I may be one of the few people who actually enjoys the Ubisoft formula (I actually LIKED Far Cry's towers!), but even this game can be a bit much. The gameplay itself emulates Far Cry but with enemies who are either 4 feet smaller than you or in mech suits, so it's of good quality. The world for this game is easily one of the best looking games I've ever seen, and the amount of imagination and love poured into both fern and fauna is astonishing. What really hurts this game is it's open world exploration loop. While you no longer need to climb towers or anything else to arbitrarily reveal nearby landmarks, anything that you CAN find in the world struggles to be interesting. No interesting quest lines, no secret easter eggs, and no major sense of variety.

The repetition cannot be overstated. You will find either a plant you tap to receive skill points, a plant you tap to give you a (very) small permanent health boost, or do a small twirl of your looking joystick to fix an object. While there are some exceptions, such as the memory painting activities and the totem scavenger hunts, these are absolutely overwhelmed by the sheer number of other repetitive functions.

The writing itself also struggles to be particularly interesting with very flat characters and unremarkable dialogue. Some credit has to be given to the player VOs, as they absolutely sell the joy, terror, and surprise you will put them through in the 30-60 hours it takes to beat this game. They'll even emit an audible "Ow!" when you bonk your head against an object above you! Unfortunately, almost nothing notable happens outside the already mostly ho-hum main campaign. My only other exception is the final level, which actually manages to live up to it's expectations and deliver a memorable conclusion to the game. If only it didn't take dozens upon dozens of hours doing boring fetch quests and touching plants to get there.

Gran Turismo 7 is a lie. For all the words spouted about how this is a return to form of the massive singleplayer campaigns and content of Gran Turismos past, it's really not. It tries, goddamit, and definetly scratches the itch that we all have of Gran Turismo 4 and such... but it never goes more than skin deep.

Because Gran Turismo 7 is just an expansion of GT Sport, and with it, the promise of new stuff to come at an indeterminate date. At time of writing it's just a buy in to a live service.

The kicker here is content. Versus GT sport there's a grand total of... 4 new tracks and two new layouts of existing ones. I'm not joking thats it, and whilst the selection is mostly good - High speed ring, deep forest, and Trial Mountain are classics - there being no completely new additions outright is really sad.

The car selection is also quite small by mainline gt standards. 400 cars which are mostly unique (compared to GT6's deluge of 20 different types of Miata) and all beautifully modelled - but lots of these are ludicrously expensive, the vast majority are imported from GT sport, and there's very few additions in the racing car categories. The overall car selection is also, by now, quite old. Most of the cars here you can track back to about 2015-ish, and there's very few non concept cars from post 2020.

And it kinda all makes sense. The reduced scope of GT7 compared to - particularly GT4, is almost unavoidable. The level of fidelity demanded these days makes something the scope of GT4 or even GT6 basically impossible, and Polyphony arent the crazed madmen sleeping at the office and making Naughty dog's crunch practices look pedestrian anymore.

And thus, the campaign doesn't really work. There's the delightful level of gran turismo charm and cheese which is lovely to have back and is probably my outright biggest criticism of Sport, but the whole thing is too linear, short, and really lacks the freedom of previous GTs.

Particularly dissapointing is the lack of the super high level events from bygone days - Like the wind, Formula grand turismo championships, etc. It's outright bizzare, the game carries the license system from previous games, but there arent even any license requirements over A in the game at time of writing. And it's so weird, because the game dangles these awesome legendary cars in front of you for stonking credit values but there's like fuck all to do with them except online!

But despite it all, there's sparks here. S-10, the final license test, has you wrangling a classic Porsche 917 around a slightly damp Spa Francorchamps. It's probably the most fun i've ever had in a driving game. The handling model in GT7 is top tier, it's implementation of weather and changeable conditions amazing, it's level of fidelity so damn high, the Car such a fun beast to drive - that it all comes together and it's downright magical. It's the apotheosis of the driving fantasy GT has always been trying to fullfill, and it's the best it has ever done it. Some of the other missions and driving tests are also great, but this moment is what makes it, and proves GT7s potential.

But we'll have to wait, i guess. More than even GT sport, this is a game where buying it is buying into a live service and years of updates which will eventually make it the game we all wanted. GT sport eventually got there. And if there's more moments like S-10 coming... I guess i'll be there to see it in GT7.

Moreso than most games I've written about, it's hard to articulate my experiences with Grand Theft Auto V. As the best-selling action game of all time and subsequently one of the most recognized pieces of entertainment of our time, there's not much new ground to cover. No matter your issues with the game, it's consistently made billions of dollars.

As somebody who likes to write about the games in my free time, a part of me feels like it would be safe to stop there. But honestly, that's an attitude that feels almost antithetical to the points made ad nauseam through this game's narrative. Caught somewhere between an old punk band playing their greatest hits to an aging audience that sees them as part of the establishment they once rioted against and a new punk band taking the opening slot to a welcome applause from the same crowd, Grand Theft Auto V is both beholden to the dirge of the formula that its predecessors helped popularize and bolstered by the effort it makes to move away from what was becoming stale at the time. As a playground for destruction, it provides the requisite tools. It allows players to create goofy scenarios of their own accord without ever fearing that the player might veer off onto a course that isn't related to the narrative or a side quest of some sort. It's no Saints Row 2, but it actually runs at a stable framerate and is more readily available, so it's much easier to play nowadays. The two pillars of its sandbox, driving, and shooting, wouldn't exactly make compelling games on their own. Of the two, the driving is arguably better. But there's enough there that, if a team wanted to take what was there and morph it into something more small-scale, it would hardly be a fool's errand to get it up to snuff. Combined as they are in a massive open-world sandbox, there's enough there to provide hours of entertainment away from the main quest. The driving strikes a perfect balance between weightiness and floatiness, never absolutely embracing either camp but providing enough of the goods from both to create something simultaneously challenging and approachable to someone who's never picked up a controller before. The combat feels like a watered-down version of Max Payne 3 with the weapon wheel and abilities from Read Dead Redemption, which is to say that it mostly works but isn't anything spectacular. Watered-down or not, Max Payne 3 was a really fun game, though, and that shines through here. You won't be diving off of staircases or doing any of the crazy action moves that you did in that game, which I do believe makes this the lesser game. But in exchange for the replayability that hurdling yourself off a ledge in slow-motion while systematically slaughtering everyone around you offers, there's a wonderfully eclectic collection of weapons on offer. Not all of them have as much use as others; outside of the one mission where it's required, using a jerry can and then shooting the gas trail feels jankier than Postal 2, and I mean that with sincerity. Almost everything else, though, is lots of fun to play around with, in and out of story content. Where things do start to falter a little bit is that the open world content is too inconsistently interesting for a 100% completion playthrough to feel like anything but a massive chore. I know this is the kind of opinion that'll get me downvoted off of Reddit within a microsecond, but I honestly think Cyberpunk 2077 plays with its setting in more interesting ways. "Look around the world and collect a ton of things" sounds like a lot of fun until you realize that you have to collect 50 of the fuckers, and that's just one quest. It begs you not to be too goal-oriented while asking you to see if you can complete as many of its arbitrary goals as you can. And none of that would be a serious issue if the things you were collecting felt tangible in any way. A torn piece of a letter is a torn piece of a letter. You don't get to see the letter as you're putting it back together, and the game doesn't use the letter in any mysterious way that might interest you in collecting all fifty shreds. Going back to Cyberpunk, the one piece of its world that did feel like a massive checklist, mini-boss fights, is used to expand its setting. It's not enough that you've killed or incapacitated someone who was bugging out; you have to look around to understand why they went haywire in the first place so the person you're corresponding with can find better ways to help that person if you kept them alive. It's intriguing, builds on top of, and, in some cases, recontextualizes what you know while leaving a fair amount of the event to your imagination. If even one of the exhausting number of spaceship parts this game asks you to collect had something similar, I'd be going under bridges all the time. That's not to say that there isn't anything of the sort that's interesting here. There's a side-mission where the game asks you to find places that look eerily similar to screenshots sent to you so you can track down suspects. If the developers kept it at that level or tried to do something that wasn't just "find all of the stuff!" I wouldn't be complaining. But for fucks sake, you could at least make a murder mystery interesting without asking the player to fetch an endless number of collectibles for it.

And then there's the story.

I honestly don't know how to feel about Grand Theft Auto V's narrative. It's entertaining in a few areas, anti-climatic in others, and a bit too much of one good thing in-between all of the cracks left over by both. If you intend to spend 30 hours with a lighthearted action romp that doesn't take itself too seriously, you probably won't mind this. If you can't stand it when characters in a story are just stand-ins for whatever the writer's beliefs on society are and barely have anything recognizable past that, I don't have very good news to tell you. The three leads do manage to surpass this through the physical and vocal performances of the actors behind them, but I don't believe the rest of the cast fares any better. The best it gets is Trevor's drug buddies, but that's because Trevor is a fun character to play straight off of. Everyone else falls into this slippery slope where if everything is satirical, it starts to lose its bite. The main missions are at least pretty fun, even if it has the Rockstar problem of "every mission needs to have a shootout, and if not a shootout, then a car chase, and if not a car chase, then something monotonous to play off of your expectations of both." I don't blame anyone for never being bothered to see this game to its credits because, fun as that may be, it's a little too obvious in its structure. And that's not even talking about the other massive insecurity Rockstar's singleplayer games have struggled with since GTA III. The most fun moments I've had in Grand Theft Auto V's main stories have been when I've found incredibly arbitrary ways to fail. Planting a bomb on the door of a clueless janitor's home, not seeing him react to it when he gets to said door, and then blowing it up in his face is some Looney Tunes shit, and the game telling you that the obviously dead janitor was just "spooked" is never not hilarious. There are missions in Grand Theft Auto V where the game accounts for what the player is doing in a given situation; none of the fun ones are part of the main quest.

Once you've beaten Grand Theft Auto V and seen all you intend to see, there's not much to do outside of playing the aggressively monetized online mode. Except for using mods to swap all pedestrian models with Goku, replacing the textures of one specific building in the world with the shittiest looking McDonalds you've ever seen, replacing several of the ads in the open world with weeb shit, and then installing a mod menu to make every car start at a thousand miles per hour so you can steal a bus and make Speed 3 a real movie. Is that a run-on sentence? Probably. But I don't care. The modding scene for GTA games has always been out there, and it's no different here—which is why ennui runs through my system when I say you shouldn't buy this game if you intend to support the creators of such projects. In short: Fuck Take-Two Interactive. To elaborate, Take-Two Interactive likes to dick over its fans who dare to modify their game, seeing their contributions as blasphemous if they don't align with their corporate aspirations. It's ironic that I brought up Cyberpunk earlier because these motherfuckers would fit right in with that universe. But most ironic of all, the CEO of Take-Two said that his company would never release a game like that and that they're focused on quality, yadda yadda yadda. Less than a year later, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy—The Definitive Edition was pooped onto store shelves. Whoops! It turns out that when you talk out of your ass like that, people are less likely to trust anything you say going forward. Especially when you remove a lot of the wonderful work your fans are creating because you see it as "competition." What a sick joke!

After 150 hours, 100% achievement/trophy completion and far too much Gwent, I’ve finally rolled credits on this masterpiece. Its by no means perfect, but working my way through this over the course of several months has been a truly special experience as someone who is fully invested in the universe, having played both previous entries and read all the books several times.

The Witcher 3 is beautifully written. There are so many layers to its writing. On the surface it has a whole host of engaging and diverse characters, great comedic moments and some engrossing and truly twisted plotlines. However, intermingled with this there is complex political undertones, frequent reminders of racial oppression present throughout the land and of course the ever-present white frost. On top of this, the game pays an incredible reverence to its source material, with countless links to previous games and book. It does an extremely good job of balancing all of the above without overwhelming the player. Moreover, the extremely detailed character and location breakdowns in the menus as well as the books littered throughout the game allow you to dive deeper into elements that are of particular interest. I really appreciated this attention to detail which helped me feel more informed when making the important dialogue decisions in quests. These choices can have huge consequences which completely change the world and what happens to characters. This is a welcome change from the superficial decision-making present in a lot of games.

The main story itself is well told, with some really strong and memorable arcs. It does have pacing issues, with a bloated middle section and some smaller arcs which feel more like busy work, but the high stakes, intriguing cast and constantly evolving relationships make it very engaging. On top of this, there are some sublime side quests such as one where you decide whether you take part in the assassination plot of a king and another where you work with a mage to uncover the secrets of a haunted island. Each area on the continent feels very distinct with its own culture and political landscape (with Skellige being my personal favourite), and the quests that are done in each of these locations do a great job of capturing this uniqueness. That being said, with a game of this size and scope, inevitably there are some weaker, more generic side quests and some forgettable characters.

The Witcher 3’s gameplay is enjoyable, but with scope for improvement. Its gameplay loop consists of traversal, combat and clue hunting. Unfortunately, this loop can get repetitive due to the lack of depth in some of its systems. For example, clue hunting is just a case of using your Witcher vision to find whatever is highlighted in red on your screen. As this system is used so frequently it would’ve been nice if there was more interaction, taking inspiration from the likes of Uncharted’s temples or Arkham Origin’s crime scene reconstructions.

Combat, the second gameplay pillar, is quite a standard affair with light and heavy attacks mixed in with counters and dodges. Potions, oils and signs do elevate the experience by encouraging strategising and enemy weakness exploitation. Moreover, you can read your bestiary to try and plan ahead when taking on the larger monsters. These monsters are some of the highlights of the game as besting them makes you feel most like a Witcher. Contracts where you trawl through a cave taking out a queen spider’s babies to remove any chance of reinforcements before you tackle the queen and another where you lure a monster into a barn with alcohol so that you can prevent it retreating during combat is this game at its peak. Its just a shame that combat feels a bit stiff sometimes and the camera can sometimes be a pain when trying to reposition yourself as you are swarmed by foes. What’s more, even playing this game on death march, there is no consistent difficulty curve. I struggled to fend off even the easiest of foes in my first dozen hours with the game, but I soon out-levelled my foes, making it incredibly easy to brute force my way through encounters rather than these being tense, methodical affairs requiring the use of everything at your disposal. Regardless, I would like to give a special shoutout to the gory combat finishers, which left me completely awestruck on several occasions as limbs were severed and body parts flew across the screen.

The final gameplay pillar, traversal, is really enjoyable primarily because of the world you are traversing through. Visually, it is gorgeous thanks to some exceptional lighting (I could soak in those sunrises and sunsets all day), the environmental variety between locations and the game’s art direction. The sublime soundtrack and sound design only add to this immersion. Though, Ido have some minor gripes with Geralt feeling a bit clunky at times, roach’s uncooperativeness and cliffs that cannot be traversed making for tedious diversions. Regardless, the sheer quantity of random encounter, side quests, loot and monsters lurking about make the continent feel lived in whilst also capturing how bleak times are with the war that ravages through the land.

When I said the Witcher has three gameplay pillars…I lied. Gwent, while not integral to the experience, is one of the best things to come out of this game. It is simple to learn, but true mastery takes lots of practice and card collecting. Gwent is a game within a game as there are so many quests and challenges you can take on to proceed in your quest to complete you deck. What’s more it spawned its own spinoff game Thronebreaker, which I highly recommend, and a standalone competitive multiplayer game. Long story short, Gwent rules.

If you hadn’t gathered by now, I adore this game. It does so much right and truly warrants the many hours required to see this experience through to its end. Yes it has some flaws in its gameplay, but the endless list of things it does right dwarfs its handful of flaws. If you are one of the few people who haven’t dipped your feet into this world yet, I could not recommend it enough. Just be prepared to lose many hours of your life…

2015 Ranked
Ranked Open World Recommendations
Witcher Franchise Ranked

This game should not exist.

It does not feel like there was ever a time before Resident Evil 4, yet it certainly feels like we are all living in its aftermath. To say that this game is "confident" with its design might be the biggest understatement I've ever written. It doesn't feel confident, it feels like concrete rules of game design being rebuilt right in front of you. It takes as many cues from the series' roots with its core gameplay philosophies as it does rail shooters a la House of the Dead with its perpetual forward motion and linear map design; "every room feeling like something new." I've seen this game described as a new age of Resident Evil, a reinvention of the series, ushering in the "action era" of the series, but I think that's selling it short.

Auteur theory is something that I am personally at ends with, as I do think there are creative visionaries who leave a thumbprint on all of their works, but it still feels like I'm drastically reducing the tens, hundreds of people involved in game development to merely support for the big name. That being said, one must be impressed by Shinji Mikami. I can not comprehend practically inventing the survival horror genre with the original Resident Evil, help heighten action games to a new level with Devil May Cry, returning to a classic to iron out the few flaws and give it a good spit shine with REmake, and finally flip the gaming world on its head with Resident Evil 4. With that out of the way, there are some design choices from both REs 1 and 4 that I'd like to highlight: your inventory, and decision making.

When I think of RE1, I'm instantly reminded of the dread it induces with its strangling inventory and how key it is to trim all fat possible and keep only the bare necessities, lest you end up with an essential item left behind due to no free space. In every sense, RE4 manages to keep its iconic inventory management aspect, but only after completely overhauling it into something that has never, and probably will never be outdone. At an entry level, it's simple: rearrange items to fit the space; a Tetris-esque minigame in your downtime. But the more you play, the more your inventory feels like more than just a bag of options, it's a flash reminder of your entire arsenal. As much as I love the 2023 remake's decision to map certain weapons to the D-pad (a very comfortable feature), I find that it takes away from a certain improvisational aspect the game's combat has. You go into a room, you're surrounded by enemies, and after you shoot a few rounds to get the baddies swarming you off, you open your inventory; clarity. You think about how many enemies are in the room, how many shots you've put into them, when your last Merchant visit was, your ammo for all weapons, your grenade count, upcoming sections (if you're a returning player), and so much more, with one button press. And the only reason you have that moment of lucidity is because the game reminds you of your entire catalog, decorated in whatever order you prefer the most. Not only does it allow you to have satisfying click moments of everything fitting into place, but it lets you test your own speed, swapping between grenades, pistols, shotguns within seconds to sweep away enemies. Then, once that room is cleared, you collect all the ammo you've got and run another stocktake, mentally preparing yourself for the next encounter, just one small gear in what makes this game play like clockwork.

Adding onto that, I'd like to cross-reference this excellent review by SimonDedalus, wherein the game asks of you "how do you adapt to it putting you in a cage with Wolverine." It may sound silly on the surface, but the tensest encounters (a great example is the cabin in 2-2) in this game are, in my opinion, its shining moments. Sure, it's fun to pop the heads of enemies from a mile away with your rifle, but being trapped in a room not much bigger than you are and having enemies strapped with maces, cattle prods, crossbows, claw hands, or rocket launchers with nothing but the weapons you have and an ever-evolving game plan in your mind is what separates this game from the Resident Evil entries that would follow it. There's no expression of skill in mindlessly mowing down zombies, which is why this game never offers you that. The infected are tough, and you're doing yourself a disservice by just plugging away at them. Switching your styles and adapting to what the game throws at you will not only keep you well-stocked with ammo, as the "AI director" likes to throw a variety of ammo types at you to balance using guns you like while also keeping your gameplay fresh, but also reward you with a richer, deeper understanding of the game's combat and possibility for what could only be described as "combos" in the RE world.

There's more to talk about, of course, but I really think those two factors hone in what makes this game an immortal entrant into the pantheon of video games. Sure, I could talk about its effortless stylistic switch-ups, or its wonderfully cheesy B-movie charm, or its superbly satisfying and iconic sound design, but those are all just the church built on the proverbial "rock" of masterclass game design.

This is the best game ever made, in fact, I'd like to raise it up a peg: I consider RE4 to be an artistic achievement in humanity's name, and we are lucky to coexist alongside it in time. If you are a game designer, this game should light your head aflame with creativity, and if it doesn't, keep playing until it does. Even if you're not a game designer, the sheer strength and confidence in every aspect this game has should be enough to instill anyone with the faith in themselves they need to create something special of their own. If Shinji Mikami can do it, if Leon S. Kennedy can do it, if Capcom can do it, if Resident Evil can do it, so can you.