amongst this conflict that we meet our main character, Shulk, and his crew of friends who come together to fight this mechanical threat. It’s a story that begins quite simply, and perhaps even a bit… juvenile? If I’m honest, I found it a bit trite to begin with – however the story evolves and really does start going to some interesting places as you push through the game. It’s very silly, and a narrative that you probably shouldn’t take too seriously – but once I realised and accepted that fact, I had a much better time with it.

The characters are truly the stars of this game, and their interactions both in and out of battle really brought the story together for me. They are fully voiced, and extremely talkative in battle. For some, I can understand how this might get on their nerves, but I loved the way characters interacted in battle and made commentary as it was unfolding. Over time, I really began to appreciate the characters and what they bring to the game as a whole. Spending time with all of the characters is important too. As you spend time with each they will deepen their affinity for one another, which can unlock heart-to-hearts – small story moments which reveal a little more about the characters – and share certain abilities.

Throughout this story, Shulk and his friends will spend a great deal of time fighting – so Xenoblade Chronicles’ battle system is quite important. It’s probably less fresh now compared to how it felt in 2010, but I still felt that the battle system had its own sense of style and flow that I just haven’t found in many other games.

You only directly control one character during battle. They will automatically use their basic attacks whenever close enough to an enemy, leaving you to keep on top of their positioning in the battlefield and issue them commands for their special attacks or Arts. Some Arts will have extra effects when used from the back or side of an enemy, so positioning is supremely important. Certain Arts can lead into others as well (such as the Break, Topple, Daze combo where you break an enemy’s defense, topple them over, and make them dizzy for extra damage) – if your party members have Arts which complement your own or would work well in specific situations, they tend to be pretty smart about using them effectively. Deciding which Arts you and your team mates will have available in battle is super important, and half the fun of combat in Xenoblade is playing with different combinations of characters and their Arts to find great combos. It’s a battle system that rewards mastery (and between gem crafting, equipment and Arts selection there’s a lot to master!) but isn’t too crushing while you work things out.

One of the nicest additions to the Definitive Edition of the game are it’s optional combat difficulty modes. If you’re new to the series or are finding the combat too demanding, a new Casual mode for battles makes combat significantly less challenging. This can be toggled on and off any time during the game, so you could just as easily play the entire game in this mode as toggle it on just for moments that you’re really struggling with. Veterans aren’t left out though, as Expert mode offers greater challenge for those who’ve mastered the game in the past and want to further test their abilities.

Another bonus for veterans are the time attack battles dotted around the map. You’ll occasionally find little teleporters which take you to a temple-like location where you can take on various combat challenges. Some will let you choose your party, others give you a predetermined one, and each will reward you with currency based on your performance in wave-based combat challenges. You can buy new equipment here too, so if you want to test your combat mastery you’ll be well rewarded. Another small equipment-related bonus that I feel is worth mentioning is that you can now change the appearance of any equipment you find. Found a really great armour set that you just hate the look of? You can now change it’s look from a selection you’ll unlock as you play – this won’t affect its stats, so you’ll never have to compromise your aesthetic for big numbers.

The world of Xenoblade Chronicles is huge – it would have looked huge for a Wii game, and is still massive by today’s standards. Dotted around the world you’ll find quest givers who assign you plentiful, but fairly uninspired quests. You’ll do a lot of “Kill 7 gremlins” or “Collect 4 Grumpy Seeds” style tasks, but most of these are easily done without going too far out of your way, and are completed without needing to return to the quest giver for the reward, which make them much less annoying to manage. You can fast travel from anywhere in the game at almost any time, so if you do want to go back to a previous area for a quest it’s really never too much of a hassle.

This Definitive Edition is a little all over the place visually. Main characters have been given a huge makeover – and look fantastic for it – but the environments can feel decidedly dated in comparison. Walking across massive open fields populated with occasional enemies and not a great deal else, with some low resolution textures, along with some pretty janky character animations during story scenes can serve as a jarring reminder that this is a Wii game underneath that new coat of paint. The game is fairly aggressive at toning down the resolution for the sake of smooth performance. Like Chronicles 2 on Switch, Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition can look downright muddy at times. It’s more noticeable in handheld mode, but docked it’s noticeable at times too.

After bouncing so hard off Xenoblade Chronicles 2, I really hoped that the Definitive Edition of this first game in the series might show me why the franchise has such a dedicated fan base. While it took a while to warm up to, by the end of the story I was absolutely invested in the ridiculous story of Shulk and his friends as they fight for the future of their world.

THE NINTENDO SWITCH VERSION OF THIS GAME WAS PLAYED FOR THE PURPOSE OF THIS REVIEW. A DIGITAL REVIEW CODE WAS PROVIDED BY THE PUBLISHER.

The post Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition Review – Now It’s Switch Time appeared first on Press Start.

A collaboration between Wolfenstein’s recent stewards MachineGames, and Arkane studios – best known for Dishonored and Prey – Youngblood is a co-op focused shooter with one foot firmly planted in the first-person shooter’s past glory and the other placed to incorporate more modern elements from it’s contemporaries. Based on my short preview time, this concoction is looking quite promising.

Zooming forward significantly in time from the ’60s where Wolfenstein last left us, the preview placed me and another player in the shoes of BJ Blazkowicz’s twin daughters Jess and Soph during the early 1980s. To begin with, each player chose some starting abilities to best suit our intended gameplay style (My partner went sneaky stealthy, while I decided to give the brute force focused options a try) and then it was into the game. These initial character customisations were a small taste of the possibilities that opened up as we played through the demo.

Boarding a flying Nazi vessel, we had our first taste of combat in Youngblood with some stealth kills, easy enough. I soon found out though that a pure stealth approach was never going to be totally effective and that we’d need to get dirty in some gunfights sooner rather than later. It was in this moment I discovered a neat little throwback to the genre’s past in the life system. Whenever one of you takes too much damage you’ll be downed, crawling and desperately calling out to your partner to come and revive you. Should they not come in time (or should you decide to just give up), you’ll need to use one of the lives from your shared life pool.

Exploring a little after the firefight I begun to find small coins hidden around the place, these are the secret to unlocking further character customisation beyond those you start with. Using these coins you can customise your weaponry to behave according to your preference as well as make little cosmetic changes to make them feel more your own. Exploring between fights is encouraged, if not absolutely required since you’ll also find ammo, health and armour pickups to help you survive the next encounter. In another nod to shooters’ past, health doesn’t regenerate after a period of inactivity – you need to actively seek pickups to heal up.

Well, that’s not entirely true – there is another way to heal up using another of Youngblood’s new features. The Pep system allows you to choose a particular Pep ability when you initially build your character. At any point during the game as long as your partner is close you can give them a Pep. Your character will make a supportive gesture to the other and give them some sort of boost like a quick heal or armour boost. This is an essential skill to keep an eye on, as you’ll really need those boosts during the more intense skirmishes.

Communication and co-operation too will be essential to your success in Youngblood. Along with sticking together to reap the benefits of a quick Pep – knowing where your teammate is in a fight and knowing when to call out for help is an important skill to keep at the ready. Additionally, some enemies have been designed to encourage teamwork, such as one of you drawing fire and attention while the other sneaks up behind to severely damage the enemy by destroying a volatile tank of fuel on their back. Based on the short preview area we got to play, this is not just regular Wolfenstein with two people. Youngblood’s levels and encounters take advantage of the co-op dynamic. That’s not to say the game is impossible to play solo, as it’s been confirmed that if playing alone, an A.I. partner will join for you, and MachineGames have stated the game won’t give solo players a second-class experience. We’ll have to wait and see whether this is true, I can’t imagine having anywhere near as much fun with an A.I. partner rather than a co-op friend.

The section we played during the demo was quite linear in structure, moving from firefight to firefight to movement puzzle towards a climactic end-of-level event. We were told that beyond this initial area the game will widen to more resemble an open-world game rather than the traditionally straightforward style of other recent Wolfenstein games – but I guess we’ll have to wait and see exactly what this means.

I left the demo event wishing there was more to play. The game was challenging, but constantly encouraging you to try again after an initial failure with new knowledge of enemy behaviours and positions. It’s hard to judge how impactful weapon customisation will be in the game over the long term but the initial taste seemed like it would give some satisfying player choice and progression. It is yet to be seen how Wolfenstein gameplay will be transformed into an open-ended gameplay style, but based on this early demo I’m extremely keen sink my teeth into some satisfying gunplay, co-operatively, in Youngblood when it releases.

The post Wolfenstein Youngblood Hands-On Preview – Double The Fun appeared first on Press Start.

2016’s Doom was a revelation that brought the series into the present without losing the series’ aesthetic and core appeal. Constant movement, versatile weaponry and a variety of enemies in situations specifically designed to push you to your limit then have you coming back for more. It gave players all the tools they needed to overcome the obstacles placed in front of them and simply asked that they learn how best to use these tools for success.

Upon walking into the preview room and seeing a bunch of computers set up and ready to play a new Doom, I wanted nothing more than to jump in immediately – the allure of Doom is real. Some at the event were keen enough that they just started playing, but we were quickly asked by a Bethesda rep to wait so the game’s director, Marty Stratton, could give a short introduction to what we were all about to jump into.

He spoke about the game design team’s intention with Doom Eternal. They absolutely expect you to fail, even multiple times before overcoming some combat sections – in the hope that you’ll take each death as a learning opportunity. You have everything you need to defeat the foes in front of you, you only need to use these tools skilfully to overcome – and based on my short experience with the game he was absolutely right. At a few select combat sequences I got obliterated – multiple times. Each time though served as an encouragement to experiment with the new additions to the established Doom formula, and there are quite a few of them.

The key to Doom 2016’s addictive gameplay loop was the ever changing, fast paced combat that forced you to re-evaluate your situation almost constantly. You’d need to keep track of enemies in the environment, your own health and ammo reserves or where you can safely move to gain an advantageous position or avoid a damaging shot. You had a series of tools you could use to navigate these situations and try to turn it around to your advantage. The most compelling new aspect of the Doom Eternal demo I played was the range of new tools you’re given, giving you even more options at every moment to deal with each situation. Alongside using Glory Kills and the chainsaw to manage your health and ammunition, you now also have a flame weapon which can set a large group of demons aflame. For doing this you’ll get some armour in return. Blow them to pieces while they’re on fire and you’ll get much more armour. You also get grenades which can place a group of demons into a stunned state, primed for Glory Kills.

It’s not just new weaponry either. Eternal gives even more options for movement than its predecessor. With the right weapon equipped you gain access to a grappling hook – enabling you to target an enemy, quickly pull yourself to them ready to deliver a close range shotgun blast to the face. You can use this to get out of tight situations as well. Regardless of your weapon loadout, you’ll have access to new double jump and air dash abilities which can be chained together to keep you moving around the arena at a breakneck pace.

Eternal brings with it destructible demons, and you’ll certainly want to experiment and find out which demons are most affected when you blow something off of them with a rocket. Being able to forcefully remove the arm of a Mancubus (an arm with a rocket launcher attached) can really help turn the tide of a battle, or at least give you one fewer explosives to worry about in the scramble.

Based on the demo we got to play, which offered short slices of various areas throughout the game to make sure we got to play with all the new toys on offer, there is one element from Doom 2016 returning that I feel could have been left behind. It might just be me, but I found that during certain moments between combat I’d be sitting just stumped as to where to go next. One particularly egregious section in the demo challenged me to navigate a series of floating space-islands, connected by boost pads or accessible through smart jumping and climbing. This was the only point during the entire demo that I found myself frustrated. When you’re walking around in circles looking for some ledge or platform you’ve missed there’s no getting better after retrying, you just need to wander until you happen upon the path developers intended for you. I found it really killed the pace of the session, and rather than serving as a short breather just became frustrating.

I mentioned climbing before too, and this is the one new ability introduced into Doom Eternal that I’m not sold on from my short time with the game. During the sections I played, climbing was never part of a combat situation but only found during those lulls between combat. The walls you can climb are limited to those clearly marked, free-range climbing à la Breath of the Wild this ain’t. You need to press a button when close enough to the wall to grab on, but I found this needlessly picky. When you often need to combine a double jump, dash and wall grab to survive and the wall grab just doesn’t work because you weren’t exactly in the sweet spot… it gets a little grating. This may well be changed by final release, but placed a singular dampener on an otherwise thrilling early demo.

I suppose the most telling part of the whole demo experience was the fact that as soon as I finished it, I realised I had some time left and jumped right back in to start the whole thing again. Throughout the demo I found myself recalling the skills and techniques I’d honed in Doom 2016 and had just begun to combine them with the new options in Eternal. The game had its teeth in me. I wanted nothing more than to keep playing and improve on how I played the first time. I don’t yet know when Doom Eternal will be coming out, and have my reservations about the platforming exploration sections but damn, this taste of Doom left me wanting more.

The post DOOM Eternal Hands-On Preview – Hell Has Never Felt So Good appeared first on Press Start.

Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight and Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight combine the Persona soundtracks and the rhythm game genre – two things I absolutely adore. I loved Persona 4: Dancing All Night to pieces, so you might imagine that new Persona dancing games should be an easy home run for me. Truth be told, I enjoyed both the new dancing centric Persona spin-offs, but couldn’t shake the feeling that both felt a bit barebones in terms of content around their core soundtracks.

Each game tasks you with progressing through 25 musical tracks either from their games’ original soundtrack or remixes based on that soundtrack in order to unlock more songs, new character customisations and short story sequences. The core rhythm gameplay is simple but can be immensely challenging depending on the difficulty you choose. You need to pay attention to icons appearing in the centre of the screen as they travel to a ring on the outer edge – and tap buttons when they cross that ring in time with the backing track. This is complicated slightly with some icons that require you to tap two buttons at once, rings that require a flick of the analog stick and a few other things to keep you on your toes. Hitting notes successfully will build your hype meter, which needs to be full at the end of a track to clear it – and of course you can aim for higher ratings by hitting more notes successfully and maintaining a combo by never missing.

In Persona 4’s dancing game, you progressed through a Story mode which while not incredibly deep, still lended some gravitas to your progression through the game’s tracklist while giving the existing cast a chance to interact with a new character and her story arc. These new Persona dancing games don’t attempt anything like this, instead replacing the story mode with a thin veneer of plot (the introduction makes it clear the entire thing is a dream, and will be forgotten when the characters wake up) and telling this threadbare narrative through ‘Social’ events. These are unlocked by meeting certain requirements in general gameplay (things like a certain number of BRILLIANT ratings in songs or using a variety of different visual customisation options on your characters) and present you with short character dialogue sequences not dissimilar to Social Link or Confidant scenes in mainline Persona games – except that they don’t really have any sort of interesting narrative arc. I found myself wanting to just skip through text after a while because it felt like utter fluff – and I never do that in Persona games. These scenes mostly serve as progress gates through which lie unlockable customisations. Without any sort of story climax to go with your progression through the games’ soundtracks, you lose some impact the songs and dances might have had. In P4D, the final song’s dance felt important – a culmination of the story involving the entire cast. P3 and 5 have a similar dance sequence in their soundtracks, but they lack any weight without a storyline to lead into them.

That’s not to say these games aren’t great fun, however. If the Persona soundtracks bring you as much joy as they do for me, there’s still some good times to be had in tapping along to these songs and overcoming increasingly challenging tracks as you progress through the track list and its various difficulties. Easy isn’t mind numbingly so and would be a reasonable place for someone to start if they didn’t have much experience with rhythm games. Normal for me brought an occasional challenging sequence, but was mostly a cruisy way to play through the tracks. Things ramp up quite a bit in Hard, you’ll probably need to practise to wrangle your fingers around the note patterns in some tracks. There’s also All Night difficulty which is unlocked later in the game which shakes up some of your expectations in a way that boosts challenge considerably. I found it a bit too much, but it’s there if you find Hard isn’t quite hard enough.

While I lament the loss of a standalone story to pull it all together, I can’t deny that Atlus packed these games to the brim with content. Alongside the 25 music tracks per game you gradually unlock a huge amount of supplemental stuff that can either change the way you play or just let you have some fun customising the look of the dancers. Support and Challenge modifiers can do things like automatically hitting scratch rings so you can focus on the main notes, stop a Good rated note from breaking a combo or obscure notes to give you less time to plan or react. Character customisations come in the form of cool, goofy or more fanservice-y costumes, along with various accessories that can be added to characters. There’s a lot here to unlock and play around with if you’re enjoying the soundtrack enough to be playing through anyway.

Your enjoyment of each games’ soundtrack really will be the biggest determining factor as to whether you’ll get much out of either of these games. The Persona dancing games are pure fanservice – something for people who loved the musical styling of the Persona RPGs and would love to spend more time with this music in a different gameplay style – I just wish the package as a whole felt more cohesive.

THE PS4 VERSION OF THIS GAME WAS PLAYED FOR THE PURPOSE OF THIS REVIEW. A DIGITAL REVIEW CODE WAS PROVIDED BY THE PUBLISHER.

The post Persona 5 Dancing in Starlight & Persona 3 Dancing in Moonlight Review appeared first on Press Start.

The Digimon franchise never hit the same heights of popularity as its monster collecting contemporaries, but has succeeded in consistently maintaining its own offbeat brand. While Pokemon plays things fairly safe, Digimon games have been a bit more experimental with gameplay and story. When I played Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth a few years ago I found it’s systems to be somewhat opaque and the gameplay repetitive, but I could see the appeal for Digimon fans in collecting and exploring the Digital World. While a great deal of Hacker’s Memory is similar or straight up recycled from the original Cyber Sleuth, this time around I found the story and overall experience to be much more compelling.

It’s best not to think of Hacker’s Memory as a sequel – that might be setting expectations too high. It’s more of a side story – Cyber Sleuth Gaiden, if you will. Taking place alongside the story of Cyber Sleuth, we follow protagonist Keisuke through a story weaving between the real and digital worlds. He’s fairly unassuming as far as player characters go, taking a back seat as the story unfolds around his accompanying cast. This story is told piece by piece as you complete tasks from an online job board. As essentially an internet handyman, you’ll be fighting rival hacker groups, hacking servers to help a client win competitions, and along the way small pieces of story are unveiled. Erika, a character you encounter early in the piece, is central to the game’s plot. She’s reserved, rarely leaves the confines of her small, computer-filled room, and suffers from a rare condition which is kept manageable by uploading and storing her memory in digital form. This idea is used to explore some unexpectedly interesting themes around our real-world and online personas.The ‘Digital World’, or EDEN in the game’s parlance, is a physical representation of the cyber world. People log into this world and physically inhabit the space through advanced VR-style technology. EDEN is inhabited by digital monsters. People understand them simply as computer programs and tools to be used by hackers for their own ends, though this understanding will be questioned as the story progresses. For gameplay purposes though, Digimon are important to the appeal of Hacker’s Memory. When you encounter a Digimon enough in EDEN, you can synthesize your own copy of that monster to train and have fight alongside you.

Collecting and fighting Digimon in Hacker’s Memory will appeal to different people for different reasons. Fights are fairly typical for a Japanese style RPG. – two teams of monsters enter and perform actions back and forth until only one team remians. Domination Battles are a new addition to the series, and involve a light strategy game of capturing and holding map tiles, and defending them in regular Digimon battles. In these regular battles you can directly control each move, however I found the inclusion of an Auto Battle option helped me enjoy the game in a way I didn’t expect. Rather than agonising over each move, or selecting the same sequence of repeatedly once I’d found a working strategy, I tackled battles from a higher level perspective. By building a team appropriate for the challenges ahead, I took joy in watching my team fight on their own. This was useful in most battles, as many of the standard encounters are mind-numbingly easy to deal with, so it was nice to do away with the tedium of actively choosing the same basic moves to deal with basic, grindy encounters. Bosses sometimes took some more thought and care in team composition, but were satisfying to topple with a well crafted team and occasionally my direct control where nuance was necessary.

Basic, grindy battles serve an important function – they’re key to building stats of your Digimon, specifically their Camaraderie stat, which increases with each successful battle. You’ll need to be cognisant of these stats to Digivolve your monsters into more powerful forms, and so in this way it is nice to have an easy way to grind for these stats. It’s unfortunate that the environments you’ll be traversing between these battles are plain uninteresting and random encounters with basic enemies while you’re just trying to walk somewhere to complete a quest can make simple travel through these boring computer worlds feel much more tedious than need be.In the end I just played these sections essentially on auto-pilot, turning on Auto-Battle each time an encounter appeared and just inattentively moving around the world until I got to my destination. It seems like a bit of a cop-out to just say that the game got more enjoyable when I paid less attention, but after a while I did grow to appreciate the way it can be played without full attention. I found it to be an almost calming experience – something you can play to relax and ease your mind (until story events or more difficult encounters demand your attention, of course).

Whether that style of play appeals to you or not will largely dictate whether you’ll enjoy the game as a whole. There is a neat story to be told in this world, despite the world being mostly recycled from the last game, however if you don’t find joy in the grinding and collecting elements you’ll probably find yourself too frustrated with the pace and general gameplay to bother. The game also expects that you’ve played the first Cyber Sleuth – you won’t be completely lost without knowledge of the prior game – but it does throw around references and past characters wildly, so some familiarity helps. There are also some issues worth mentioning with the localisation. One notable concern is that other male characters seem to talk to Erika condescendingly, calling her ‘the little lady’ as though she’s not right there, which seems to cheapen her importance as a character. I was helpfully advised that in the Japanese version of the game the title that characters use to refer to Erika implies respect and endearment, so it seems the way characters originally interacted with Erika has been somewhat lost in translation.

THE PS4 VERSION OF THIS GAME WAS PLAYED FOR THE PURPOSE OF THIS REVIEW. A DIGITAL CODE WAS PROVIDED BY THE PUBLISHER.

The post Digimon: Cyber Sleuth Hacker’s Memory Review – More Of The Same appeared first on Press Start.

I don’t know about you, but I had lost hope. There hasn’t been a great, explorative Metroid game in a little over a decade. When Other M came along, I had honestly thought that Sakamoto had forgotten the elements that made Metroid great and after that game’s icy reception I suspected maybe the franchise was done for good. I’m happy to report that rumours of Metroid’s demise were greatly exaggerated – Metroid: Samus Returns (M:SR) is a stellar return for the series.

Samus Returns is a remake of Metroid 2, a game for the original GameBoy which while being revelatory in its time is difficult to play these days. I’ve tried on more than one occasion to exterminate the Metroids on their home planet of SR388 but given up due to a lack of maps and the claustrophobic feeling from the GameBoy’s tiny screen. Of all the past Metroid games, Metroid 2 was the one most in need of a modern, accessible remake and that’s exactly what MercurySteam have provided.

Samus Returns takes the underlying structure of Metroid 2 and takes liberties with the map layout and combat to modernise the game for 2017 audiences. Teleporters have been added sparingly around the different map areas, but they don’t cheapen the exploration as I suspected they might – rather they just act to prevent you needing to retread old ground any more than you really want to. Speaking of the map – there is one in Samus Returns and it makes a huge difference to playability compared to the original. You can place markers on the map screen too. Anyone who has played a Metroid before will know the feeling of finding an upgrade that is just out of reach, that you have every intention of coming back to but by the time you have the ability to get there you’ve just forgotten about it. Markers help greatly here, making it ever so slightly easier to go for that perfect run.

Exploring the map and finding collectable upgrades is a huge part of the Metroid series’ appeal and forms an important part of M:SR’s gameplay too. Like with the teleporters, concession has been made to help with uncovering secret paths through the scanning Aeion ability. This ability uses Aeion power, a newly added resource gained by defeating enemies and allows you to scan large portions of the map around Samus. Doing so will uncover layouts on the map screen, much like finding a map terminal in other Metroid games, along with a visual and aural indicator if there is a secret path nearby. This doesn’t diminish the puzzle elements of M:SR’s gameplay at all in my mind. Finding invisible paths is only the start of a puzzle – it’s as satisfying as ever to use your understanding of Samus’ abilities and movement to actually reach the items.

The second major element of any Metroid game alongside exploration is the action, and Samus Returns adds some abilities here that change the way you approach combat. Most hostile creatures in the game will charge at Samus when close enough, often too fast for you to deal with them with your beam weapons. For these situations, M:SR introduces a melee counter attack. Requiring some modicum of timing (the window is pretty wide for most enemies, to be fair) you can whack’em back to stun the attacking creature and immediately counterattack. This skill is an essential one to learn as many creatures you’ll encounter are armoured and near invulnerable unless you counterattack them and to uncover a weak spot.

I was in two minds about this change to begin with. It is jarring, going from past Metroid games where you rely on movement and projectiles and replacing this with a stop/start combat where you really need to wait, lure enemies in and counter to be successful. Enemy attack patterns and layouts have been well designed around this ability, but I am pretty ambivalent on it overall. It’s not something I’d want added as a standard feature in Metroid games from here on out, but it works well enough here that it helps make combat feel distinct from other games in the series. It does feel pretty great to nail the occasional string of quick counters to be sure. Boss encounters are a combat highlight, some demanding precise control and other some elements of puzzle solving too – some of the later bosses are quite difficult but greatly satisfying to conquer.

It’s certainly nice that while you’re exploring and fighting across the planet SR388, the environments you’re running through look really spectacular. The background behind the play area is always alive with movement of local creatures, natural rivers or lava flow. It’s not so prominent as to be distracting but adds dimension to the environments, making them feel like natural habitats as well as carefully constructed game levels. Samus herself is great too, with her iconic suits rendered in great detail. MercurySteam seem to have pushed the 3DS about as far as it could to produce an impressive presentation for the platform. Bucking a trend of late, the game can be played in stereoscopic 3D as well. I personally didn’t use this all that often but the times I did performance did not seem adversely affected. The music is similarly great, though I feel it was overly familiar. Too much of M:SR’s music seemed pulled straight from Metroid Prime. Prime’s music is still as great as it ever was, but would have appreciated unique arrangements of familiar themes rather than the same music I’ve heard countless times before.

I didn’t know what to make of Metroid: Samus Returns on it’s announcement. Metroid 2 is the game in it’s series in most dire need of modernisation but after some past missteps in trying to build a Metroidvania style game I wasn’t not entirely confident that MercurySteam could do the series justice. After playing the game though, my worries quickly faded. The melee counter will be divisive, but boss fights are immensely enjoyable to overcome. Exploration and puzzles are a joy and overall the game scratched that Metroid itch that’s been sitting around for far too long.

The post Metroid: Samus Returns Review – An Outstanding Reinvention appeared first on Press Start.

Most of my Final Fantasy experiences come from the so-called golden age of Final Fantasy, the PlayStation era – so Final Fantasy XII is a bizarre left turn compared to what I’m used to from the series. Gone are the traditional turn-based battles and the characters defined by their own personal melodrama – in their place, a character programming combat system and a story concerned with the rise and fall of empires. I never played Final Fantasy XII during its time, and so knew only of its reputation as being a bizarre black sheep of the series. The Zodiac Age was a chance for me to experience the game for the first time with the expectations of a player in 2017. It turns out I’d really missed out on something special until now.

To me, the defining aspect of Final Fantasy XII is it’s combat system. It is completely unlike any Final Fantasy title before it, and while different to what would come later it hints at some of the series’ future direction. Final Fantasy had flirted with the idea of making turn-based combat more ‘active’, specifically through the various iterations of the Active Time Battle system – XII takes this active combat concept and combines it with more MMORPG-style encounter design. Rather than randomly entering battles while in combat areas, enemies you encounter share the field with you. There is no separate battle screen and you are free to navigate and avoid counters at your leisure.

The MMORPG comparisons go deeper still when you look at how combat actually plays out. You can still give each character individual commands, but juggling a team of three or four characters in close to real-time is a near impossibility. This is where Gambits come into play, allowing you to utilise a series of if/then logical instructions to dictate how your characters will approach situations. As an example, I might choose to have a character use healing magic if a party member’s health falls below 40%, always attack the enemy targeted by the party leader, or use elemental magic when a nearby enemy is weak to a particular element. You can also assign importance to each command, so you can make a character prioritise healing over combat magic as an example.This change of combat style has huge ramifications on how you approach situations. Rather than primarily reacting to an enemy encounter, you’re pre-emptively trying to engineer the best set of Gambits for your three (or occasionally four) character party to deal with any upcoming situation. As encounters become more difficult and varied throughout the game you’ll need to re-evaluate your Gambit choices in light of new abilities and changing opponents. I found this idea of designing a combat recipe for success super engaging, and found myself examining the general strategies I used in turn-based games and mapping those to Gambits. Having characters play out your meticulously planned set of instructions is immensely satisfying. In a way, you’re becoming a junior AI programmer and watching your creations succeed or fail based on your design.

Improvements over the game’s original incarnation help make this process of designing and testing your character creations less tedious. The Zodiac Age adds an auto-save feature that saves your progress at the beginning of every new zone, meaning that if you do manage to let your entire party be wiped out you won’t lose a great deal of progress. Not constantly stressing about when you last saved makes for a far more enjoyable game. Another particularly useful quality of life improvement is the speed option, which I found helpful when pursuing hunts in previously explored areas. When you’re confident you’ve seen most everything an area has to offer and can reliably defeat the local foes, 2X speed makes the journey back across familiar areas feel like a more efficient use of time. It’s quite well implemented and doesn’t affect menu navigation or cut scenes, only the actions you want to be at ludicrous speed. Personally, I found the 4X speed option a bit too fast to handle, but it’s there if that’s your jam. A toggleable map overlay on the main game screen is useful too – while it makes the game screen look a bit busy, it can save a lot of the annoyance of having to pause and check the map screen to get your bearings when navigating a dungeon.

The ‘Job System’ in FFXII is based on the International Zodiac Job System, previously exclusive to a Japan release. In this new system each character can be assigned a job from the twelve available. There are no restrictions as to which characters can be assigned which job, but once assigned that choice is locked and cannot be changed. Later in the game, each character can be assigned a second job, which allows you to potentially complement their first to cover weaknesses or double down on strengths. I found the freedom of this system a little overwhelming at first. I’m used to characters having a defined role, and I found myself constantly anxious that I might not be choosing the best job for the character or even the best complementary job for each once that option became available. I’m sure there are proven best combinations that have been found, but once I overcame the anxiety of not knowing the ‘best’ jobs, I found the freedom of the system didn’t let me really make any ‘wrong’ choices. I gave each new character a job that sounded interesting, and when assigning second jobs I thought about what would match well with the first and just ran with it. On reflection, I was worried over nothing as an intimidated first-timer – the freedom of character building will likely lead to some fun experimental combos for seasoned veterans.It’s worth noting the improvements to The Zodiac Age’s presentation as well. Speaking as a new player I found the remastered musical score suited the game well, and there is an option to toggle between this and the original score based on your preference. The visuals look about as nice as a PlayStation 2 game can look on modern hardware, with improvements to textures ensuring the game doesn’t look too outdated in 1080p or 1440p resolutions (depending on your console). Nobody’s going to be fooled into thinking Final Fantasy XII is a game from 2017, but it’s a sight much more appropriate for today’s screens than the original PS2 game.

I’ve neglected to mention the story so far, but I feel like its importance paled next to the interesting mechanics here. Characters are generally interesting, playing off each other well, but they’re mostly along for the ride – taking a back seat in a narrative of warring empires. It’s different to the character-driven narratives of most Final Fantasy games, but still enjoyable at this grand scale.

The post Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age Review – Still Holds Up appeared first on Press Start.

The Surge might feel familiar to players of games like Dark Souls, but it has enough differences that you can’t expect success by simply copying your strategies over from those games. If this is your first hardcore action RPG you might even feel overwhelmed with the relentless attacks of the game’s enemies.

We’ve put together a few tips after playing through The Surge, the kinds of tips we’d have liked on our first time through. Hopefully they make your journey a little bit smoother.

Remember to craft and upgrade gear

Targeting specific body parts during combat is essential for success in The Surge. It’s tempting to always attack unarmoured areas since they finish fights quickly, but relying too much on this (as I did for a while) will haunt you later on.

Especially when first exploring an area with new classes of enemies, you really want to attack their armour and perform finishing moves. This is the only way to get schematics for new armour pieces and weapons, and also the best way to get specific materials needed to craft and upgrade this gear.

Make sure you explore

Exploring your environment thoroughly is hugely important in The Surge. Aside from finding the path to progressing you can find new characters to interact with and super useful shortcuts.

It’s worth talking with characters and helping with their concerns. They often have their own stories happening alongside your own progress that you can follow along – and there are a few trophies attached as well.

Finding shortcuts is immensely useful. Shortcuts back to Operations can allow you to skip huge portions of an area each time you die, saving you the hassle of dealing with the same set of enemies again and making runs to difficult bosses more manageable.

Bait enemies out for one on one fights

Jumping into the middle of a group of enemies is one of the fastest ways to become overwhelmed and utterly destroyed. You’re way better off pulling individuals away from their groups and dealing with them 1v1 style.

The easiest way to do this is with the drone you acquire a short way into the game. This drone can fire a weak shot at a target, but even this weak shot should be enough to get that single enemy’s attention and make them run to you for a fight.

Learn to dodge effectively

To be successful in The Surge you need to learn how to avoid enemy assaults as well as you dish them back. You have the option to jump to avoid low attacks (L1 + Right Stick up), duck to avoid high ones (L1 + Right Stick down) or just dodge out of the way with a quick step (X button while moving).

To be successful with jumps and ducks you really need to be able to read enemy movements, and that’s pretty difficult. Muck up and you get hit. I found dodging attacks with a quick step the most reliable way to avoid attacks. You can mix up your dodges with attacks too which becomes essential later on to quickly deal damage and get out of the way.

The post Tips For Playing The Surge appeared first on Press Start.

Set in a dystopian tr-future, The Surge is an action RPG that demands as much skill and persistence as you can muster. Focusing on merciless close quarters melee combat, you’ll need to explore an industrial complex and overcome tough foes to uncover the truth.

The Surge comes to us from Deck13 Interactive, the same people behind 2014’s Lords of the Fallen. Our character finds himself in the middle of a grim speculative future arriving for his first day at work with CREO – a technology company promising a solution to the problems caused by global warming. Upon arriving you are fitted with a standard issue exo-suit, which augments human strength and endurance, and also serves as the base for character progression in The Surge.

Combat is where hardcore action RPGs live or die, and The Surge differs enough from its contemporaries in the genre to stand out. You can lock your focus onto enemies, letting you move relative to their position for easier dodging and positioning. As well as targeting enemies generally, you can choose to target specific body parts – this becomes hugely important as you progress through the game. Enemies are generally wearing similar exo-suits to yours, along with armour, and you can choose to strike unarmoured body parts to do more damage. While this seems like the obvious best choice, it’s not quite so simple

Building up your suit with upgrades forms the central means of improving your character’s resilience and strength. When enemies are defeated you will gather Tech Scrap, which essentially acts as experience points. These can be used to improve your character and gear. If you die, you drop any Tech Scrap you were holding and are given one chance to recover it by returning to your place of death. The Surge adds more stress by giving you a limited time to reclaim your scrap – if the timer expires, all that scrap is lost for good.

During combat you build up energy, and at a certain point you are able to execute a particularly squelchy-sounding finishing move, executing the enemy and relieving them of whichever body part that you had targeted. I mentioned earlier that attacking unarmoured parts does more damage, but if you do this exclusively you’ll miss the opportunity to gather schematics and scrap that can be used to upgrade your own equipment. Having the choice between an easier kill or greater rewards gives you more to consider during combat, and the freedom to adapt your play style to your mood and patience at that moment. It’s a neat twist on what otherwise might have been a fairly derivative combat formula.

You’ll face these enemies as you explore the industrial complex of CREO, which forms the second main gameplay hook. Near the beginning of each major area you will find an Operations Room, which houses the Med Bay and tools for upgrading and crafting gear. This is where you will return if you die, ready to take on the area anew. There are no other checkpoints to find while exploring  – if you die, you’ll start from this room every time. However if you explore thoroughly (which can be a challenge when you weigh up the risks of finding a difficult foe potentially around any corner) you will often find shortcuts back to the Operations room. These act almost like checkpoints, letting you quickly return to an area without fighting through the entire path you took to get there in the first place.

Exploration is one area where The Surge faltered for me. The science fiction futuristic setting held the promise of interesting and varied locales, but for most of The Surge you’ll be fighting through repetitious and dull factories and buildings. There are moments of respite where you get to see the sun or more visually interesting areas, but otherwise you’re trudging through grey rooms and corridors. The world is laid out in a way that does make exploration rewarding, especially when you find a short cut after suffering through a particularly arduous series of combat encounters, but it lacks anything memorable to help areas resonate in your mind. Enemy variety is lacking also, with enemies consisting of variations on the ‘man in an exo-suit’ along with occasional robotic guards. Bosses are a highlight (aside from one in particular later in the game), but they are few and far between. Some variety arrives a little later in the game by way of new enemies and a new twist on the industrial locations admittedly, but you’ll be pushing through a lot of samey robo-men and factories before that happens. It makes sense given that your gear progression relies on salvaging parts from other exo-suits, but prevents any particular encounter or locale feeling different from the last.

This lack of variety in environments and enemy encounters sadly came to define my experience with The Surge. A science-fiction setting holds so many possibilities for environments and enemy variety, but The Surge falls back on minor variations on similar themes throughout the game. Combat is mechanically sound – while the enemies you fight won’t be particularly interesting, the choices you need to make about targeting, battle style, and taking up risky opportunities for gear advancement keep the combat engaging in the moment.

CONCLUSION

Though it might not be particularly remarkable or memorable as a whole, the science fiction future setting is a nice departure from the dark fantasy that pervades hardcore action RPGs, and there are some new ideas in combat and advancement that differentiate The Surge from its peers.

The PS4 version of this game was played for the purpose of this review. You can read our review policy HERE.

The post The Surge Review – A Gory Sci-Fi Challenge appeared first on Press Start.

Everybody knows Tetris, right? It became a mainstream hit on the GameBoy back in 1989 and it’s addictive puzzle gameplay has been a mainstay in games and culture ever since. Puyo Puyo on the other hand is not quite as well known. You may have played it unknowingly back in the 16-bit era thanks to games like Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine or Kirby’s Ghost Trap, which were essentially Puyo Puyo games with more familiar characters. Puyo Puyo Tetris is, as the name suggests, a crossover of the two games – it first appeared in Japan in 2014, but this latest Switch (and PS4) release is the first time the game has been released in Australia.

Upon first launching Puyo Puyo Tetris you’re met with a main menu giving you the option to immediately jump into a game of either Puyo Puyo, Tetris, or Fusion. Tetris tasks you with arranging falling blocks (known as Tetrominos) in different patterns to create a complete line across the game board, clearing the blocks in that line away. Similarly, Puyo Puyo has you arranging falling blocks (the Puyos), but this time their colour is important. Matching 4 Puyos of the same colour will make them pop, and surrounding Puyos will fall to take their place. Both games generally end when a player’s board is overwhelmed.Besides the standard games, Puyo Puyo Tetris offers a variety of alternate modes to mix things up. Versus is your standard game mode, but offers joint play with other players or CPUs. When you clear lines or Puyos you can send garbage blocks to other players hoping to mess up their combos or just overwhelm their game board – the last person standing is the victor. Fusion is an interesting mode, where in essence you’re playing Tetris and Puyo Puyo at the same time. You can clear Tetrominos by making lines with them and clear Puyos by matching four together – but they share the field in a way that takes some time to get used to.

Big Bang mode gives players preset patterns of Tetrominos or Puyos that can be quickly cleared in a combo, and has you racing against your opponent to clear them the fastest. Party mode is similar to standard Versus, but with items on the field that can be used as a nuisance to your opponents – things like obscuring their vision, forced quick drop, and restricting rotation for a short time make this game mode particularly chaotic.Finally, Swap, which is one of my favourite modes. At the start of a round you’ll randomly be playing either Tetris or Puyo Puyo and the game type swaps out at set times during play. I had heaps of tense moments where I just struggled to hang on while playing Puyo Puyo but then managed to defeat my opponent with a big Tetris combo when the game switched over. It’s a great way to expose yourself to a new game type while keeping the one you’re familiar with as a safety net if things get hairy.

All of these game modes can be played online as well, and the online play was flawless in my experience. It’s easy to set up a private or public room based on your preferences of game type and connection quality filter, and super simple to join rooms your friends have made. There is a ranked Puzzle League mode as well where you compete with players and your match results affect your ranking score. Playing against opponents from the same country or internationally exhibited zero issues and felt no different to local play, so online should be a fun way to keep finding opponents when you don’t have anyone nearby to play against.There’s also an Adventure mode – a single player story of sorts. While it might seem bizarre to Tetris players to even consider a story mode, it is a regular feature of the Puyo Puyo series. Characters from Puyo Puyo find curious blocks falling into their world, get mysteriously teleported into space and meet some people named after Tetris blocks, and things progress from there. There’s not really any extra kinds of gameplay offered by the Adventure mode, it’s really just a series of standard versus and challenge sections strung together by cute, voiced story scenes – but they’re a neat way of working through a campaign if you’re playing alone and serve as a reasonably good introduction if you’re not familiar with one of the game styles.

These cute stylings might be a point of contention for prospective players, and I think it’s a point worth raising. Personally, I have no issue whatsoever with the cute Saturday morning anime characters and voice overs, but I can easily imagine them coming off a bit saccharine for some. The characters appear across virtually every game mode, so if any of the screenshots have looked a little sickly sweet for your tastes, it’s worth knowing this before going in.

CONCLUSION

Puyo Puyo Tetris is the best way I’ve found to enjoy either style of block falling puzzle game. It brings together fans of both Puyo Puyo and Tetris, letting them play the way to their preference whilst still competing on a fair playing field. With the variety of game types and variations, a consistent online experience, and flexible multiplayer options, Puyo Puyo Tetris is a fantastic way for fans and new players alike to enjoy some quality block or blob clearing action.

The Nintendo Switch version of this game was played for the purpose of this review. You can read our review policy HERE.

The post Puyo Puyo Tetris Review – A Perfect Blend appeared first on Press Start.

The beginning of 2017 has been defined by redefinitions. Franchises and systems that have languished from a lack of direction have been stripped back to their roots, condensed to their basic elements, and rebuilt anew – learning from everything that has unfolded since their inception.

The first example we saw of this reinvention was Resident Evil 7. It’s no secret that the series has been struggling to maintain relevance outside of its ever dwindling fan base. After Resident Evil 4 brought the franchise back from impending doom, it seemed that with each new series entry the core essence of Resident Evil became more and more diluted. It got to the point where a game like Revelations prompted comments like “It’s actually scary!”, since this was the exception rather than the rule. Capcom eventually came to realise that this wasn’t what the fans wanted, and sought to recapture the identity the series had lost – they absolutely nailed it with Resident Evil 7.

I was genuinely concerned for Resident Evil 7 when it was first unveiled. The first-person horror genre had drifted from being an interesting emerging subgenre to one that was flooded with jumpscare rollercoasters and “me too” imitators of Amnesia. A cynical RE fan could be forgiven for suspecting that Capcom would take the easy route and follow the crowd. Thankfully they didn’t, and in doing so succeeded in bringing Resident Evil to a new perspective that retained what fans had long been yearning for, whilst simultaneously shedding the convoluted storyline that had acted as a barrier to potential newcomers from jumping in.

2017’s next big reinvention came in the form of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. While Resident Evil weathered criticism for changing its formula too much, The Legend of Zelda was harboring it’s own flak for its formula becoming stale. Aside from some occasional curve balls the Zelda franchise was somewhat rightly accused of rehashing the same formula established by A Link to the Past in 1991, whilst also chipping away at player agency with each new entry. Ocarina of Time had a helpful assistant fairy, Navi, who offered some direction at important junctions and advice when you needed it. With each new instalment the assistant characters became more overbearing, until we reached the universally reviled Fi of Skyward Sword – an assistant more interested in tediously calculating your success percentage than in genuinely helping you progress.

It took a while, but eventually Nintendo came to realise that Zelda had strayed too far from its explorative roots – strapping players into an exciting but restrictive rollercoaster, far from the original game inspired by childhood exploration of gardens and forests. Breath of the Wild brings back this essential exploration element and sheds itself of any mechanic that previously stood in the way of discovery. Like Resident Evil, it was easy to cynically expect Zelda to follow it’s contemporaries, though any concerns that Zelda might feel like ‘Ubisoft in Hyrule’ were quelled when we finally got our hands on the game.

You weren’t mindlessly following a screen full of objective markers or checking off a list of objectives like you might in a Far Cry game, nor were you following the same ‘three dungeons – world changing event – some more dungeons’ formula that defined much of Zelda up to this point. Instead, you explored – at your own pace you climbed a tower; you saw a landmark in the distance and marked it for yourself as a point of interest; you climbed mountains just to see what you could spy. By shedding what was thought to be essential in a Zelda game, Breath of the Wild effectively recaptured the feeling of wonder and discovery that some of its fanbase feared we had forgotten.

Along with this refreshing of Zelda, Nintendo also reinvented their concept of a games console with the Switch. For most of their video game centric history Nintendo have diversified their efforts across both a home console system and a portable games platform. The portable unit was generally less powerful than the console, but often enjoyed more success than its contemporary home console. The GameBoy Advance helped Nintendo’s bottom line when the GameCube was struggling, and the same could be said about the 3DS during the recent lukewarm reception of the Wii U. Rather than splitting it’s efforts between two platforms as it always has, Nintendo decided to combine them.

It’s far too early in the lifetime of the Switch to declare this new direction a success, but the initial signs are certainly promising – the Switch is selling even faster than the phenomenal Wii did at it’s launch. The split of the past meant that Nintendo’s own development efforts were divided between these two platforms, and players needed to buy both systems to enjoy the full range of the Nintendo developed games they wanted to play. With the Switch, Nintendo has consolidated its efforts into a single platform. Once the 3DS’s limited remaining library thins out, the Switch will be where all of Nintendo’s games end up – which also means that Nintendo is betting the farm on the Switch’s success. There’s no second platform lifeboat anymore – the Switch is everything Nintendo has learned in the past and embodies its hopes for the future of games. It remains to be seen whether this grand plan will pan out, but it’s an all-or-nothing approach that certainly has me more excited about the company’s future than I have been in a long while.

We’ve had an incredible start to 2017 when it comes to games. NieR: Automata, Nioh and Horizon: Zero Dawn have wowed us with gorgeous views and intricate gameplay mechanics. Games like Overwatch have moved from strength to strength, giving us new maps and gameplay modes to keep us coming back for more. We have an entirely new system in Nintendo’s Switch, and a newfound sense of hope for the company. I think I’ll remember the start of 2017 as a time where games that had lost their way over the years managed to rekindle their essence, redefine themselves, and let players experience what made their early entries great in an entirely new way.

The post 2017: The Year Of Reinvented Gaming Franchises appeared first on Press Start.

It was back in 2006, maybe 2007. I was at a pretty big LAN party where a friend of mine passed me a copy of this game FlatOut, begging me to give it a try. I’d never heard of it, but exhausted of Unreal Tournament I decided to give it a go. It blew me away. I couldn’t work out how a game this great had gone completely under my radar until that point.

A decade later, FlatOut 4 appears on my console, bringing back hopeful memories of bright, bombastic racing, destruction derbies and goofy mini games. I’m sad to report that FlatOut 4: Total Insanity doesn’t live up the high standard of the earlier games, instead it’s a muted looking, frustrating misunderstanding of what made the originals great.

Developed by Kylotonn Games (whose previous notable works include WRC 5 and 6), FlatOut 4 is a destruction focused racing game. Your main single-player career mode gives you a series of events to complete in different vehicle classes, with more unlocking as you place in available events. It’s a good way to get to grips with most of the game modes, and there’s a fair amount of game here to get through. As you progress through the career you earn money to buy new vehicles and upgrade the ones you already own. It’s a tried and true career progression, and it makes sure you always have alternative races if you get stuck on one. There’s no storyline, and no characters to speak of aside from names of your opponents that show up on the leaderboard and your own bland jeans-wearing man character who occasionally flies through the windscreen.

Destruction is what separates FlatOut from your typical arcade racer, and for Total Insanity it is both a blessing and curse. Cars deform during races after collisions with opponents and the environment, making sure the impact of each crash is obvious at least visually on your vehicle. Crashes don’t affect car handling in any noticeable way though so a heavy collision or two generally won’t sound the death knell on your race. It is possible to damage your vehicle to the point it explodes and you automatically lose the race, but this doesn’t happen often. The cars you start with are old, rusty clunkers and boy howdy they feel like it. It’s unusually satisfying to see the vehicle jam into gear after stopping, a feeling uncommon to racing games.

Where the destructive element starts to bring down the experience is in how enemy AI seems to aggressively push you off the road at any opportunity. Opponents seem more interested in slowing you down than they do in winning themselves. Even the environment itself is intent on ruining things. It’s no fun to be pushing your way up the positions in the race, slowly but surely inching to first, only to have your car flip into the sky after hitting a train track or small rock on the road. Environmental crashes particularly feel unfair. In my experience I found myself often losing races because I flew off track hitting an obstacle I couldn’t see. With opposing racers so unforgiving already it was enough to put a huge damper on my desire to keep playing.

Speaking of the environments, FlatOut 4’s tracks capture their American desert theme quite well (at least, they seem to based on my experience of American desert environments coming entirely from films and television).  They are full of destructible terrain. Fences, building foundations, shed doors, all there just waiting for some driver help them to fulfil their ultimate purpose of becoming flying debris. As well as deserts, there are forests, stadiums and industrial areas to bound through. It is a shame though that when comparing to early games the tone of these tracks is so dull and lifeless. The contrasting blue skies and brown roads of the original give way to a grey and generally muted look here. The soundtrack is a reasonable selection of alternative rock songs whose appeal will depend on your affinity for the genre, but by default the music is quiet enough to be drowned out by engine noises. Even the best tracks are so quiet they become droning background noise.

Aside from the standard career mode races, FlatOut’s claim to fame is it’s bizarre mini-games, aptly named FlatOut mode. Launching your driver out of the windscreen during a crash was a cosmetic thing in the racing modes, but here it’s a sport. In High Jump you throw your driver at a net, aiming as high as possible. There’s a version of beer pong where you’re launching your driver out of the car, bouncing them on a table and aiming to have them land in a cup. There’s a mode almost like a version of Boom Blox, where you need to knock down a block structure with your flying driver. There are even versions of billiards, soccer and curling to be played with the unfortunate ragdoll body of your driver. It’s silly good fun, and playable with up to eight players taking turns using a single controller in Party Mode. I don’t think these games will have much staying power. There’s a heap of variety on offer, but playing each mode a few times I found myself tiring of them pretty quickly. Still, Party Mode is a fun way to while away an evening with a bunch of friends while it lasts.

CONCLUSION

I wanted to like FlatOut 4. I had such fond memories of the first game, the sequel and even after the misstep that was FlatOut 3. I was hoping the fourth entry would be a return to the ridiculous destruction racing I enjoyed both alone and with friends earlier in the series. The short-lived but exciting FlatOut modes are great fun for a minute, but between the unexciting visuals, frustratingly unpredictable collision physics and overly aggressive AI, racing in FlatOut 4 is too hostile to be fun.

The PlayStation 4 version of this game was played for the purpose of this review. You can read our review policy HERE.

The post FlatOut 4: Total Insanity Review – Short-lived Fun appeared first on Press Start.

Okay, so hear me out. I have a soft spot for the PlayStation Vita. It’s a complete disappointment in terms of sales, even Sony near abandoned the platform not long after  launch. Despite all this, the system has thrived in some very specific areas – smaller scale independent and Japanese developed games. Even with this niche carved out, it’s hard to imagine the Vita is long for this world. I believe the Nintendo Switch will inherit its torch and become a haven for Vita fans.

The Vita is absolutely full of RPGs, and Japanese-specific games in general. The RPG genre works well with the platform thanks to its portable nature which allows pick up and play with instant suspension of gameplay while being just as comfortable to lay down in bed with to play for hours on end. It’s region free as well, so if a game doesn’t get an official release in your region (which can be a particularly annoying issue in Australia and Europe), you can import a copy and play it just as easily as a game bought down the road. So many games that probably wouldn’t have warranted a full console release outside of Japan end up coming westward thanks to the Vita’s smaller development costs and the knowledge that Vita fans are very likely to enjoy Japanese games.

Independent games are prevalent on Vita as well. Many indie games with their smaller scale environments or simpler visual styles are absolutely at home on the small screen. The Vita offered something no other machine could match at the time. A high resolution screen with enough power to push the calibre of game only possible on  home consoles a generation earlier, a touch screen, along with traditional controls that held it in a different class to smartphones. These factors led to the wonderful ability to play games like Spelunk and Rogue Legacy (among *many* others) with the same control method, quality of graphics and often the same save file on both your TV and away from the TV. This comes with some problems though. Needing to buy some titles twice (once on each platform) is a bother and cloud save transfer isn’t exactly foolproof, relying on manual uploads and downloads that could easily lead to data loss if you’re not careful.

As wonderful as the Vita is, we’d be kidding ourselves if we believe it is long for this world. It’s a handheld in its sixth year of life, and it has been years since Sony has paid any real attention to it. It’s on extended life support, held up by fans happy to buy and play some very specific types of game. Sony are almost certainly not going to replace the Vita, and so that leaves developers and publishers with a decision as to which platform to target next. I feel that the Nintendo Switch will be the logical next step for previous Vita developers.

In the end, I feel that the kinds of games popular on the Vita won’t have a lot of choice but to move to the Switch. They could try their luck with PS4 only development once the Vita is gone, but that either turns out far more expensive to develop for or turns out a game that doesn’t look visually up to the PS4’s standard. They could move to the 3DS, but as much as Nintendo don’t want to say it I don’t expect that system to remain relevant long after the Switch hits stores. Switch just makes sense as the next platform for these kinds of games.

It’s not all gloom, since the Switch shares many traits with the Vita. Switch is (thank Kimishima) a region free machine, so the issue of delayed or cancelled regional releases of games won’t be an issue. It can be used in portable mode which lends it all the advantages of the Vita as far as a pick up and play nature of gaming. It has a big, high resolution screen and both touch and traditional button/directional controls so it will be just as capable with games designed for each style of control.

The Switch should perfect the cross-play concept too. When the exact same copy of a game can be played on the same system in either portable or TV-connected modes it eliminates so many of the issues that bugged me around PlayStation’s implementation of the idea. No buying twice, no save management, just buy the game and play it however you want to.

It will be sad seeing the Vita fall further into irrelevance for sure, but I genuinely believe that the future is still bright for the portable style games that defined the system after launch. Switch will pick up where Sony decides to leave the Vita, and improve on nearly everything that made the Vita great in the first place.

The post Nintendo Switch Will Be The Next PlayStation Vita In All The Best Ways appeared first on Press Start.

Dead Rising 4 is a silly Christmas game. It’s like one of those straight to video films you’d see at your local rental store right around this time of year, fun while it lasts but not really something you’ll be thinking about too much, or coming back to later on.

Though there is a short prologue featuring Frank West (now apparently a professor of journalism) and his student uncovering a conspiracy at a military base, the game proper starts back at Willamette Mall. This being the same mall where the Frank gained his fame by uncovering and documenting the first zombie outbreak, which will bring some nostalgic feelings on for long time fans.

After these nostalgic feelings wear off, you’re presented with a game full of characters that aren’t interesting and a hackneyed storyline. The basic premise, according to the developers, was to make players see parallels between the mindless consumerism of Black Friday and the mindless behaviour of zombies in a shopping mall. This would be an interesting concept if it hadn’t been done to death already in what could be called the progenitor of the modern zombie film, Dawn of the Dead. But it’s even worse that the same concept was already explored in the very first Dead Rising game.To be fair, looking beyond the grand concept there is a little more to Dead Rising 4 than a slapdash consumerism satire. The story follows Frank West as he uncovers a government conspiracy behind a new zombie outbreak.

You see some exploration of how people react in extreme circumstances, many people hide or seek leadership, some rise above to lead and others take the opportunity to exact more extreme measures. DR4 calls these people ‘Maniacs’. In earlier Dead Rising games these people were meaningful encounters. Difficult enough to stop your play through in its tracks and their motivations and actions actually seemed maniacal. I just didn’t get that same feeling in DR4.

The maniacs are just events that you can walk into, and every single encounter I found ended in a minute or two. They never had time to develop a fearsome persona and as such felt more like padding rather than an integral part of the fall of Willamette. Frank is still a standout character though. His goofy personality still shines through with funny one-liners and playing dress ups with ridiculous costumes you find in the environment, brings some nice levity to an otherwise dark atmosphere.

Moment to moment gameplay is where Dead Rising has traditionally been strongest, and Dead Rising 4 succeeds here to some degree. There are hordes of zombies to deal with, hundreds on screen at any time. You’re given a huge range of options when it comes to decimating the walking dead. Basic throwing, swinging and shooting weapons can be found all around the environment if you’re happy with vanilla zombie slaying, but the real fun comes with combo weapons.

Similar to the last few games you can find blueprints around the world and learn to combine different objects into ridiculously powerful weapons. Found a sledgehammer and a grenade? Tape them together and you have a sledgehammer which explodes on contact. A knife and some flammable liquid? Time to have some fun with a flaming sword! You’re encouraged to build up combos of hits, as when you land enough hits in a short period of time you can unleash a powerful weapon specific attack which can cut a swathe through the hordes ahead of you.As the environment expands outside of the mall you can find drivable cars as well which can be used to get around, as well as weapons in their own right. Vehicles can be combo’d too, with things like a tricycle/lawnmower combo making for a hilarious way to cut through large groups.

There are EXO Suits to find as well, big mechanical exoskeletons which allow you to wield much larger weaponry or fuse with objects you find in the environment for extra power. Things like industrial vacuums bolting onto the suit to let you wield the awesome power of cyclonic winds.

As fun as this all sounds, though (and it is fun for a while), it becomes clear quickly that there isn’t much here when you look deeper. For all the combo weapon possibilities, there’s rarely any reason to deviate beyond a few reliable standbys, when most weapons have the same ‘swing and kill lots of zombies’ or ‘shoot and explode lots of zombies’ end result. For completionists, there are many combo weapons to find, but I didn’t find much incentive to do so besides pushing the completion stats closer to 100%.

Many story events require you to enter ‘investigations’, where you use your camera to explore an area and find clues. You can see that Capcom has tried to further incorporate Frank’s journalist profession into the game mechanics, but what results is a tedious pixel hunt which breaks up gameplay. These scenes feel out of place, and the game would have been better without them. Missions regularly force you to navigate from one end of the game’s map to the other and these seemed to happen more often later in the game. It felt like they were padding the game out, and just got frustrating by the end. I encountered a bug where character dialogue just didn’t play in some cut-scenes too, which might be fixed with patches later on, but were nonetheless, was jarring when trying to pay attention to story scenes.

CONCLUSION

Above all, Dead Rising 4 feels uninspired. Most of what we have here has been seen before, from the unoriginal satire on consumerism and government zombie conspiracy story, to the combo weapons and combat in general, it’s all been done better before by previous Dead Rising titles. I’m not sure if straight to video, shallow Christmas film was what the Capcom Vancouver were aiming for here, but it’s what we’ve got. Dead Rising 4 might be fun as a once off if you just want a mindless way to grind through zombies with goofy characters, weapons, and a Christmas theme, but you’ll be disappointed if you expect any more.

The Xbox One version of this game was primarily tested for the purpose of this review.

The post Dead Rising 4 Review – Uninspired, Mindless Fun appeared first on Press Start.

In a dystopian future, your life’s direction is decided for you. No longer do humans need to worry about things like their career, every person’s aptitude for different tasks benefiting society is decided by a central computer. This computer is constantly scanning and reassessing people, determining their likelihood to benefit society, or to worsen it. As a computer, it has limited means with which to physically affect the world though, and this is where we take on a role as an inspector or enforcer. Enacting the system’s will for the betterment of society.

Set in the same universe as the popular anime series, Mandatory Happiness joins the visual novel genre, one of niche popularity alongside games like Danganronpa, Zero Escape and Phoenix Wright. Mandatory Happiness sticks much closer to the traditional visual novel formula than those aforementioned series however. There are no logic puzzles, no trials, no action elements whatsoever. Instead, Mandatory Happiness plays much more like a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ novel. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but something worth knowing before going in.Told from the point of view of an Inspector or an Enforcer, depending on which character you choose at the outset, Mandatory Happiness delves into some fairly heavy themes during even it’s initial chapters and does so in a way that doesn’t feel cheap or tokenistic. The aforementioned AI system, Sybil, will judge the people you meet, and order that they be allowed to live, be forced into mental rehabilitation if they are not yet lost, or be Eliminated if they are deemed a threat to society and beyond recovery. The morality of offloading life or death decisions to an all-knowing computer is one of the most exciting elements of Psycho Pass’s story and will be familiar to fans of the show.

The game does throw a lot of terminology at players and to a degree assumes some familiarity with the world. It’s not obtuse enough that you won’t be able to make sense of things, but for people entering this world for the first time, a detailed reference is kept in the pause menu which will clarify any topics or entities mentioned during story scenes to make sure you’re not left in the dark.After opening strongly, I was disappointed with how the game’s main story progressed. The opening chapters present some incredibly interesting moral quandaries but the central plot that is revealed a little further in is far more predictable, cliche and shallow in comparison. It’s hard to explain my reasoning without discussing the plot and ruining it for anyone, but I found the major revelations in the storyline utterly predictable and painfully signposted. It might just be because things began in such a thought-provoking manner, but the central theme of ‘mandatory happiness’ just felt sterile.

The bulk of your time will be spent reading, characters interact through sparsely animated dialogue sections and inner monologue. Occasionally during chapters you will be faced with a choice which could possibly have an effect on your story’s direction entirely, or affect how favourable another character will behave towards your character. The game doesn’t force you to make split second decisions like The Walking Dead, but the kinds of decisions you will make feel similarly morally ambiguous. The decisions can lead to an early end though so make sure to save regularly, there are no checkpoints or auto-saves.The game’s dialogue is almost entirely voice acted by the Japanese cast of the anime, which does help the game feel right at home as part of the greater Psycho Pass world. I often found that I read fast enough that I would interrupt voice lines by skipping to the next piece of dialogue. This is mildly jarring, but every character’s dialogue can be turned on or off, or have volume adjusted individually so it’s an issue easily rectified. Dialogue is accompanied by artwork of the characters speaking, but there isn’t much variety in their animations. Most characters have only a few poses and facial reactions throughout the game which really don’t do much to enforce the story they’re part of. Dramatic events can have their impact entirely lost when characters on screen barely react beyond a slight smirk. Characters fade in and out as their lines begin and end, which slows down progress of dialogue. It’s something that like the skipping dialogue you can get used to, but was a mild annoyance throughout the game.

CONCLUSION

There’s a lot of story here for those looking to delve further into the Psycho Pass world. Two characters give two different points of view from which to follow the storyline, and there are a bunch of endings and story directions that can be taken depending on the choices made along the way. I suspect Mandatory Happiness might be more appreciated by someone already immersed in the franchise, who has been eagerly awaiting more perspectives into the authoritarian dystopia of 2112, but as someone only tangentially familiar with the show I found that the story made promises of exploring the social impact of a world dictated by an all knowing computer only to instead focus on an uninspired side story. If you’re interested in the setting the Psycho Pass anime is definitely a better place to start, and for someone looking to play a visual novel style game there are many out there more enjoyable than this. Mandatory Happiness is one for the fans only.

The PlayStation Vita version of this game was primarily used for the purpose of this review. 

The post Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness Review – One For The Fans appeared first on Press Start.

The PlayStation Store is currently having a sale on a bunch of retro PlayStation games. I’ve rounded up some of the great games that you may have missed over the years. You can see the full range HERE. The sale will end on September 8th.

Max Payne (PS4/PS3) – $14.95
A revolutionary hit for the PC, Max Payne was later ported to the PlayStation 2 and that is the version we have here. Max Payne has you “shootdodging” in slow motion, Matrix-style, mowing down endless streams of gangsters. The action rarely lets up, it’s exhilarating. It might turn off players more used to modern sensibilities, but if you can put that aside Max Payne takes you for a ride through an incredible film noir story of drugs, murder, corruption and tragedy.

Mega Man Legacy Collection (PS4) – $11.95
A labour of love from lifelong Mega Man fans, Legacy Collection brings together the first six Mega Man games from the NES to current platforms for experienced players to revisit, and for new players to discover. Hugely challenging, the Mega Man series gained a reputation in it’s day for pixel perfect platforming and shooting action that still endures today. There’s a whole bunch of Mega Man to play in these six games and this is the best way to play these classics today.

Future Cop L.A.P.D. (PS3/Vita/PSP) – $4.55
This game went fairly under the radar in it’s day, but I was lucky enough to pick up a copy when it was relatively new. Piloting police vehicle “X-a Alpha” able to switch between hovercraft and bipedal mech on demand, it’s your job to clean up the streets of Los Angeles 2098, infested with crime. The entire campaign is playable single-player or co-operatively. A few rough edges in level design for sure, but it’s still totally playable today. There’s a counter-operative mode too called Precinct Assault where you protect your base, create AI controlled defences and attackers and need to fight against another player (or an AI) to escort one of your ground minions into their base. It was pretty much DotA before DotA existed, and it’s still a blast.

Klonoa: Door to Phantomile (PS3/Vita/PSP) – $4.55
In an age where the 2D platform genre was all but ignored in favour of 3D world, Klonoa pushed against the trend. Behind the kid friendly veneer hid a satisfying side-scrolling platform set in a 3D world. Novel abilities like grabbing enemies and throwing them as an attack, or throwing them down during a jump for a little extra height allow for some incredibly satisfying platforming. The soundtrack is memorable too, along with the story which deviates from it’s bright and colourful beginnings. It’s not incredibly long, not crazy challenging, but was innovative for it’s time and stands among the best side-scrolling platformers.

Mega Man Maverick Hunter X (PSP/Vita) – $4.55
Maverick Hunter X is a remake of the original Mega Man X that appeared on the Super Nintendo. The level layouts and bosses remain very similar, but the game has been given a complete visual and aural overhaul. Every piece of music has been remade and improved on (in my opinion anyway), and the environment’s bright colours look fantastic on the Vita’s screen. Challenging, especially in the later areas, Maverick Hunter X is totally worth a look.

Silent Hill (PS3/Vita/PSP) – $5.95
In the PS1 era, the horror genre in games had made a huge mark in the Resident Evil series, with it’s tense scenes and grotesque monsters. But a little later in the generation, SIlent Hill came along to spook every person who thought they’d seen all that horror games had to offer. Offering a twisted psychological take on horror where your mind conjures up images of the dangers lurking just beyond your view, you explore the town of Silent Hill in an attempt to find your missing daughter. In doing so, you explore the human psyche, and uncover dark secrets of the town. Absolutely required playing for any horror fan.

The post PlayStation Retro Sale Has Some Cheap Games You’ve Probably Never Played appeared first on Press Start.

Some of my absolute favourite multiplayer sessions have been thanks to Worms 2 and its immediate sequels Armageddon and World Party. After Worms World Party though, it felt like the Worms games had lost their direction. Moving to 3D made things needlessly complex, losing the simplicity that made Worms accessible and deceptively deep. The series returned to 2D after a few unsuccessful 3D titles but I never felt like it quite recaptured the joy of the earlier games. Worms WMD might be the closest the series has come to recapturing the essence of it’s origins.

There’s not much in the way of story in Worms WMD. It’s never been a series about establishing lore, with narrative taking a back seat to strategy and humour. The closest thing to a story you’ll find in single-player will be the Campaign missions. These are set scenarios with specific levels and teams built around a theme, often very loosely around historical conflict. If you play with friends though, there will inevitably be stories forged in the heat of combat. A perfectly aimed and strategically bounced grenade going off at the perfect time or a wonderful accident setting off an unbelievable chain reaction of chaos and destruction, there is the potential for some truly memorable moments.The visual style of Worms has necessarily changed over the decades. It begun with the worms being made of a few pixels and became much more expressive with larger character sprites in future editions. WMD’s characters and environments are entirely drawn in 2D. Worms are expressive and emotive through their movements, reactions and joyous victory dances. The worms’ voices are as enjoyable as ever too. There is a wide range of classic voices (I’m particularly attached to Angry Scot and Soul Man) along with completely new voice sets. There are a bunch of voice sets based on well-known online video personalities too that I won’t pretend to be familiar with but I’m sure will be a nice bonus to fans. Environments are varied and destructible. Landscape themes don’t change much of how the game plays but can help give the randomly generated battlegrounds some individual character.

Worms pits two or more teams of worms onto randomly generated environments, gives them a pile of weaponry and lets them take turns to shoot, explode and crush the opposing teams until only one is left standing. Explosions can destroy parts of the environment, creating hiding places or forcing worms out of cover. Your basic weapons consist of bazookas and grenades, but there is a large range of other traditional and less traditional implements of destruction. Sheep will bounce around the landscape and explode on command. The Old Lady will walk back and forth between obstacles passing gas, making worms sick and finally exploding once her time runs out. Holy Hand Grenades come to a stop, summon a chorus from the heavens and create an almighty explosion destroying huge chunks of the environment. The irreverent humour of Worms is definitely still here. You will play countless matches before seeing all the weaponry on offer and yet more before you master how to use each one.Worms WMD adds a pile of new features to the Worms formula, with varying levels of success. Crafting seems to be almost an inevitability for games this generation and Worms doesn’t escape this fate. During turns you can pick up crafting materials in crates around the landscape. Using these materials you can craft weapons during your turn as well as while your opponent is moving, and these weapons can have special properties depending on the materials used. Personally, I found this crafting to be more tedious than anything. It acted as a distraction from the flow of gameplay and seems included for the sake of keeping up with current trends rather than as something that genuinely improves the gameplay.

Other new additions include mounted weapons and vehicles which can be commandeered during your turn. Mounted weapons might be a single shot sniper, or a rapid fire machine gun and can change up a match’s dynamic and create competition to reach and use them, or to destroy them before another team can get there. Vehicles include an armoured tank, helicopter and a mech. These vehicles offer some unique firepower and movement options but also don’t feel unreasonably overpowered considering some of the more ridiculous weapons on offer.

Matches can be played online or locally with up to six players, with local games allowing every conceivable option to be tweaked to suit your preference. If you’re all in on the new crafting system and vehicles, you can control which materials and vehicles appear during the game. For people after a classic Worms experience, a Classic option is available which disables weapons and features introduced more recently for a more back-to-basics match. Custom rule sets and options can be set up and saved as a scheme for later, making it simple to create a set of house rules with friends. Local matches can be played with multiple controllers or simply by passing the controller between turns, meaning that you can have a whole bunch of people playing without investing a small fortune in controllers which is a nice bonus.

[divider]Conclusion[/divider]

Worms WMD is a whole bunch of fun. It adds some questionable new elements to the core Worms formula, but matches are so infinitely customisable that you can completely ignore them for a traditional experience if you want to. There’s not a lot of compelling content here for the lone player with the Campaign and Challenge modes really just acting as a training ground for the core multiplayer game, but if you have a few friends to play with Worms WMD is a hoot.

The PS4 version of this game was used primarily for the review 

The post Worms W.M.D Review – A Whole Bunch Of Fun appeared first on Press Start.

Hello Games revealed details of a launch day patch for the upcoming No Man’s Sky yesterday. This patch makes some massive, literally universe changing improvements to the game, completely changing the algorithm used to generate the worlds players will explore. As a result of shipping such a massive change after the game ‘went gold’ (the moment a piece of software is ready to be delivered to customers) though, much hand wringing has been had, accusing Hello Games of shipping an unfinished game.

This point of view held merit back when game platforms were disconnected, and what you got on the cartridge or disc was what you were stuck with forever, but today when a developer has the opportunity to improve their game after the discs are pressed, why are we decrying this as a negative thing?

In earlier game generations, specifically in the console arena, what came in the box was what you got. A game could have humourous glitches or showstopping bugs that were missed during play testing, and the only means to fix them would be to pull a game from shelves. All the quality assurance testing in the world will never stop every bug that can appear when a piece of software, game or otherwise, is released to the world. One of the best aspects of our current Internet connected platforms is that these bugs can be fixed.

Sometimes they can even be found and fixed in the weeks between media pressing and the actual release date. It could be argued that the minority of people who never connect their game machines to the internet will get an inferior experience, and that can be true, but I’d argue that allowing most people to get an improved experience is far better for games overall than forcing every player to be stuck with what is on the disc.

Another argument that I see around No Man’s Sky’s launch patch is that the game was ‘not finished’ at the time it went gold. To put it bluntly, thinking of any kind of software as ‘finished’ is an outdated way of thinking. Any software developer needs to think of their work as ‘ready to release’ at some point. Clearly Hello Games weren’t finished working on No Man’s Sky at the point they decided it was ready to send for distribution. Games are often pressed weeks ahead of the game’s planned release date.

My suspicion is that the developers had to take this lead time for pressing and distribution into account, and made sure that what they had ready for the disc was something that fulfilled their (and their publisher’s) vision and expectations for what the game should be. Then they took the extra time they had until actual launch day to keep working on the game. We need to stop thinking of games as ‘finished’ when the discs are pressed. The reality of games development is that you have to ship eventually, and there is only so much that a team can do with the time and resources it has.

The No Man’s Sky we get at launch is going to be a better game than the No Man’s Sky that is on the disc. We’re getting adjustments to gameplay as informed by play testing, and improvements to the recipe that will be used to generate the vast worlds to explore. Software isn’t finished the moment it is released anymore. Developers take the opportunity afforded by distribution lead times to keep making their games better even after a game has been sent for distribution. We should not be demonising creators willing to keep improving their work after an arbitrary ship date. A developer passionate enough about their game to make sure it continues evolving for the better is one we should celebrate.

The post Eventually A Game Just Has To Be Shipped appeared first on Press Start.

Ninja Pizza Girl is a game about bullying and resilience. It’s a game about freely running and jumping across a city’s rooftops. It’s also a game about delivering pizza. Built by a family development team in Australia, Ninja Pizza Girl is a self-described ‘serious game’ dealing with themes not often broached on the medium.
Our story centres around Gemma, the eponymous Ninja Pizza Girl. Working for her father’s local pizza store, she is tasked with delivering pizzas across the rooftops of her city’s slums before they get cold. Throughout the game, the people you deliver pizza to have their own story vignettes that might play out over a few levels. While their stories are only short, these characters come from a diverse range of backgrounds and all are dealing with their own concerns that Gemma is determined to help with. It’s encouraging to see such a diverse range of people represented in the game, as short as their stories may be. Gemma’s story is interspersed with these character vignettes and an overall story arc following the struggle of a small family business and competition from faceless corporations. It’s kept fairly simple, probably to avoid a complex deconstruction of capitalism from distracting from the core character themes, but it’s more than enough to keep the game flowing from level to level.
Graphically the game is kept fairly simple. Environments are not complex, graphical effects are fairly subtle, and character models are somewhat basic. While this is not out of the ordinary for independent PC games made to play on the widest variety of systems possible it looks a little out of place on the PS4. For the most part the game maintains a consistent frame rate, however there are some moments of slowdown that can be bothersome when you’re just getting into a nice flow only to be thrown off.Music changes dynamically throughout gameplay, ranging from some softer piano-infused trance to high-energy dubstep when you get right into a flow. The sound levels at points feel a little inconsistent, with stage starting sound effects sometimes feeling unreasonably loud compared to the ambient music but this is not a major issue.
Ninja Pizza Girl plays somewhat similar to a side-scrolling Mirror’s Edge. Across rooftops Gemma must run and jump to reach new ledges and platforms, or slide under obstacles. As the game goes on, new gameplay elements are introduced to add a little more complexity to proceedings with things like wall jumps, jump kicks and other teenage ninjas. Gemma can roll at the end of long jumps, and successfully avoid obstacles and enemies to keep her flow going.

Gemma’s survival isn’t tied to a health meter or similar, but rather to her own positivity. While running Gemma feels energised and the world is colourful. She isn’t really hurt by long falls and hazards, she can shake that off, but they do kill her flow. Other teenage ninjas however do all they can to overwhelm Gemma with dark thoughts, which turn her world dark until she falls to her knees. Gemma can recover from this state to push on during a level, but her state of mind carries with her across the game. Starting levels with a negative state of mind will make the levels dark and drab, and make Gemma more susceptible to the taunts of other ninjas. Luckily, to combat this you can treat Gemma to some TLC in between levels. Things like bubble bath, a nice cup of tea or a copy of Assault Android Cactus can help boost her mood and give her the best outlook on the next delivery. While mechanically the self-esteem system doesn’t differ a huge amount from the standard health systems of most games, having Gemma’s own feelings affect gameplay is a refreshing and unique take on the system which both removes the questionable concern of our character being killed by enemies and hazards, and allows for a character that could be more relatable to people going through similar struggles.

The main criticism I can give to Ninja Pizza Girl’s gameplay is that there are some levels that feel overly unfair to push through. Most levels are well designed in that you can’t really fall off entirely and fail through missing a jump, but the placement of enemies during some sections can lead to frustration. Ninjas will leap down from their hiding places on the roof, or ambush you at the end of a long fall and when a group of them keep shoving you or throwing garbage at you it can just feel unfair. These moments were the closest I came to taking a break and turning off. Maybe the game is just making me empathise with Gemma’s struggles?
Ninja Pizza Girl is probably not a game for everyone. It’s a ‘serious game’, a game whose purpose is not primarily to entertain but instead to demonstrate how crummy the world can be for a teenage girl constantly facing a world seemingly intent on putting her down. Ninja Pizza Girl can still be satisfying to play purely from a gameplay perspective.

Obtaining and maintaining a sense of flow is still satisfying across the few hours the game’s story covers, and there are incentives to keep playing like leaderboards and a dedicated speedrun mode. But mostly Ninja Pizza Girl is an effective exploration of bullying and self-esteem told through gameplay mechanics that are simple enough for a wide audience, but that can offer some challenge to platforming fans as well.

The PS4 version was primarily tested for the purpose of this review.

The post Ninja Pizza Girl Review appeared first on Press Start.

Alchemy is the art of taking materials and synthesizing them into something else. This is the story of Sophie, a fledgling alchemist who is continuing in her late grandmother’s footsteps providing alchemical services to the city of Kirchen Bell. Beginning the tale, Sophie is fairly unskilled in her art, but inspired by her admiration of her gran is determined to improve herself so that she may be helpful to the people of the city. The game begins with Sophie discovering a mysterious book (fancy that) in her atelier. Shockingly the book is able to talk, but is also suffering from a horrible case of book-amnesia. Sophie discovers that when she writes alchemy recipes into the book, it begins to recover some of it’s lost memories. We discover that the book’s name is Plachta, and Sophie decides to push forward and expand her alchemy skills so she can help Plachta regain her memories.Exploring the city as well, we encounter some important characters who can help Sophie gather materials for her alchemy or help provide services back in town. There’s plant obsessed Oskar, son of the city’s vegetable seller, the high-class and well studied fencer Monika, along with a bunch of others Sophie meets in her travels. Helping out her fellow townsfolk by using her alchemy skills is an important goal for Sophie, and motivates her as much as her desire to help Plachta regain her memories. Sophie’s story is not of massive scale magical world ending events and life-or-death twists. In contrast to most Japanese RPGs, Sophie’s story sticks close to home. It’s about getting to know the people around you,  and helping them out for nothing but the sake of being helpful.Much like with the story, Sophie eschews grand scale in favour of intricate detail on characters and their individual plights. Each new character that is introduced is beautifully presented. Their clothing, their manner, and their overall designs all combine to define characters and give them their own personality and depth. Most major cutscenes (and even some seemingly minor ones too) are fully voiced which helps further define people as characters more-so than just text on a screen.Areas outside of the city are more basic in their presentation, generally consisting of some randomly distributed gathering points and monsters, but you will find more deliberately constructed areas where their layout is integral to the plot. Even the more basic areas are still pleasant to look at though. Exploring a forest or a quiet beach can be quite relaxing purely thanks to the peaceful visual and aural ambience. It makes for a wonderfully refreshing presentation in contrast to the all-action high-stakes norm in the genre.Atelier Sophie is a relaxing game to play. You are generally pretty free to go about your business in whichever way you want to. You can choose to go out and gather materials for your alchemy, or wander around the city talking to friends and townsfolk. When exploring out of town, you select a location on a world map which takes you to a small, self-contained area with monsters to avoid or fight while you collect materials. Battles are fairly straight-forward turn-based affairs. Basic attacks and special character specific skills can do damage to opponents and help turn the direction of battle in your favour with status effects. Characters can take an offensive or defensive stance and in longer fights when a chain link meter fills up, allowing characters will to do extra attacks or perform guards after they have acted in their turn. In longer fights you can activate Special Guards or Attacks which involve multiple members of the party acting with great strength and this can be ridiculously helpful to defend against heavy attacks or take down strong creatures. Monsters appear on the map and only engage when they catch you. They can usually be avoided if you’re keeping your wits about you. You will of course need to fight occasionally for the sake of developing your party’s skills and abilities but if you just want to go and find a specific kind of leaf and have no desire for fighting that day, that is entirely possible.

Walking around and talking to people in the city will pull you into their personal stories, and give Sophie ways to use her alchemy to help them. You can take requests from the owner of the Café which could involve gathering materials, slaying specific monsters or synthesising specific items. Characters will ask Sophie to synthesise items for them as well which can progress their individual plotlines and often unlock services that these people can provide in return for Sophie’s help.Alchemy is the core of Atelier Sophie. At your atelier, you can combine different categories of materials in your alchemy cauldron, according to fairly lenient recipes. You only need to use a specific category of item in most cases, rather than needing a strict list of ingredients. The game introduces alchemy and it’s complexity very gradually, beginning with the basic combination of ingredients. You later discover that you can imbue the final product with traits derived from its ingredients. Things like stat boosts, higher selling prices and passive skills can be instilled in items which allow dedicated alchemists to fully personalise their equipment to how they want each party member to act in battle. Understanding alchemy is important to success in battle, as well as in progressing the plotlines of each character and the overall story.

The progress of gameplay and story can feel a little directionless at times if you’re used to games pushing you to meet specific quests to push forward a narrative. Atelier Sophie doesn’t tell you what to do, but instead encourages you to just go about collecting, synthesising and talking to people, allowing the story to just happen as you go about your business. You get some general advice on how to trigger the next story event, but often it is vague enough to be of little use. I found this jarring at first, but once settled in to the idea of just going about things at my own pace I realised that events just progressed along. It’s nice not feeling under pressure, letting you discover and progress without the stress of objective arrows and progress bars.

That really sums up my feelings on Atelier Sophie, it’s a Japanese-style RPG at your own pace. It’s a game about being a nice person, forming friendships and strengthening them through helping people with their personal struggles simply because it’s nice to be nice. It’s about always having somewhere comfortable to come home to after you’re done exploring.  If you’re a fan of JRPGs and won’t be put off by the slower pace and smaller scale storyline, there’s a lot to like in the story, characters and deep alchemic systems of Atelier Sophie.

The PS4 version of Atelier Sophie was primarily tested for the purpose of this review

The post Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book Review appeared first on Press Start.

Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth puts you in the shoes of Aiba, a girl (or boy, you choose) who is part of an online forum community that becomes involved with an infamous hacker group. In Cyber Sleuth’s world, people can work and socialise in a digital world called EDEN, which could be described as a massive virtual reality internet. Creatures known as Digimon have been inhabiting EDEN, and are thought to be hacking programs created by humans for nefarious purposes. As our character soon finds out though, this is not quite the whole truth. The story is chiefly told through conversational cut scenes between characters as they discover the truth behind Digimon, the nature of EDEN itself and how it relates to the human world.While the story of Cyber Sleuth eventually does become interesting, the first fifteen to twenty hours will see you tediously progressing through countless mini-stories that are, to put things bluntly, uninteresting. Characters you meet are generally shallow cardboard cutouts, adhering to overdone anime tropes, whose individual concerns seem unrelated to your more interesting main adventure. Their stories really feel like filler designed to make the game last longer but have the unfortunate side effect of delaying the actual interesting story that comes later. Even worse, a lot of these missions essentially boil down to ‘walk to a place and talk to a person, then walk back and turn in the quest’. It becomes very tedious, especially when the same locations are used over and over at times. Push past the initial tedium though and the story starts taking some super enjoyable twists and turns.

You couldn’t accuse Cyber Sleuth of being ugly by any stretch. The game features real world locations like Nakano Broadway and Shinjuku which are a joy to look at. They’re full of little details. Advertisements for in-universe anime and games, as well as showing some real world brands like Tower Records and Sega to lend the places some authenticity. The EDEN worlds are initially quite interesting too, looking all bright blue and appropriately science-fiction like. Over time though, EDEN locations begin to feel very samey. Visiting the same kind of cyberspace blue computer land with different layouts can become pretty tiresome. Some of the most interesting locations are where the real and EDEN worlds intersect. While I won’t say much more for fear of spoiling things, this allows for some intriguing looking locales which evoke an atmosphere similar to those of the TV World locations in Persona 4.The Digimon are the stars of the show here though, and each one looks beautiful. Every single monster I encountered felt like it had been carefully crafted, which is quite a feat when there are this many Digimon to deal with. Everything from the series mainstays like Agumon and Gatomon to more obscure monsters look about as good as I could imagine them looking, it’s really impressive.

The music too is worth noting. While many themes used in battles and common areas can become grating after a while, I found myself a few times sitting back and just enjoying the tunes.
Playing Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth, you will split your time between exploring the human and EDEN worlds, battling, and raising your Digimon. Battles are fairly standard fare for a Japanese RPG. They are turn based, with the order of actions displayed in a list on the right of the screen. Digimon each have elements and types that determine the effectiveness of specific kinds of attacks on other types of monster, and they learn new techniques through levelling up. Each time you encounter a type of Digimon a bar will fill, and when this reaches 100% you will be able to create a copy of that Digimon for yourself back at a DigiLab.Raising Digimon is the main hook of the game. If anything will keep you pressing on for just one more hour, it will be the joy of training, raising and Digivolution. The entire process is initially explained in a wall of text and diagrams which for me didn’t quite sink in straight away, but once you’ve got the hang of things it is super easy to sink hours and hours building your team into monstrous companions. There is a lot of grinding involved in training your Digimon which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but definitely something worth noting.

For a game that wears the importance of it’s story on it’s sleeve, Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth takes far too long meandering in relatively meaningless events before it’s story becomes interesting. The setting and concept of parallel physical and human worlds does lead to some genuinely enjoyable events later on, but it is a shame that you need to play for so many hours to get there.

That said, once you’ve managed to understand the process of Conversion, Digivolution and devolution, training your Digimon to their Ultimate forms can be incredibly rewarding. Seeing your old favourites in all their modern 3D glory is wonderful. It’s a shame that the story takes so long to become engaging, especially since the title itself places such importance on the story, but if you think you’ll enjoy training Digimon enough to persevere through the initially slow narrative there is a lot of fun to be had with Cyber Sleuth.

The post Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth Review appeared first on Press Start.

A hunter who goes drunk with blood is said to be taken by the Nightmare, destined to wander forever, engaged in an endless hunt. It is a fate that no Hunter can escape.

The Old Hunters’ story will likely resonate with Bloodborne fans who have taken the time to ponder and discuss the events and characters of the game. The expansion doesn’t offer much of an easy to follow narrative. Cut scenes and dialogue moments are few, and they are ambiguous enough that they might not mean a whole lot to the casual observer. Much like the base game though, there is a wealth to be learned about the events surrounding Yharnam by paying attention to seemingly inconsequential details and taking time to consider their implications among all the other seemingly inconsequential details. Those who keenly analysed the lore of Bloodborne will find much here to kindle their sleuthing flame. Characters mentioned in passing conversation and item descriptions make appearances, and it can be truly compelling to piece together all these seemingly disparate chunks of narrative to form and expand your own version of events.

Technically, not a great deal has changed from Bloodborne. The game still runs at a mostly consistent 30 frames per second, and manages to create beautiful scenes out of bleak gothic architecture and creepy environments. There are familiar areas, but they are only superficially so. Start exploring around the expansion’s first area, Cathedral Ward, for example and you’ll find that recognisable landmarks take on an entirely different meaning when considered in their new environmental context. Rivers run red, and new hideous inhabitants make the areas you once knew take on an uncanny vibe. Cathedral Ward offers relatively open spaces in which to manoeuvre, but later areas use cramped spaces and evidence of past goings-on to fashion a claustrophobic and unnerving tone.
Enemy design in this expansion is particularly notable. Some creatures you will face early on might feel like relatively tame reinterpretations of those you’ve faced before in the base game, but very quickly the monsters become wonderfully grotesque. The first boss of The Old Hunters is a spectacular example of the awe-inspiringly twisted creative minds at From Software. The revelatory cut scenes for each of the bosses were captivating, it’s genuinely enthralling to discover the freakishly monstrous ways these beasts look and function.

The hideousness of these creatures and the worlds they inhabit is intensified by the audio accompanying them. The sounds of crunching bones, of slimy tendrils and ear piercing shrieks give each of your adversaries their own distinct vibe and sense of ferocity. Environmental sounds also make sure that each new area you explore feels distinct from the last and begins to take on an ambience all its own.

You can access the new areas of The Old Hunters after you defeat the boss in Grand Cathedral. The method of accessing the area however is somewhat cryptic. This will come as no surprise to veterans of Dark Souls – the DLC “Artorias of the Abyss” had a similarly ambiguous series of steps required for access. In addition, while you can access The Old Hunters from a relatively early point in the game, it really feels designed to be played with characters from a later stage in the game’s progression.

The Old Hunters’ first area is the familiar Cathedral Ward, specifically the area surrounding the Grand Cathedral. There are parts that will feel familiar, but enough has changed here to give the place an entirely different feel, gameplay wise. Rather than immediately facing wretched beasts, you come face to face with intimidating hunters, and if you’re not prepared for them it’s likely that they will surprise you with just how formidable they are. They are equipped with weapons not before seen in Bloodborne, and will take some thought and strategy to overcome.

It will be a fair while before you feel comfortable in this version of Cathedral Ward. While the beasts you once might have feared now cower from your very presence, the world is instead inhabited by other hunters which has the effect of making the entire area feel foreboding. The first time you sneak up on a beast only to have it obliterated by another hunter out of nowhere, who has now set its sights on you, is exhilarating to say the least. You never quite feel safe. When you feel like you’ve gotten the hang of besting a hunter, you’ll find a new one not far off with an entirely new weapon and moveset to consider. You’re always on your guard, and the entire time is wonderfully stressful. Your experience as far as difficulty goes will differ greatly depending on your character’s level, equipment, and your own experience with the game, but I’m confident to say that there is a fair challenge here even for seasoned players.

For those a little less experienced with Bloodborne, there are some concessions available to help you push through and overcome some of the challenges. Spending some more time in the main game levelling up and getting new equipment will help, but a newly added covenant can provide some much needed assistance with the bosses in this expansion. The League is a covenant which was added to Bloodborne in patch 1.07 who are dedicated to the single purpose of helping out players through jolly co-operation. If you swear your allegiance to their cause, you will find yourself able to summon help from the covenant’s ranks to help out just before most of the expansion’s boss fights.
The best part about this is that the game’s difficulty, to a point at least, is entirely within your control. You can choose to challenge yourself to crushing enemies entirely by yourself, or enlist the help of one or two AI-controlled helpers to distract and help in your struggle against your foes. Summoning AI helpers is not new to Bloodborne or the Souls series but this covenant, centred entirely around co-operation, can definitely come in handy. It is often the difference between a glorious triumph or controller-bending frustration for many players.

The only negative that I began to notice in my time with The Old Hunters was that although, for the most part, the new enemies and bosses looked entirely fresh and unique compared to those that came before, the methods of dealing with certain bosses and enemies felt unfortunately familiar. It was definitely not enough to leave any lasting negative impression with me, but it’s worth noting that some of the challenges you face might not need as much creative new strategy to deal with as you might hope.

The Old Hunters, essentially, is more Bloodborne. There are elements which will feel familiar to players well versed in Bloodborne’s world and inhabitants, but when it’s more of something this good I am not one to complain. There is certainly enough new here to satisfy anyone who has yearned for more to do in Yharnam and its surrounds. While the price may feel steep compared to other DLC packs around right now, there is enough here to make the price of entry absolutely worthwhile. Whether you’re here for the challenge, to learn more about how Yharnam came to be the way it is or even just to admire the artistry in the game’s monster design, I feel there is something here for anyone who found themselves ensnared by the Hunter’s Dream.

The post Review: Bloodborne: The Old Hunters appeared first on Press Start.