Microsoft are on a roll there’s no debate Gamepass is the service du jour, Flight Simulator made a massive splash and now we get the Master Chief for Christmas.
Make no mistake the silly season is going to be peppered with the screams of a billion Grunts.
Thanks to Microsoft for supplying the Korucottage team with early review code.
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Space Combat games have always been a favourite genre for me. Starting with Descent back in 1995 and most recently with the excellent Star Wars: Squadrons on the PSVR.
But the genre often struggled to get AAA quality outings. Certainly, any tangible story and world building rarely occurs within them.
BUT, Chorus has literally come out of my blind-spot and some how managed to be both an awesome arcade space combat game, with an interesting story.
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Real Time Strategy (RTS) titles like Iron Harvest on Console are a rare beast.
And even rarer is a Console RTS that has a control and user interface (UI) system, which isn’t a finger twisting nightmare on a controller. But it can be done.
Halo Wars and Sudden Strike 4 have nailed the UI in an RTS for Console gamers, and Iron Harvest…almost did.
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Football Manager 2022 brings me back to one of my most beloved genres. Having spent the best part of 40 years playing these games. All the way from Kevin Toms’ 1987 Football Manager, through my love affair with CM97/98 to here and today. Sports Interactive are way ahead in this game and it shows.
Yes.It’s make believe and even the best of them look like a spreadsheet, a keen eye soon learns where to look. But, once you’re under and engaged with these players it all starts to become important, to you, personally.
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Call of Duty : Vanguard, being the 2021 annual entry to the series Dylan takes us back to WWII to battle latency, with or without Zombies.
Until Vanguard, my relationship with shooters has simmered the last few years. I used to love them. Loved those AA and AAA shooters. I loved CoD 2 – the house-to-house fighting still jostles inside my gaming memories for prime position.
I loved Wolfenstein and Rise of the Triad and Doom and Quake and Singularity and even Timeshift. I’ve enjoyed quite a few Calls of Duty. I even got sent to LA to preview Black Ops 3.
We played MW3 on the morning of my wedding to take our minds off the day. But since then, I’ve just kinda . . . not played many.
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I had very little basis to be as hyped as I was for the new Guardians of the Galaxy game.
The E3 trailer looked pretty good, even if Star-Lord was presented as bit of a “dude-bro” and the dev team (of modern Deus Ex fame) have a reasonable pedigree in the AAA space. But I had concerns as the Comic book, super-hero genre is hard to get right.
However…against the odds Eidos Montreal crushed it!
With an absolutely fantastic Marvel game and some of the best characters I have experienced since Mass Effect.
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t’s been almost 15 years since the last instalment of Microsoft’s seminal real-time strategy (RTS) game. Man, it’s good to be back playing the newest game in the series, Age of Empires IV. Back in the day, Ensemble Studios was the proud custodian of the Age of Empire mantle but that developer has sadly long since departed.
The reins have now been handed to Canadian development studio Relic Entertainment, an experienced developer with a fine pedigree of RTS games behind it like Homeworld and the Company of Heroes series.
Returning to the medieval age, AOEIV offers eight civilizations (English, Chinese, French, Rus, Roman Empire, Delhi Sultanate, Mongols and Abbasid Dynasty) and a handful of single-player campaigns running from the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066 up to the Russo-Kazan wars of 1552.
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nd the first Forza Motorsport on the original Xbox, it had me hooked. But then in 2012 came the first Forza Horizon on the Xbox 360.
It was the Horizon Series that reeled me in. The freedom and forgiveness that Horizon has over its Motorsport brother is far more to my liking, and driving style. And here we are now in 2021 with the fifth instalment in the Forza Horizon franchise.
Viva Mexico!
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Switch code for Diablo II Resurrected because I don’t need to see it in 4k. Also, I don’t need whiz-bang-Direct-38-high-dynamic-apples. I am happy to play a 20-year-old game in my hands, and I like Diablo a lot without being hardcore about it. I regularly peek into Diablo forums and am greeted with gobbledy-gook terms and verbs that mean absolutely nothing to me.
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many are calling a spiritual successor in the form of Back 4 Blood. Developer Turtle Rock Studios (renamed as Valve South) are the team behind the Left 4 Dead games and even the format of the game name points towards a sequel to Left 4 Dead.
But thanks to Copyright/Ownership/Politics Turtle Rock Studios in its current form had to create a ‘new’ IP. And so Back 4 Blood is born.
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Rainbow 6 has become a toxic, fluro-laiden, run and gun fest. Ghost Recon is now a soulless open-world monstrosity which as of last week is set to become of all things, a Battle Royale!? And Splinter Cell has been missing in action for almost a decade. What I’m getting at is that the goods on offer for the Tactical console gamer are slim pickings at the moment.
But thankfully dear squad mates, I have good news! Insurgency: Sandstorm has finally migrated from PC to the console and there is now some solid tactical shooter goodness to be had.
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