Recent reviews by Flashbaxx

#DRIVE Rally leaves a lot to be desired.

The car models are impeccable, and come in great variety, from recognizable rally legends, to unconventional offroaders. I wish I could compliment more.

Controlling the vehicles feels unrealistic and weightless. Most vehicles grip the dirt incredibly tightly, and it seems as though some kind of artificial downforces keeps them grounded.

The environments feel haphazardly strewn together. The routes blend together and feel samey, as unique landmarks are few and far between. And by slowing players down to scan the terrain in a free-roam collectathon, attention is brought to errors in the environment design: roads and paths have thick seams where they interesect, foliage looks of poor quality, and many props don't quite touch the ground. Shadow pop-in is incredibly aggressive, to the point of becoming a distraction while racing.

There is very little to do. There is no campaign; the "Championship" mode may look like one from the cover, but it is nothing more than a tour to introduce players to all of the cars and environments. You earn heaps of cash from playing, but there is nothing that costs more than pocket change to spend it all on. The AI times to beat are complete pushovers. And the online leaderboards for each rally stage cap out at a mere top 12.

There is a lack of certain options. Graphics come in 3 presets, beyond that you may only toggle volumetric lighting and motion blur. There are 3 camera angles (cockpit, follow, overhead), but no way to fine tune them to your comfort.

The audio design has issues. The voiceovers of the caricaturistic co-drivers are a novelty, but some of their voice lines seem corrupted, with harsh static cut-offs and stuttering. Most of the vehicle engines are passable, but there are still some overclocked electric toothbrushes that play an uncomfortably high pitch. A good chunk of sound effects don't even properly load until you pause/unpause the game: this includes environmental audio, tire effects, and even the race start timer.

There are many areas that require fixes, and lots of room to improve. But with seemingly no public roadmap, one can only hope #DRIVE Rally's recent 1.0 release isn't the developer throwing in their hat and calling it a day.

An innovative take on the Advance Wars style of turn-based strategy games, Athena Crisis is not afraid to try something new

Although I find PAYDAY to be the better multiplayer experience, Crime Boss: Rockay City coexists as an excellent alternative with a greater focus on singleplayer

With just a couple tweaks to the difficulty settings, I find that the gameplay feels very much on par with Saints Row: The Third. I'd say it's even an improvement from SR:TT -- Santo Ileso is more varied and visually appealing than Steelport, city takeover feels more involved via the criminal ventures, and more player customization is always a plus. The new cast is admittedly weak (I only somewhat liked the nerd guy, the rest were ♥♥♥♥), and some of the humor falls flat in an attempt to appeal to today's culture. But the actual gameplay is still Saints Row regardless.

The new race type, "Endurance," isn't much different from the standard Circuit racing, only instead of laps, you race on a time limit. There is one gimmick, though, and that is the Multi-Class feature. Unlike the base game Multi-Class events, divisions compete amongst themselves, not each other, each having their own separate standings and winners -- essentially, you have between 2-5 separate races going on simultaneously, sharing the race track. You can, of course, set Endurance races to feature only 1 division in the race creator if you don't want the multi-class gimmick.

The 4 new cars and their classes are the Bentley Speed 8 (GT, Vintage Prototype), BMW V12 LMR (GT, Vintage Prototype), Bentley Continental (GT, Class 3) and Mazda Autozam AZ-1 (*New* Specials, Kei Car). These are a nice variety of picks across existing classes, and I'm wondering if we'll see more added to the newly added Kei Car class.

It's nice to finally see another new locale in GRID, in the form of Fuji Speedway. It offers 2 similar layouts (one just has a chicane removed), drivable in both forward and reverse, and can be raced on in the vast majority of race types,

The new story mode is OK. It has you racing for Seneca again, but now in the shoes of Lara following the main story. There are 8 events -- they are not made up entirely of the new Endurance race type, instead opting to mix in some Stadium Trucks and Electric events utilizing some new ramp and boost gates on routes that previously didn't support them. Neither the story nor sponsors give any rewards on completion, aside from some Steam Achievements, but the story does end with a cutscene that may be a teaser for the next expansion.

The combination of GRID's collision physics and AI make shoving and ramming vehicles feel terribly unfun. Yet Codemasters still thought it OK to make an expansion whose theme is "demolition derbies" (it's technically banger racing), without any apparent changes to said physics or AI.

The 5 cars and 4 track variations included are also locked exclusively to the demolition derby race type. I found that a bit disappointing, because I would've liked to be able to do regular races on base game tracks in a hot rod.

Finally, the extra story and sponsors don't serve much purpose, as there are seemingly no unlocks behind them beyond some Steam achievements.

If you're buying GRID DLC separately, you can safely skip this one. And if you absolutely must have demo derbies, look to Wreckfest instead.

JUMP ON IT!

I'm not going to compare this to prior DiRT series games, I think that's been done enough. As a standalone game, DIRT 5 doesn't necessarily do anything bad, but it also does nothing really good or unique. It's pretty bare-bones, just pick an event, a car, and then race. There's no upgrades, no team management. No gimmicks or features to stand out from any other racer. The different car classes didn't really change the game all that much, and neither did some of the event types (after 20 hours, I still don't know the difference between Stampede and Land Rush events). As I 100%'ed the base game's campaign -- 125 events in total -- it became very grating as it just went on and on, the races all feeling very samey; I don't think I have the patience to even start the extra 100 events the DLC all together add to that. Unless an incredibly simple, straight-forward racer is what you like, I wouldn't recommend this.

Upon this DLC's announcement months prior, I held onto this game thinking it'd be a breath of fresh air whilst the rest of the game was stale and unimpressive. It was not.

The monster trucks receive no different handling or physics; they're just regular cars, but 3 times the size and with abysmal handling. They lack suspension, cannot drive over / have no urgency over smaller cars (yes, you still race against standard cars, despite the advertising), get caught on the walls and spun around very easily, etc.. Their only perks are being able to smash through barriers, and are affected slightly less by a select few other obstacles. But overall, you're handicapping yourself by driving these vehicles.

As for the environment, the "Stop Motion Studio" looks like a different experience in the screenshot, but is just another regular location, the courses using the same old orange track pieces throughout. And the off-road environments do not bode well with the games physics: without any suspension modelling, a small bump easily loses you control of your vehicle.

The track module is meh, just a wrecking ball swinging back and forth (a little too fast, imo). At least we can play it with AI via the new official courses, which is more than I can say for the standalone track module DLCs.

When are basement customization and profile customization ever exciting?

And the new 3 achievements included are piss easy (upgrade a monster truck once, play a quick race in the new environment, and place first in just one of the added campaign levels).

Thoroughly disappointing. If you want to experience monster trucks properly, Hot Wheels is clearly not the place to turn to.

It's been over a decade and a half since Tt Games released LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game, introducing us to modern LEGO game formula. What better place to issue a massive overhaul to that formula than with franchise that we started with?

Firstly, my biggest takeaway is that LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga strikes me primarily as a collectathon game more than any prior LEGO game. There are over 1500 collectibles, from characters to khyber bricks, spread across over 2 dozen large free roam environments. These can be just lying about for you to pick up, or require you to solve a puzzle of some sort; many even take you on fairly lengthy quest lines. If you enjoy games like Super Mario Odyssey, for example, this is more of the same.

The level structure of LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is very different from it's predecessors. A vast majority of the stories take place within the free roam environments, sending you to various locations to progress the story. Every now and again you'll be taken to a proper "level:" there are 5 per film, and these levels seem to be mostly reserved for scenes that majorly involve vehicles, space battles, and boss fights.

There are some remarks about what has all been represented in this video game. The battle over Coruscant from the start of Revenge of the Sith, for example, is almost completely skipped, with the game throwing you directly into the Invisible Hand to fight Count Dooku. The Death Star assault is an incredibly short skirmish, despite being the grand finale of A New Hope. Meanwhile, the submarine segment from The Phantom Menace has been drawn out into an easy but prolonged boss battle of sorts. There are also a lot of wishes for representation from other media, such as The Clone Wars; while I'm not expecting it, as it's not the focus of this game, I would certainly enjoy some fully fleshed story DLC for these instances, instead of just mere character packs (previous games have had level packs, so it's not entirely out of the question).

As for what it did right with the story, I think it did well. I was much more engaged in this than I was with the corny original story-line of, say, LEGO DC Super-villains. The voice acting is mostly excellent, as far as the main cast goes, featuring voices previously heard in Star Wars works such as The Clone Wars. The writing has also improved; it's not too serious, being filled with gags, but it's also not packed with tasteless jokes (LEGO Marvel Superheroes must've had at least 100 different "chicken vs egg" lines recorded). Although I still miss the time before voice acting was introduced to LEGO games (Mumble Mode can only go so far without any pantomiming), I was still very happy with what we got.

The rest of the gameplay overhauled in LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga has made major strides. With the new over-the-shoulder view, static camera angles have been completely eradicated. Shooting is made more entertaining with free aiming, a cover system, and enemies that react to where you shoot them. And melee combat is not slept on, either, as every character can mix up combos from 3 different attack buttons, as well as a dodge and counter. Enemies will even block attacks if you mash only a single button, encouraging you to mix things up. Overall, this is a significantly more interactive game than prior games.

At the end of the day, this is easily my favorite LEGO game to this date, and I'm excited to see where Tt Games goes next with its updated formula (I, for one, would be down for Harry Potter + Fantastical Beasts).