Recent reviews by Kirjava

I'm not a typical Souls-like fan, and I bounced off this game at first- but persevere. There is such a rewarding experience waiting for you if you power through the pain barrier and get to grips with Elden Ring's idiosyncratic game design, narrative and combat. Initially I sighed and prepared myself for a frustrating experience I would not enjoy... and now I've got over 300 hours in it and this thing is consuming my mind. If anyone ever tells you games are not art, show them this, then go back to making your way through hauntingly beautiful landscapes against mournful but fearsome enemies.

Nothing is quite as exciting and enthralling as getting to explore more Elden Ring for the first time. Marvellous atmosphere and mood. Frame rate chugs a little so could definitely do with some optimisation but the actual game is stellar. Don't worry about the difficulty- if I can beat these bosses, anyone can!

its very good!!!!!!!!!!

The gunplay is so solid and satisfying that I can forgive any amount of noun salad worldbuilding and naff scifi narrative. Suffice it to say that, after mainlining free-to-play Destiny 2, I was happy to shell out for Forsaken and Shadowkeep, which ought to be recommendation enough.

Rome 2 was abysmal, Attila was riddled with bugs... fret not, here comes Warhammer to save the day! Whilst at its core this is a typical Total War game (with all the good and bad that implies), Creative Assembly have been allowed to really cut loose and go a bit mad. The result is zombie dragons, flaming skulls and dudes that ride mini-griffins, and it's all awesome. With a fantasy setting to run wild in, the campaign finally finds that mix of variety and challenge that so many Total War games before have lacked. The variety of the factions is such a change when contrasted with the poor old historical titles' long list of, "Guys wearing different outfits", and watching Orcs lay into Dwarves is really quite something.

Negatives remain: though their reaction time has improved this time around, CA is still slow to respond to bugs and issues in the game. There are base features of design carried over from previous iterations that still stick in the craw, and the AI, while further enabled by some increased simplification of systems, continues to disappoint in its (allegedly) strategic and tactical thinking. New disappointments loom: the simplification of Siege mode rankles with many, for example.

CA's approach to DLC bears mentioning. It looks a lot like most of the negative Steam reviews for Warhammer revolve around this, and it's an utterly baffling criticism to have when, initial FUBARs regarding the Warriors of Chaos DLC aside, it's all been handled rather well. The initial purchase gives you four great armies. Subsequent DLC has buffed that to a grand total of seven (including the Wood Elves, two days away at time of writing), or eight in multiplayer if you include Bretonnians, who are coming in 2017- for free! At the same time as this, CA have provided a steady flow of free patches and updates to accompany their priced content. People can quibble over the cost, but this is the best way to do DLC, as developers like Paradox have demonstrated.

In summary, then: Total War: Warhammer rises above its predecessors as a colourful, interesting and fun twist on the TW formula. Some of the same old problems remain, but above all it is a glorious success. Praise Sigmar!

This is a wonderful little shooter. It isn't polished to within an inch of its life, it's a bit janky here and there, and it can most definitely feel very unfair sometimes. What it does very successfully is create an atmosphere of verisimilitude that allows for what seems to me like a rare thing: a game that is simultaneously historically faithful and mechanically satisfying, with a main multiplayer mode that roots the action in a tangible objective, simulating the back-and-forth of trench warfare as best it can. Again, it's not perfect by a long shot, but compared with other, more generic shooters, this feels full of personality.

Payday 2 used to be a fantastic co-op siege shooter with a lot of depth and a host of options. As of this October, however, it has completed its long, slow metamorphosis into a microtransaction-based DLC hell, complete with devs that cheerfully flip the bird to their fanbase. It's a crying shame given how much time and money I've put into the game, but I can't recommend what was once a great experience in good conscience anymore.

Try Vermintide instead!

There is one basic and important thing to know about Spec Ops: The Line, and that's that it is at the same time a deeply satisfying and a deeply frustrating experience. Gameplay-wise, it's a fairly competent shooter marred by some very poor design decisions- checkpoints often come before cutscenes and are too far apart, which, combined with the surprisingly unforgiving difficulty (even on Normal you can find yourself gunned down in seconds) can be teeth-grindingly annoying. The range of guns you can pick up is unremarkable and there are nice secondary functions to a lot of them; you can carry three kinds of grenades; the cover mechanic is just flawed enough to be irritating but functions tolerably for the most part.

This is not a game about gameplay, however.

Were it to be judged purely on its design and mechanics, Spec Ops: The Line would be pretty forgettable, but it has an ace in the hole: a story so out of the blue in its direction and message that it's a miracle a major publisher put this game out at all. What you think you're getting- particularly if you only play the demo- is another gung-ho gun-wielding slice of Americans saving the day by killing all the brown people. What you actually get is a slow, spiralling descent into madness that wears its Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now inspirations proudly and uses them to forge a modern-day commentary on the type of video game you thought you were going to play. Captain Walker is no godly Call of Duty avatar who can murder a thousand people and walk away- he falls apart mentally, visually and audibly as the game continues, his professionalism is stripped away and raw ego left exposed. "Tango down" becomes a more chilling, "Kill is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ confirmed" as the game confronts you with issues of culpability and responsibility. It's incredibly unsettling.

If you don't come away from Spec Ops: The Line with questions and doubts about shooters, I have serious concerns about whether you're dead inside. Do your best to ignore the sometimes-frustrating controls and systems and try and appreciate just how important this game is in the history of, and commentary on, shooters.

If you've got a "giant robots from the 80s"-shaped hole in your heart that only Transformers can fill, like I have, then by Primus, this is the game for you!

While Fall of Cybertron isn't a perfect PC port by any stretch of the imagination (the control and graphics options are mediocre to say the least), it's eons ahead of its predecessor War for Cybertron. Crank it up to the highest graphics setting and you won't care so much about making adjustments, because apart from a couple of slow texture loads here and there this is a beautiful game. Transformers are covered in detail, just like last time, but where WfC was criticised for its muted colours and lacklustre landscapes, here we get eye-popping shines on Optimus' red and blue paintwork, and Megatron is deliciously evil in a murderous black and purple (though on the whole, the Decepticon colour palette is more muted than the Autobots', which is a shame), while they and their armies battle over magnificent Cybertronian vistas.

Combat is a bit finicky here and there but good overall- there's a very meaty (metallic?) feel to FoC, a real weight to your robots, which lends to a real feeling of satisfaction as you storm positions and make use of a combination of guns, melee, abilities and gadgets to wipe out the enemy. Even your inventory is turned into a bit of a meta-game, with energon goodies scattered throughout the game that you can use to upgrade your guns. Upgrade a weapon three times and you unlock a final bonus with ludicous benefits- the Riot Cannon, for instance, ends up doing something like 500% its normal damage on the final shot in a clip (I might be misremembering the details, but that's the gist of it). These bonuses lend the later game a gratifying sense of power, and you can carve your way through the enemy with merry abandon. The only downside is vehicle mode- it's still fun, but, vehicle-specific sections aside, it's hard to see much benefit of transforming when control in robot mode is so much more precise. I still love swooping around as a flyer, transforming in mid-air, falling for a while and then transforming again before zooming away, but it's something you do because you think it's bloody cool, not because there's much gameplay benefit.

Multiplayer consists of various competitive modes (team deathmatch, capture the flag, etc), and has a better Build Your Own Transformer system than the first, though as mentioned the colour palettes still leave a lot to be desired. In-game, you might find yourself running around a bit trying to find people in some of the larger maps, but on the whole the pace is fast and rewarding. Kill the enemy and support your team to level up and unlock more weapons, abilities and Transformer bodies to customise your classes (Scout, Destroyer, Titan and Scientist). Or, if you feel like playing a Horde mode, there's Escalation, where you choose from a selection of named Autobots or Decepticons to fight against wave after wave of enemies. Kills are rewarded with energon points, which you can use to buy weapons, health, upgrades or to open up new areas of the map. It gets punishingly difficult, especially without four players.

In summary, because this has got a bit long: forget the Michael Bay nonsense. There are more loving nods towards what you remember from the original G1 cartoon in FoC than I suspect we will ever see in the entire movie franchise, and the care and attention that has gone into making this is obvious. As a massive Transformers fan, it's this that wins me over more than anything. The fact that it's a really fun game underneath helps, of course!

EDIT: I initially wrote this review two months after Rome 2 was released, which I think is obvious given my reaction to it. Total War games are, since Empire, not known for being in a particularly high-quality state at launch, but Rome 2 really took the biscuit. It was dreadful.

Anyway, fast forward seven months. It's almost the end of June now, and Rome 2 has received 13 patches to date, as well as two main DLC expansions and several "free-LC" updates. The second of those major DLC expansions, Hannibal At The Gates, brought me back to Rome 2, and I have to say that the state of the game is far improved. Those awful "capture the flag" bits are gone, the technical performance of the game is better, there are more factions, more units, more features, more everything. The HatG mini-campaign is (annoying Agents aside) about as close to a perfect Total War campaign as I could ask for, and the factions are more balanced. Those unbearable turn-load times I mentioned before? Dealt with. Basically almost everything has been improved.

There're still some glaring errors- siege AI remains fundamentally thick-headed, naval battles are still dogged by the AI insisting on clumping all its ships together in a mess when it regroups, and the policy of charging for factions still makes me sick- but the game is in a state where it can be played and enjoyed. That mod that brings the original Rome music into the game is brilliant too!

I've left the original review below.

* * * * * * * *

Given how much I was looking forward to this after the first Rome game, Rome 2 is disappointment in video game form. Technical issues have abounded from day 1- it looks like I've got over 100 hours logged, but most of that was spent waiting for the AI to take its turns. Though this and many other issues have since been patched, it's a mark of how important it is for a game to launch with at least a pretence of smoothness: I haven't gone back to Rome 2 in a month. It's not just the bugs that have killed my enjoyment, it's some quite fundamental alterations to the way the game plays as well as some baffling design choices. As usual, the game lacks difficulty after a certain point, and the game's attempt to introduce a mid/late-game challenge is to spawn rebels with inexplicable amounts of troops instead of, say, actually building up enemies to be a threat. Agents are more of an irritation than anything else; the AI seems to prefer a bunch of smaller armies instead of larger ones that makes fighting them more akin to a game of whack-a-mole than anything else; multiplayer has been utterly eviscerated since Shogun 2.

There are some bright spots: the new cinematic mode makes engagements a joy to watch, for instance, and the army traditions help breed attachment to your forces and can lead to some nice emerging stories. Unfortunately this is nowhere near enough to make up for the disappointment of everything else- the AI, the design choices, the multiplayer, the loathesome attitude towards DLC. Avoid if at all possible.