Matt Gardner's Reviews
Dying Light is a game best experienced on your own terms and at your own pace. It eschews the excesses of its sibling franchise, Dead Island, but is no worse for it and if you can get past the clunky storytelling and the repetitive missions, you might a diamond in the rough that really empowers you to revel in the design aspects of its zombie-infested sandbox.
Gat Out Of Hell is a £15, bite-sized Saints Row-lite experience. Go into it with those expectations and you'll probably be fine. But if you don't care about playing last-gen material on new-gen platforms, give this a miss, do yourself a favour and pickup a copy of the original Saints Row IV for under a tenner.
A deeply atmospheric, emotionally compelling game that manages to treat war as a serious topic and examines the hard choices made by those caught in the middle of conflict. You might not particularly enjoy your time with This War Of Mine, but it's definitely a game you ought to play, being one of the finest critiques of war that this medium has to offer.
Though lazily framed and under-scripted, Far Cry 4 is a gorgeous, systems-oriented playground that provides endless hours of entertainment. And exploding elephants.
LittleBigPlanet 3 is an impressive game, stuffed with more imagination than ever before, and presented in a manner that makes user creation supremely accessible even as the toolset deepens. Though the Adventure mode is sadly short-lived, and the platform differences are fairly negligible, LBP 3 will surely prove to be a must-have game for PlayStation or series newcomers this winter.
Far from pointing the way forwards for the series, Assassin's Creed: Unity is a model of creative indecision and corporate policy -- a corpulent, broken mess that plays neither to its own strengths nor to its fanbase. There are flashes of promise here, moments when everything comes together, and the game's content package is hefty, but ultimately Unity proves to be a mercifully forgettable disappointment.
Make no mistake, this is a content bundle rather than a generational upgrade, but that's sort of okay. How To Survive: Storm Warning Edition presents a solid content package, but it is disappointing that technical hiccups of last year's version still remain. Still, if you're looking for some pick-up-and-play, zombie survival action, this is a pretty good shout, and the new modes are ace.
The Evil Within is a good game, an assembly of Mikami's best work and a rather pointed lesson in classic survival horror that Capcom would do well to note, but it's also unashamedly rooted in bygone years. As such, it'll pleases nostalgic fans yearning for a shinier, bloodied love letter to the creepy classics of yesteryear, but it doesn't really deliver anything particularly new. Greatest Hits albums are usually stuffed with goodness, and The Evil Within certainly has its moments, but they're also usually put out by bands with nothing more to say, I can only desperately hope that's not true of Shinji Mikami and Tango Gameworks.
NBA 2K15 is probably the best example of sports game fan service out there. It's a comprehensive package for any NBA fan that does an enormous amount to capture the intricacies and the dramas of the league, all the while creating exciting on-court action that is detailed and nuanced and fun to play. However, its years-old connectivity issues, and the dependency of offline modes on online servers once again threaten to ruin what should an outstanding game.
Bereft of a new-gen equivalent, F1 2014 is a stopgap game thrust into the spotlight that takes last year's version, strips back the Classic content, and adds in this year's cars. With the right setup, you can still get a pretty thrilling ride out of it, but to be honest you're best ignoring this hasty knockoff and investigating next year's effort instead.
Probably the best tower defence game there is. Nothing more, nothing less.
Bayonetta 2 is mechanically perfect, yet it is also a game that is stuffed with personality and wit and charm and an abundance of ideas and imagery and symbolism that its poor story cannot hope to make sense of or contain. But that's okay -- it is the finest game Platinum have ever made, and the best thing to grace the Wii U thus far.
Pix the Cat is a joy to play -- a heady, thrilling mix of bitesized, speedy, spatial puzzling that'll keep you coming back time and time again.
I'm not coming out of this locker.
Not much has changed off of the pitch, EA Canada still can't seem to work out how to create stable netcode at launch, and goalkeepers still make hideous errors in spite of their obvious upgrades, but ultimately FIFA 15 is a fast-paced, thrilling triumph where it counts. It's frustrating at times, but it's also the most rewarding FIFA in years.
I'd never have pegged the folks behind Bulletstorm to craft something like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, but I'm very glad that they did. It has a few niggling issues, but ultimately this is a brilliantly subtle, imaginative and thoughtful game.
A cracking adventure game, possibly the best Sherlock Holmes game that Frogwares have given us thus far, Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments goes a long way to making players feel like we are are Holmes rather than simply playing a game about him. There are little niggles here and there, but frankly if you enjoy your detective mystery games, it would be criminal to overlook one of the best we've had in ages.
Pro Rugby Manager 2015 is an utter disgrace, a broken shambles, bereft of depth or quality, worth neither your time nor your money. It's frankly insulting that niche audiences continue to be exploited in this manner, and 505 Games should be utterly ashamed of themselves.
Hyrule Warriors doesn't pretend to be anything that it isn't. It does exactly what it says on the tin, producing what is probably the best Warriors game to date, and doing so by taking many of the best aspects of The Legend of Zelda and successfully incorporating them into the classic 1-vs-1000 gameplay. The fan service is astonishing, the level of detail very welcome indeed, and the action can be truly satisfying, with the various bosses going a long way to making the repetitive action seem quite refreshing at times. A triumphant mash-up indeed.
Infamous First Light packs a whole bunch of content in at a decent price, and fleshes out Second Son's most interesting character in fine fashion, with a sibling story that tugs at the heartstrings thanks to another great performance from Bailey. It's an extension, perhaps, more than an expansion -- more of the same sort of thing, but with a slightly different flavour -- but given how much fun Second Son was, that's no bad thing.