Rally, Touring cars, super bikes, trucks….. There's a racing game for practically every racing discipline on the 360 and unfortunately a lot of them suck. Hats off to codemasters then for producing some really good F1 sims on the console. F1 2011 is the second in the series and is basically everything you would expect from an F1 sim. Licensed drivers and teams. A full championship mode featuring full race weekends. your basic exhibitions and online modes. Time trial racing. A nice selection of licensed F1 tracks from this years championship. The game looks great also. Driving around famous locations such as Monza or Spa are made better by the details in all the race tracks. Trees swaying the in background, the detailed buildings of street races like monaco, it's all here and gives you a more authentic experience. The game also handles well and has enough options in terms of assists to help you progress as a driver. I do have to say I found this version quite easy in comparrison to some of the other codemasters F1 games, and while the computer AI can be changed, it was a little bit difficult to find that sweet spot. Aside from this nitpicking, its a really great F1 racer and you can have a lot of fun with this one. The thing is, there are 5 F1 games on the console, all of which are fairly cheap and while 2011 is great, it's not the best in the series in my opnion. Because of this, it's kind of difficult to recommend this one, as do you really need more than one F1 game?

Under rated game alert. Viking: Battle for Asgard manages to tread the fine line between simplicity and being too simple and manages to deliver a hack and slash experience that is a lot of fun. You play as some random viking dude hacking the shit out of orcs as you fight to reclaim your lands. It's a simple story, with simple gameplay mechanics and it works great. Being completely sick of these repetative open world games which are made artificially longer by repeating pointless tasks, Viking gets straight to the point. There are 3 islands that you have to reclaim, each being fairly small without a great deal of filler. The gameplay is a simplistic but nice take on god of war, mostly hack and slash but including some blocking and dodging which add to the variety. The best part of the game is the epic wars that you find yourself in. Hundreds of enemies on each side, just slicing limbs off of each other. The game does have some bugs. I found that every so often it would stop for a second or two. This wasn't game breaking, but was very annoying. If you can get past this, it's a great little game, which I highly reccomend.

The less you relate this game to gothic the more you will enjoy it. As someone who has not yet played a gothic game, (I plan to change that) I had a pretty good time with this one. Arcania is a WRPG in the vein of Two Worlds, Dragons Dogma, Risen, Kingdoms of Amalaur etc etc. If you haven't tried any of these, its a single player adventure RPG, which features some hack and slash combat, spells, leveling up your character, a bunch of quests, loot and a semi- open world to explore. Most of these type of games have fairly servicable but simple combat style, so in my opinion live and die by the way they ask the player to interact with the environment. In this sense, Arcanaia is a fairly linear affair, with the game splitting the open world into small sections with a main quest and a few small side quests. It's probably to the games benefit and there is enough material to let you enjoy the environment, but not to get bogged down. It also means that the game doesn't suffer from the issues of going back and forward between locations a million times, ala dragons dogma. Another nice thing about this game is your bag does not have a weight limit, making loot super easy to deal with. The combat itself is fine, theres a bit of variety to the melee and it doesn't feel as clunky as Two Worlds. Magic can get a bit boring, just spamming auto targetted spells without much thought, but at least you have that option. The environments are quite nice and varied, but the game seems to be constantly loading the enivornment as you walk around. It has some flaws, horrible voice acting, dodgy controls, a poor camera. Yet, none of this really takes away from the fun. One of the better WRPGs on the console while not really standing out from the crowd for any positive or negative reasons. Does it hold up in 2023? Yes, I think so, especially if you are sick of the cluttered, busy modern rpgs.

It's nice when a game has a clear simple concept, executed well. At it's heart, that's what bulletstorm is. A FPS which focuses on crazy kills and having fun. A bit like a first person gears of war that takes itself even less seriously, bulletstorm puts you through a while fairly short, pretty fun and action packed campaign. The story doesn't matter, it's all about killing enemies in the mos fun ways possible. You can kick enemies and they go flying. You have a leash to pull enemies towards you. Your guns all have a variety of firing modes, some of which are totally crazy too. Best of all, the environment is set up with a bunch of things to help you kill enemies. The main focus of the game is linking all these together to create ever more crazy kills as you work through the campaign or online multiplayer. In many ways it's a breath of fresh air, focusing 100% on fun, and it mostly succeeds. I really enjoy the challenges it gives you, a checklist almost, which encourages you to kill in different ways. At some points though, it does get a bit samey. It's perhaps because the levels all have the same focus. You are either fighting your way through a series or enemies, or holding a room from an enslaught of enemies. This is maybe a weak criticism, as many games are like that, but i did find myself bored at times. With that in mind, i still highly recommend bullet storm. I like to pull it out every now and again and blast through an hour or two in between playing other games. A nice one to have in the collection.

With the mess of tennis games on the console, it's a little bit difficult for tennis fans to figure out what to play. To simplify things for this, Top Spin is your premium simulation series, and in my opinion the best option for fans of tennis on the console. There are 3 entries in the series, and I have picked 2 as my favourite as I think it is really quite impressive for a 2006 title. Top spin 3 makes some changes, but some of them not are good ones and over complicate things. Top Spin 4 goes on to make solid improvements and is arguably the best in the series. However, due to the similarity of the three, I decided to rank them together. I really think only the biggest tennis nerds need more than one of these. So what is so good about these games? Well, for a start its a great blend of easy to play but difficult to master. The career mode has an excellent tutorial, interjecting in the gameplay every now and again to teach you a new move. I really enjoyed this approach and found it a lot more fun than them teaching you everything in one boring block. The career starts you as a rookie created character, and each week you will work with your trainer on drills to improve your stats. This progression system is a lot fun and adds some connection with the created player. Most of the training activities are fun minigames that really help you understand the controls and different techniques for getting points. They are simple such as using power to hit a box out of the court, or hitting bowling balls to knock down pins, but quite effecitve and fun too. Once you have built up your stats and can take part in the competition you will find that it's quite hard. You can't just press A and direct the ball, you really need to master different shots and tactics. In this regard, it's quite different from the more arcade style gameplay from titles like virtua tennis. Yet, even as a non-tennis fan, I was willing to put time in to master it and had a lot of fun with it. Even if you are not putting time into the career mode, this style of gameplay is great for 1 on 1 or doubles couch play with your friends and really makes the game stand out. I can definitely reccomend this one to all 360 owners. If you are willing to put a bit of time in, you will get a lot out of this series. If you are picking one up in 2023, while there is some decent progression in the series and some improvements, I think top spin 2 holds up as the best of the bunch, and is definitely the most impressive for its age.

With all the more recent excellent battlefield campaigns like Battlefield 1 and Bad Company 2, it's easy to forget that the first few battlefield games didn't even include a campaign. For whatever reason, they decided to change that with the release of Battlefield 2 Modern Combat, the first battlefield release on the 360. Based on the PC game battlefield 2, which was multipalyer only, the console version offers a fairly decent single player mode which is very similar to the multiplayer mode. This was a great decision as the multiplayer mode is what battlefield excels at. You are a nameless soldier in wave upon wave of others working together to capture bases and advance further behind enemy lines. It does feel clunky and a bit basic, but it's a real nice throwback to shooters of old and plays to the series strengths. Similarly to the excellent Call of Duty 2, your AI teammates are vital to your survival, and the war off attrition feeling to the game keeps your pushing to make it a little further each run. One of the best aspects of the campaign is the Hot-Swapping feature, which lets your warp between different soldiers at will and pick who you respawn as. This keeps the action constantly going and you can be tactical about who you pick to face the different challenges of each mission. Another funny quirk of the game is how much damage you take is related to how many enemies you can see on the screen. This means that in some cases the best tactic is to look at the floor and just run forward. It's stupid stuff like this that makes the game more enjoyable and it really works as a dumb fun throwback FPS. Surprisngly good and a definitely worth picking up for cheap.

After loading up the game and being greeted by a bunch of random warning, yes it's ok to autosave no need to make a warning box about it, DOA5 informed me I needed a online pass. I loaded up the marketplace tab to enter the code on the back of my booklet and was greeted by a selection of purchase able costumes. Bikinis and bunny costumes galore. "You might find it hard to keep your head in the fight with this sexy cheerleading uniform", the marketplace proudly states. Errr right.... It was off putting to say the least. Luckily my code from my 2nd hand game worked ( I guess they don't expire), not that it mattered as the online was predictably dead. Ready to hate the game, I started off on the story mode. I was met with some really nice graphics and a very detailed story, which while extremely cheesy, was quite impressive, especially the voice acting. The fights themselves are interspersed among the story scenes and are directly related to the story. The fights themselves act as an excellent tutorial. Each fight teaches you a new move, from simple punches early on, to blocking, countering and combos later on. This is such a nice change from so many fighting games that fail to adequately explain the game mechanics and it really helped me understand and enjoy the fights. The fighting system itself is simple to use but difficult to master. Moves link together well so it is easy to pull of combos. Blocks are simple to execute and really give you a good chance to counter the enemy fighter. The system itself just feels great and is really nice to play. Perhaps I have acieved complete pervert status by enjoying a game famous for it's boob physics, but it's hard not to be impressed by DOA5. As with all fighting games, the death of the online community is a huge drawback nowadays, and there are definitely better fighting games out there, but DOA5 holds its own as a fun game for both perverts and non perverts alike.

If there is one simple joy in video games that is universally recognized, it's gotta be shooting red barrels equals a big fun explosion. Battlefield Bad company is that idea bottled. In previous battlefield campaigns EA hadn't really bothered with the campaign. I guess after the success of the COD games like MW1 they decided to follow suit and flesh out the campaign with some characters and a story, and it works pretty well. The story is fairly interesting and the characters have some memorable lines. It controls well and has a nice variety of different guns and explosives, plus a bunch of vehicles to have fun with. It's one of the hardest campaigns I've played on normal, and I really enjoyed the challenge. This is slightly ruined however by the fact that when you die you just respawn and the enemies don't, which makes the difficulty pointless. I much preferred the never-ending wave of enemies style of Call of duty two. I even got a chance to play a bit of multiplayer too which was excellent. Overall a pretty decent shooter, let down by the respawns. Worth a shot for FPS fans.

Is it worth a try still?
Worth it for the explosions alone.

Back in the early days of the 360, the draw of a good multiplayer game really excited people. Xbox live was getting more popular and improving each year and the number of decent online games couldn't keep up with the demand. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfare dropped in early 2006 and was a huge hit. The online coop and versus modes were polished and better than most of the competition. It was lauded for it's smart AI and beautiful graphics but most people stuck around for the online play. Reviewers loved the game and it ended up with a score of 91% on Metacritic. 20 years later, with the multiplayer no longer really playable, does this hold up? No absolutely not. GRAW is a 3rd or 1st person shooter, with most of your time spent in a team of 4 soldiers. The story focuses around saving politicians and something called the football? To be honest I wasn't paying much attention, but its very much your standard mid 2000s anti terrorism type of story. Levels take place in fairly realistic environments and the you do get a good sense of urgency and danger as you play through the levels. The enemy AI does hold up and gives you a fairly hard time at parts, and the feeling of being pinned down by enemies, with the now common cover system works well. I think that is the issue with this game, anything it did well has become pretty commonplace nowadays. The cover system, enemy AI, online coop, teamwork aspects, all of it is not so impressive in 2023. I found myself having fun through the 8ish hours of the campaign, but it wasn't particularly memorable. One of the bigger frustrations is the tactical nature of the game. Previous advanced warfare games in the series were very tactical affairs, requiring planning and skill to get through missions. GRAW 1 has dumbed things down for the 360 generation and a lot of the fun has been taken out because of it. It's pretty easy to run and gun through the campaign without the help of your teammates. Your AI teammates also make the game too easy in some parts. Acting as meat shields, they draw the fire of enemies while you pick them off from afar. It takes away from the tension of the game, and I found myself enjoying the single player sections a lot more due to this tension. Its hard to imagine anyone giving this a score of 90% nowadays and it really doesn't hold up to this score. There is fun to be had here, but don't get your expectations up.

Having played and enjoyed Battlefield 2 and Bad Company, I decided to skip 3 for now and move onto 4. The series has always excelled in its online multiplayer, so of course looking at the game as an entry into your collection today is perhaps a little unfair. I do think B4 is a worthwhile addition to your collection however, as more of a reference to the history of FPS games than for a solid single player campaign. In my mind Battlefield 4 is the perfect example of a modern or at least Xbox One style modern FPS game. It feels modern, with its highly detailed and dramatic cutscenes, it's excellent modern feeling control scheme, the online functionality, huge levels, good physics with explosions and bullet drop, some of th ebest graphics on the console and of couse a bunch of bugs. The campaign itself is a great example of this. Like a lot of modern shooters, the campaign feels like a an afterthought hidden behind a shiny Hollywood blockbuster story and set up. The story, voice acting and the feel of the levels can be commended. It feels like a lot of effort has been put in and on the surface level it's really impressive, but delving deeper the cracks start to appear. Firstly, the epic story doesn't really match the campaign. With only 7 levels, the campaign is very short, but the story seemed to be designed for a bigger project, which leaves it feeling very rushed and confusing. The levels themselves are also a bit shallow. The first mission is fairly epic and sets up the campaign well. Things go downhill fairly quickly however, with most missions feeling very narrow and linear, and a number of strange difficult spikes and strange tank destroying sections. It's a real mix of highs and lows and it gives the feeling that it could have been a great campaign if more time and effort was put in. There's a great section in the campagin where you are battling through a damaged city to reach the last base of resistance holding out deep in enemy lines. There's a great feeling of relief when you finally make it behind the friendly walls, seeing all the exhausted and depleted soldiers in the base. I was quite excited by some epic last stand style mission following this. Instead, we were greeted by the commander who basically told us to F off, and we just left in a car. These issues don't ruin the campaign, it's still pretty fun in parts. But It seems like this could have been an epic Modern warfare 1 style adventure, and what we are left with is slightly dissapointing. A very interesting but flawed campaign.

Revelations, a side story to the mainstream resident evil games, start with a 3DS game which was then ported to other consoles. Here, rather confusingly, we have the sequel. It's a sequel in loose terms as it links to the first game, but isn't really a direct continuation of the story, or at least it doesn't feel like it. The game is split into two main story arcs, Clair and Barry's daughter and then Barry and some random kid, with each story split into 4 sections. This intense segmentation of the game is because it was released in small installments, similar to the walking dead or the latest series of hitman. This seems like a strange decision, and I'm really confused as to why they did this, luckily its all available on the disk. The game actually starts off quite nicely. The first segment of the game is a lot of fun. It has coop gameplay throughout and is perfect for couples with a more dominant character doing most of the combat, and a side character helping out with finding hidden objects and distracting enemies. After playing through a level with Claire and Barry's daughter you then get to try a different route on a later timeline with Barry and the random kid. Unfortunately, the level design gradually gets worse, meaing it becomes a real pain to repeat these boring levels again. It's a shame because the game starts off so well, the gradual decline to bore fest is sad to see. The game also includes the excellent mercenaries levels, where most of the fun can be had. You take part in various combat challenges in coop or with friends online, from levels from previous games in the series. This mode is fun, and the call backs to enemies and locations from previous games is a nice touch. Overall the mercenaries section saves this game which ends up leaving you feeling gradually more and more disappointed.

As a series need for speed is exhausting. When you pick up one of these games you never know what you are going to get. Games like Most Wanted are street racing and battling rivals. Shift went more down the simulation route. The Run introduced some weird giant race mechanic. Rivals is the last game released on the 360 and one of the better ones in my opinion. The game seems to follow on from the Hot Pursuit series, mixing up some underground gangs and police chases. You have two parts of the game, the police side and the gang side, both offer slightly different gameplay. You are dropped into a decently sized and quite pretty open world map and given 3 different sets of challenges. You work your way through the ranks, completing these tasks in any way you choose, and leveling up unlocking different cars and gadgets. The tasks are quite nicely varied and the cars handle well and are fun to drive, but its nothing particularly special. Perhaps I am jaded from playing too many crappy NFS games, but as I had such low expectation I was almost able to ignore the shortcomings of this game. At the heart of it, it is Hot Pursuit 2. All of the criticisms that I levelled against that game are even more relevant here. It is everything a bland modern racer stands for and sticks far too closely to the standard set up of many racing games of this era, making it very forgettable. However, it is still a fun fast paced arcade racer. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, but fans of simple arcade racers will enjoy it.

Street Fighter 2 was the first video game I every played, and for that reason I loved it. The popular 1 on 1 fighting series basically revolutionised console fighting games and most modern fighting games in some way pay their respects to that absolute classic. The console realease of Street Fighter 4 also garnered a lot of praise and is apparently one of the best fighting games on the console, but for me, it's fairly boring. That's ok. We are all different and some games just won't gel with us, even though they are supposed to be excellent, but 7 year old me feels sad. SF4 has been praised for it's netplay and online modes, which isn't really relevant to me. Its graphics, which are beautiful. But most of all praise was heaped upon its deep gameplay. I think that is probably the issue for me. As far as a pick up as go fighter, SF4 isn't really it. It feels sluggish and slow to start off with, and combos and special moves are really hard to pull off. Another issue I have with the game is the lack of story and the poorly animated cutscenes. The characters and their backgrounds was one of the main draws of the SF series, yet it seems to have been slightly ignored here. I'm sure If i stuck a good 20 hours into this game I would love it, but so far in my 4 attempts I haven't got much out of it.

I've seen reviews of this game which highlight it's "massive" open world and it's "amazing" and "forward thinking" pawn system. Personally I was quite baffled when I played the game. I spent most of my time walking between the same two towns of a map which is hardly massive. The pawn system while fine is nothing to write home about, I would rather have companions that actually have something interesting to say. That's not to say I didn't enjoy the game. It has its charm, the combat system is good, you are able to grab onto enemies and team up with your pawns, the quests are fairly solid too. Unfortunately, its bogged down by walking over the same boring path with the same enemies who respawn in exactly the same places. On the other hand you can use a warp stone and skip most of the game. If you are a fan of action RPGs, especially difficult ones, then this is a semi- enjoyable romp. The side missions are quite detailed and normally have an interesting set up. The graphics are quite nice. However, it feels like it could have been better and in many ways seems a little over-hyped.

Some games have such a bad ass premise that they are almost destined to fail. Fighting Mythical creatures in NYC, the badass boxart, distributed by gamecock, protagonist call Dickhard, wait what? Legendary in many ways suffered from its own success and ended up with terrible reviews. Well, I'm here to tell you that these reviews were probably too harsh, and Legendary is pretty fun. It's a member of the 4 hour campaign crappy FPS group that I am overly fond of. Playing as Dickhard, you have to blast your way through waves of enemies, more doom style than call of duty, including minotaurs, griffins and werewolves. The enemies are pretty badass, and you have to deal with them in different ways which adds a bit of variety. Werewolves have to be shot in the head after they die to stop them regenerating, fairies can only be shot when they are attacking, human soldiers can only be killed if you can aim the shitty controls. Yes this game is made by the same people who made turning point, so its no surprise that the controls are quite slow and unresponsive. It is however a huge improvement on Turning Point, both in terms of controls and how much fun it is to actually play. It reminds me more of a budget F.E.A.R than Turning Point, with its difficulty and how quickly the enemy soldiers kill you and while the horror elements mostly miss the mark, they do help the game stand out from the crowd of generic FPS games. I was wuite disappointed with some of the level locations. It's awesome to start off with civilians get eaten griffins in time square and seeing big ben getting smashed by a giant Kraken was dope, but the intermittent sewers and metro station levels are far less imaginative. I also want to give a shout out to the wolves for always glitching out and getting stuck in walls so you can't blast their head off, thanks guys. Yes it's kinda bad, but no where near as bad as the reviews state and it IS fun to play. Worth picking up cheap just to experience the short campaign and see if you disagree with the critics.