Hard to fault Forza Horizon 5. It sticks to the formula that's brought it to where it's at and just keeps improving user friendliness.

I didn't actually play much of Horizon 4 so can't say exactly what is brand new and what isn't.

Seasons are a great idea, I know they were added in 4 but back in 3 there was only Forza Fridays (3 or 4 challenges) which could all be completed in about 30 minutes.

I love The Eliminator mode. Would have NEVER thought a Battle Royal in Forza would work but it's a lot of fun. I'd love them to add a destruction variant where damage to cars is what causes eliminations.

As always there's a fantastic selection of cars and lots of customization to be messed about with. Combined with photo mode and the stunning graphics, it's a dream for Virtual Photographers and creative players.

Mexico as a map is a great idea. I've played plenty of hours and still haven't explored a whole lot of the map but what I've seen is gorgeous.

My only issue at the moment are global leaderboards. Clearly full of hackers and cheaters. Kinda lame.

Played a 10 hour trial.

Conquest feels broken. 128 player games sounds AWESOME on paper but the map design needs to be flawless for it to work. These maps are terrible conquest maps, too big, too much empty space and they are almost all heavily balanced for Vehicles.
Future maps can fix conquest but I don't see how they make the current maps fun to play conquest on. I'm sure many disagree and find them fun though.

Breakthrough can be very fun! I haven't played many of the maps in Breakthrough but one or two of them are great to play.
The maps I've played felt mostly defender sided but other than one site which I'll touch on, most felt breakable if you work together. The skyscraper site on Orbital felt impossible to break, every entry to that site is just a death funnel. If you get lucky and have some good Aircraft players on your team then you might fair better.

Portal has great potential and is definitely the most exciting thing about the game. When some really creative people get their hands on it, expect some incredible game modes.

The game performs terribly, some people will tell you otherwise but it's garbage. People are getting 50fps and ~60% GPU usage. Servers are horrendously laggy at times. Movement animations are bugged, especially at long range, many times I just watched players just sliding across the horizon instead of running.
Performance will be fixed and people are defending such a shocking release with "It's not even released yet" but it's kind of an asshole move to make it sound like early access is a perk of pre-ordering when really those players are just guinea pigs, ironing out the shitshow for regular access players.

Destruction is barely existent, everything is an indestructible industrial fixture, it never feels like the map is evolving as the battle goes on.

There's a bunch of missing features like the universal scoreboard, so you never REALLY know how much you contributed to the team overall.
Fortifications is quite a large feature but you can't fortify anything.
The UI is sloppy.
Weapon and attachment selection is poor (Possibly the worst selection of any Battlefield?)

This turned into a big rant so I'm just gonna leave it there.
Basically, the game is pretty trash in it's current state. You can still find fun with it but if you're a Battlefield veteran you might have to drop your standards.

I WANT this game to be fun and successful though so I hope I can come back to it further down the line and have better things to say.

I was really hooked with the story and even the time loop gameplay right up until the end game loop.
By the final loop or two I had pretty much figured out the twist to the story. I just couldn't figure out what I needed to do to progress. I ended up having to google it in the end, replaying the loop OVER AND OVER trying to figure out one little thing got very tedious, even while being able to speed up repetitive dialog.

It's a great game, could have been excellent...or maybe it is excellent and I just don't have the patience to appreciate it more.

I'll go to youtube to watch the alternate endings because I have nowhere near enough patience to play the loop again and again to see numerous endings.

I've been having some great fun coming to grips with Keyboard & Mouse playing Hunt.

Bounty hunting some kickass monsters while fighting off zombies and tons of other cool creatures along the way is just a lot of fun.
You have a bunch of loadout options and perks to unlock which is a big drive to keep playing and level up.
There is 2 live maps and another about to be released, I haven't got bored yet because the maps are pretty big but I could see it getting a bit repetitive if they don't release a new map here and there.
Maybe an occasional new monster bounty would freshen things up too.

You can play Solo, Duo's or Trio's. If you opt out of Trio's you'll encounter solo players and teams of two. With up to 12 players spawing into each game, it makes every game thrilling. You could potentially spawn in with no other players but you would never know for sure. The only way of knowing how many players are left on the map are counting dead bodies and if anyone extracts with a bounty you will be alerted.
You can spend a whole game locating clues, fighting off hell hounds, zombies and hives all game without encountering another player and then get ambushed while you attempt to banish the bounty monster.
It can feel cheap but it keeps the game really exciting imo and there is nothing stopping you being the first player to locate a bounty and then setting up an ambush instead of wasting resources yourself, then swoop in when another team of hunters have done all the hard work.

When you die, you lose your character, all the perks and any equipment they had. Sounds very harsh and it can be devastating if you've built up a beefy loadout. But buying equipment and stuff is cheap so it's not the end of the world. The exchange for a harsh punishment is the ability to retire a hunter when they get to a high level for a nice stack of XP.

The soundtrack is bitchin' too.

If there was a couple of maps more and maybe 1 or 2 additional bounty monsters then I'd be inclined to give it another half star.

Reinstalled because I'm kinda excited for Infinite.

I'm mainly writing this just because I found the multiplayer completely different to what I remember from Halo 3.
Halo 3 was easily one of my favourite games to date. Especially the multiplayer. But for some reason, every game I played that was from the Halo 3 pool of games, just didn't feel like Halo 3.
The reason for that which I figured out eventually was that the games are always Team BR's. Halo 3 felt like every game of Team Slayer had some crazy variety because everyone would try to control locations for weapon spawns but because everyone spawns in with a BR, the games just turn into BR battles.

Always loved Worms games so although I disliked the look of this one, I wanted to give it a fair chance.

Customisation of the worms is really good as usual.
The game looks great.
The music is brilliant.

The gameplay just isn't my thing. It's not terrible, I'm sure loads of people have a lot of fun with it.
I just found it way too hectic and navigating the maps while trying to aim and shoot felt completely chaotic and quite frustrating.
I also found myself lost a lot and not being able to even find opposing players, that might be more to do with the fact I didn't learn the maps though.

Probably a really fun game but just not for me. I'd love if they made a new game with these visuals and classic Worms gameplay though.

I thoroughly enjoyed playing through this.

It felt like an almost perfect blend of action and survival gameplay.
Killing zombies was so much fun because of the meaty melee combat but you could soon find yourself above your head if you aren't vigilant.
Gathering resources is key to the early game.
By end game its not something you will need to worry about quite as much because you'll be a pretty solid zombie killing machine by then.

Even towards the end I wasn't completely impressed by the parkour. It was fun, especially when you get the grapple hook, but I found it a bit clunky and often inconsistent.
It actually kind of ruined what should have been an awesome section of the final mission for me.

Once I was finished with the main story I jumped right into the Hellraid mode. That was another hour or so of a more arcadey style action blast.

Looking forward to the rest of content I haven't played yet, also excited for the second game and being able to play it Co-op

I’m SO glad I didn’t give up on this and came back to finally complete it.

Possibly the best survival horror game I’ve played.
The whole thing captures everything from the movies and recreates them perfectly. It truly is a wonderland for any fan of Alien.
The sounds, atmosphere, lighting and how everything looks are just outstanding.

I’ve attempted to play the game a number of times previously and could never get over the intensity of the game and how utterly terrified it makes you from the beginning until the end. There’s only a handful of times you will feel safe and even at those times you never know if you truly are safe.
I managed to embrace those things this time and it made for one hell of an experience.

The Alien AI can feel a little unfair at times and it got me a bit frustrated once or twice but upon reflection, I actually think it makes the game far better that the Alien is so unpredictable and OP.
The Working Joe synths are questionably scarier than the Xenomorph with their expressionless faces and beady eyes.
I thought the hostile humans might have ended up being something that really bothered me about the game. Turned out it made the game really fun, I quickly figured out I could use them as bait for the Xenomorph and at one point I released an imprisoned Worker Joe that took care of some heavily armed humans for me.
I don’t think I actually personally killed a single human during the whole game.

Anyways. It’s a fantastic game and it really is a work of art. Seeing the Sevastopol from the outside was mind blowing, descending into the derelict was mind blowing and there were numerous other mind blowing moments.

Highly highly recommend.

I’ve been playing a lot of PC games recently and I REALLY don’t want to sound like one of those “PC master race” people. But....this game on console feels HORRENDOUS to play.

I’m gonna leave it at 2.5 stars because the game visually is amazing and the potential for it to be really fun is definitely there.
There’s just no way this was made to be played on a console, or with a controller.

Will possibly pick up again when it’s available on gamespass pc but the hype will have probably passed by then and it won’t be much fun to play alone.

Really pleased I finally got round to experiencing this game.
The game does have it's jump scares but I was expecting a lot more. The game instead has a very dark and tense impending sense of doom. Instead of being lulled into a sense of security and jump scared periodically between the dips in adrenaline, the game keeps your adrenaline steadily pumping for most of the whole game.
There were the odd sections that were a safety zone with some cool puzzle solving. Another thing I loved about the game was the puzzle solving, it wasn't super complex but it was just enough to be satisfying when you figured the puzzle out, especially when you were on the brink of insanity and solving a puzzle would restore sanity back to tip top shape.

I didn't pick this up expecting some Forza or Project Cars level of racing sim but the racing was really poor, like not even just average racing game poor. I raced with all assists turned off and the game still felt like it was helping me, it felt like my car was loosely on a rail.

The reason most people will pick up Wreckfest is obviously the Destruction Derby element. Unfortunately it doesn't excel enough in that department to compensate for the poor race mechanics.
The crashes have no crunch to them and you kind of just bounce off the other cars. It had no satisfaction level whatsoever.

Giving it one and a half just because the opening destruction derby on mini tractors was actually quite fun and I did enjoy it enough to complete the regional juniors championship.
It just didn't have enough about it to make me want to complete the rest of the championships.

Not played an awful lot so far but I think you only need a few games to see what the game is about on a casual level.
I expected it to be really tough as I'm new to KBM gaming but it's actually pretty simple, especially compared to a game like R6:Siege, which I had hundreds of hours in on console and is unplayable for me because the movement and everything is so tricky.
The playable characters all have fun abilities and I can't wait to try them all. The last game I played, I chose Sage, she can throw orbs on the ground which makes a pool that slows the enemies and she can raise Ice walls so you can cut off lines of sight, block off lanes entirely unless the enemy destroys the wall or raise yourself up onto places that can't be reached otherwise, her third ability is a healing orb which can be thrown at teammates or used on herself. It makes each round interesting, deciding how you will use the abilities and you can be really creative with some of the plays you make, which I really like. Each character has an ultimate ability also for extra game changing possibilities.
Probably gets a bit repetitive after a while but these kinda games I enjoy being able to play 1 or 2 games every other day or something.
Pretty nice game for anyone new to KBM who likes tactical FPS games.

Gonna give it a star because the art is pretty cool.

Not sure if they jumped on the Among Us band wagon or not but the idea is really cool.
I was really excited to play when I found out about it.
You can’t help but compare it to Among Us and the thing that makes Among Us so great, in my opinion, is how simple it is. You can pick it up and play it with barely any thought at all, you have to try and be on your toes of course but there’s no mechanics in the game that make it difficult...and that’s where Project Winter fails for me.
They’ve made it quite complex, I had no idea what to do. You get guns and weapons in this game but killing someone isn’t that easy, my aim was probably just bad but the mechanics are pretty rubbish, the beauty of Among Us is being able to kill someone and disappear in a flash.
Maybe being a regular survivor is more fun but there wasn’t anything that made me want to play another game to find out.

Probably unfair if me to compare it to Among Us but I can’t help but do so.
If they’d just kept it simple it could have been brilliant.

My experience, though I wasn’t targeted myself, was also dampened by some annoying Liverpudlian who kept yelling at some of the other new players who were playing.