My digital issue is here. So here are the closing paragraphs for this months reviews:
Kirby and the Forgotten Land
Not that FromSoftware will be quaking in its boots. Indeed, those who've never understood the appeal of Kirby are unlikely to be convinced by his move into 3D. But otherwise this compact, imaginative adventure is a low-key triumph, a work of great craft and wit that, unlike its lead, doesn't bite off more than it can chew. And it only leaves you hungry for more.
8
Elden Ring
Even with 60 hours on the clock, we're still not finished - and that feels OK. We have been down this road before, in similar, lesser games: we know that despite our best intentions to pick a world clean after the credits have rolled, defeating the final boss drains the idea of its oxygen. As ever with Miyazaki's games we near the end of our first playthrough already thinking about our second, and since the build variety here seems outrageous, we're also contemplating our third and fourth. There's NG+ to come too, of course. All that can wait. This is a game to be strolled, not sprinted through - unless you're running away from something. anyway. It will be only be new once, and its delights deserve to be savored to the fullest. Not for the first time, a Miyazaki game has arrived and the landscape appears transformed. As you play, there is a sense of plates shifting beneath you, of the T&Cs of game development being hastily rewritten. We haven't felt this way since Breath Of The Wild. Here, as there, an open world means freedom and fresh air. But Elden Ring manages to make even its hugest, most sprawling spaces feel as enclosed and foreboding as any Dark Souls dungeon - yet still compels you to keep going to see what's around the next corner, up the next hill, or behind the next hulking beast with the one-shot attack in its second phase. See those mountains over there? You can die on them. And you will do so, gladly and repeatedly, as the sensation slowly builds that you are playing a videogame for the ages.
10
Gran Turismo 7
Beyond it technical excellence, then, Gran Turismo 7 feels deeply, idiosyncratically personal in ways firstparty games rarely do. It is strange and sometimes restrictive, resolutely uncool and, in its earnest celebration of car culture, occasionally even a little overbearing. But this is a racing sim with real soul, realised with genuine passion and no little eccentricity. Twenty-five years on, Gran Turismo has never felt more vital.
9
Tunic
When Tunic gestures towards Zelda games of old, something it does with all the subtlety of an air traffic controller, it's indicating an attempt to chip away the intervening decades and get back to the feeling of playing those games for the first time, when they still held what seemed like bottomless mystery. As in Inscryption s game-within-a-game, that requires a return to a time when games could still be found objects, before online guides were within easy grasp. Playing before release, our own experience was not too dissimilar, and we'd advise trying to replicate this as best you can – Tunic s secrets can be a little obtuse, but the game is more modest than, say, a FromSoftware outing, and it should be possible to plumb their depths without too much external assistance. Just RTFM, as they used to say. You're sure to be rewarded.
8
Triangle Strategy
The characters, however, are what make it sing. Rather than being limited to familiar archetypes, each has unique abilities that makes them valuable in certain situations – and leads to some thrilling synergies besides. The stoic Erador draws attention away from frail allies, his shield slam capable of knocking enemy units off their perch for fall damage. Blacksmith Jens can build ladders – handy for getting retreating units to relative safety, or offering an elevated position for veteran bowman Archibald to target distant foes. Wheedling Merchant Lionel can tempt enemy units into defecting, gaining interest on coins left behind by the fallen, while shamaness Ezana harnesses the elements, conjuring rainstorms to form large puddles, which can in turn be electrified to stun clusters of enemies. But it's more than utility that makes them valuable. True, the relentless earnestness of the script may have you agreeing with Serenoa's comment during a sparring session with his best friend: "Ah, enough sentimentality. Raise your spear so I can knock it down!" But it's hard to deny that Square' s most effective stratagem is the time it takes to invest you in the fate of this war-stricken continent, and all who live there...
8
Destiny 2: The Witch Queen
Despite those few awkward seams where MMORPG meets FPS, then, this is a worthwhile continuation of Bungie's space opera, telling a story featuring enough twists and teases to keep things rolling until the next expansion, Lightfall. For players who have been here since the beginning, this is prime red meat. Yet there's an elephant in the room to address: the removal of Destiny 2's first major expansion, Forsaken. Previously, Bungie had also „vaulted“ the game's original Red War campaign and two minor DLC chapters. That's around 50 hours of story content replaced with a tutorial segment rehashed from the original game. It's frustrating, since The With Queen finds Destiny 2 firing on all cylinders. What should be an easy recommendation is instead laden with provisos: this is a good expansion, a solid foundation for the next year of updates, and a lousy place for newcomers to start.
7
Martha is Dead
The upshot of this middle of half-baked mechanics is that the story winds up feeling disjointed. Indeed, despite the attention lavished on the setting, there is a lack of finesse in everything from the dialogue to the controls to the user interface, while a game-breaking final-act bug forces us back to a prior save just so we can finish the story. Here, some of those disparate narrative threads are either dropped entirely or are made to feel peripheral. And the concluding scenes don't so much invite player interpretation as actively demand it: rather than leaving you to consider your own thoughts, it gives you several possible versions of events and asks you to pick one. Regardless, you're unlikely to feel satisfied by the answers, which provide little justification for all that bloodshed. This miserable wallow in the psyche of a traumatised young woman isn't so much horrifying, then, as simply unpleasant.
4
Total War: Warhammer III
Sending armies through rifts while managing the home front gives TWW3 decent mid-game complexity, with the same trade-offs as the previous game's Vortex campaign: fall behind in the race for souls early on and you're most likely committing to a 20-hour defeat. A more significant adjustment is the expanded campaign multiplayer, which now allows simultaneous turn-taking: players make decisions in parallel, then vote to initiate the AI phase. It's a terrific (and overdue) change of pace, making Total War multiplayer more fluid and less time-consuming without softening the strategy. There are plenty of familiar minor shortcomings to go with the enhancements. Siege battles still dissatisfy in singleplayer, despite some new fortification options, with AI generals prone to being lured into their own defensive chokepoints. Diplomacy is an afterthought, and has never felt more out of sync with the fiction – it's difficult to picture Nurglings at the negotiation table. More seriously, the battle aspect's micro-management is showing its age. Babysitting brittle cavalry is simply not as entertaining, 20 years down the line. We're ready to see what the future holds for The Creative Assembly after Total War. We're also, however, delighted by the studio's seemingly indefatigable ability to bend its own rules and brew up new playstyles, as it bring one of gaming's greatest licensed adaptations to a thunderous conclusion.
8
Norco
Remember: this is a mystery. The itch of an unanswered question is the most basic of plot engines, and here it's enough to maintain forward momentum even when the game's focus wanders. Don't expect a tidy conclusion, exactly, or one that's much happier than it's beginning, but the succession of increasingly strange moments that leads you there is irresistible. It's these that will live on in our memory, we suspect, as the game's rough edges are eroded by time: the mall cultists and toothed birds and all the other indelibly bizarre images a trip to Norco has to offer. And the sense of having travelled somewhere that games have never taken us before.
7
Lost Ark
If Lost Ark's loot game and sometimes brainless quests are its most grievous shortcomings, its sightseeing opportunities and escalating character powers are sufficient compensation. And though its pacing suffers for its MMORPG-style padding, it also never loses its capacity to surprise. No classic, then, but Smilegate has delivered a big, silly, characterful romp that's best experienced with friends.
7
CrossfireX
(…) After all, how many examples can you think of where the two halves are made not only by developers on opposite sides of the globe but in different engines? (…) The big gimmick is „Combat Breaker“, an ability which slows time to a syrupy halt. There are nice flourishes in its presentation – the way it cranks the framerate every time you pull the trigger so that bullets instantly find their home; the turned-up-to-11 saturation that brings its grey visuals to life – but we are, ultimately, talking about bullet-time. Something Remedy itself has done better before, in a game where everything else has been done better by others. Perhaps these two halves have something in common after all.
3
Far: Changing Tides
Still, a few dramatic sequences do land, such as a storm that sends the sea into convulsions and cracks the ship's mast if you're foolish enough to extend it. And overall, the bond with your vehicle becomes as strong as that in Line Sails, if not stronger thanks to a longer runtime. Changing Tides is a tentative advancement, then, but it's clearly built to mirror its predecessor, right up to a pitch-perfect ending. If both games essentially proffer the same parable („where there's a will, there's a way“), the sequel slips in a poignant and timely extra: „no matter how deep your troubles get“.
7
A Musical Story
As the band pick up a fourth member (a female singer-songwriter in the Janis Joplin/Joan Baez mould for whom the Hendrix-like frontman quickly falls), their music grows more adventurous and complex. In some ways that's no bad thing, but the combination of unorthodox rhythms, syncopated beats and shifts in time signature and pacing – not to mention more sections per chapter – lead to a steep increase in challenge. The call-and-response approach results in plenty of frustrating downtime between attempts, while slight variations on previous leitmotifs, sustained notes that muddy the waters in terms of timing, and proggy flourishes that defy easy memorisation feel like a cheap way to draw things out. Ignore the star requirements and this breezes along amiably through to an ending that's rather more cheerful than its hospital-set intro suggests. The process of mastering it? Let's just say it's not quite our tempo.
6
Preview of the next issue:
