Richard Scott-Jones's Reviews
Its two campaigns offer deliciously bonkers fan service for the rats and a meaty strategic challenge for the lizards, deftly served with CA's usual care for the source material. A generous free update that profoundly improves the Skaven is the icing on the cake.Richard Scott-Jones
Boasting the best swordfighting in the business, Sekiro is a game of rare but deserved self-assurance. You'll despair as it breaks you down, but then you'll exult as it builds you up. It's a journey like little else in gaming, and if you're up for the challenge, you absolutely have to play it.
Beautiful and mechanically robust throughout, but weighed down by repetitive missions, a flabby structure, and a lot of the people you meet in Fort Tarsis. Even the strongest beats become tiresome if repeated or drowned in white noise, and that's Anthem in a nutshell.Richard Scott-Jones
The new World Congress and climate change mirror real-life in that they're partly beyond your control, making them hard to factor into your schemes. The new civs are among the best and most novel in the game, though.
Creative Assembly's art team has outdone itself, building a visual treat that drips with detail. However, Curse of the Vampire Coast's sheen is let down by a one-note campaign.
With a darker, more nuanced story, loads of activities, and clever tweaks to its core systems, Forsaken vastly improves the quality, quantity, and structure of content in Destiny 2. It could still peter out if the raid is bad or the DLC is as poor as last year's, but as of now, Destiny is fun again.
Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is still lumbered with some of the quirks of its '90s origins. This is understandable - it is a remaster, not a remake - but those quirks do cause some friction. Beneath them, though, the underlying gameplay remains as solid as a fully upgraded phalanx.
A hefty chunk of DLC that adds what is arguably Total War's most inventive race yet, along with four different ways to play them.
Aesthetic brilliance and great gunplay can't wholly save Destiny 2's campaign from trivial difficulty, repetitive action, and a go-nowhere plot. Its best content in the mid-game and beyond is betrayed by a reward economy that nudges you instead toward a vacuous treadmill made of public events, and which truncates the endgame.
This is a rich and thoughtful strategy game that is a joy to engage with at practically every level, and a new high-water mark of ambition and quality for Creative Assembly.
Total War's mechanics and the Warhammer setting complement one another beautifully, and Creative Assembly has mostly nailed the execution. Total War: Warhammer is the best representation of the Warhammer universe there has ever been in a video game, and the best entry in the Total War series for some time.
Beautiful to look at, thrilling to play and infused with the gleefully anarchic spirit of the original, *Doom* offers the best and most refreshing shooter campaign in years. This alone would justify the price tag, but abundant secrets and potentially endless content via SnapMap add further longevity. *Doom* is back.
The second episode in The Banner Saga retains the gorgeous artwork, strong characters and agonising choices that made the original a success, while adding depth, variety and clarity to the combat.
Every element of Dark Souls III reinforces the others, from the broad, contiguous sweep of its stunning yet desolate world to the tiniest, menacing croak of a waiting basilisk. This triumphant summation of the series to date sets a new standard for action-RPG gameplay, and is a landmark achievement in game design.
Garden Warfare 2 looks great, boasts a huge roster of inventive characters and contributes much to the social shooter genre. Single-player and PvE content is lacking, however, and this exacerbates the already glacial pace of progression.
Superhot is a groundbreaking idea wrapped in a slick, minimalist aesthetic. Though its gameplay offers little variety, it is fun and truly unique, and comes at a fair price.
An incremental rather than radical improvement, but no less an achievement for that, XCOM 2 irons out flaws you didn't even realise existed in Enemy Unknown. The consequence is one of the best strategy games in years.
I had far more fun with Legacy of the Void than I was expecting to. The campaign is excellent, and even as a newcomer, transitioning from the single-player to dabbling in multiplayer was surprisingly smooth. RTS fans past and present should take this opportunity to return to StarCraft, or - even better - join the action for the first time.
A mostly successful step out of Civilization V's shadow, Rising Tide is a fine strategy game that only suffers in comparison to its truly great predecessors.
A strong strategy game tarred by its unfinished feel and the influence of luck, but fans of the setting will be able to overlook its flaws