Game Reviews

Legacy of Thieves Collection
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Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection

Richard Armitt 1695 Views ,  ,  ,  ,  , 

For more than a decade we’ve been friends of Nathan Drake here at the Cottage.

We’ve re-trod old ground with the previous Drake Collection, been wowed by Uncharted 4 and Guy thoroughly enjoyed Lost Legacy.

It’s been a journey, fraught with miraculous leaps, ferocious beasts, all manner of mercenaries and often faultless Naughty Dog narrative.

Now in Legacy of Thieves we get to re-play the two most recent games, Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy in glorious PS5 vision.

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God of War
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God of War, PC

Gerard Campbell 2482 Views ,  ,  ,  , 

A new year and another PS4 console game has made the jump to PC, with Santa Monica Studio’s God of War now available to PC gamers – and what a beauty it is.

When the game came out on console in 2018 it quickly became the poster child for how a talented development team could make games on Sony’s console sing.

On PC the graphical fidelity has been turned all the way up to 11 – and it looks bloody fantastic.

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HALO INFINITE
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HALO Infinite, Review

Richard Armitt 1833 Views ,  ,  ,  ,  , 

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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CHORUS
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CHORUS, PS5 Review

Guy 2048 Views ,  , 

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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Iron Harvest
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Iron Harvest: Complete Edition, PS5 Review

Guy 8232 Views ,  ,  , 

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
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Football manager 2022 review

Richard Armitt 1785 Views ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 

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
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Call of Duty Vanguard, PS5 Review

Dylan Burns 1742 Views ,  ,  ,  , 

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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Guardians of the Galaxy
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Guardians of the Galaxy, PS5 Review

Guy 1837 Views ,  ,  , 

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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Age of Empires IV
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Age of Empires IV, review

Gerard Campbell 1383 Views ,  ,  ,  , 

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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Forza Horizon 5 Review (XSX)

Barrie Clarke 1592 Views ,  ,  ,  , 

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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Diablo II
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Diablo II – Resurrected

Dylan Burns 1386 Views ,  ,  ,  , 

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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