Luigi's Mansion 3 is bursting with charm and personality that I've come to expect from this series. While the gameplay largely remains the consistent throughout, use your torch to stun ghosts and then suck them up with your vacuum, each level of the hotel has a unique theme and end boss that made me eager to progress to see what the game offered next.

Despite thoroughly enjoying Luigi's Mansion 3, there were a few things that were a let down, which can be summed up as a lack of polish I come to expect from Nintendo. Controlling Luigi can be fiddly at times, especially when trying to reoriente Luigi while charging his torch to stun ghosts with. A couple of the puzzles required me to look up a solution online; I knew what I had to do to solve it but I didn't know what interaction the game was expecting from me. There's a jump in difficulty when it comes to the final two bosses that may catch some people out, after having 15 hours of consistent low challenge.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with Luigi's Mansion 3 and I would recommend to the majority of Switch owners. If you missed out on the excellent Luigi's Mansion 2 on the 3DS, you'll get a very similar experience that those players got with this game.

Halo Infinite feels like a game where Microsoft and 343 are making a conscious effort to bringing the franchise back to an identity that fans are familiar with, while moving things forward in a way that keep things fresh.

The gunplay feels solid, with weapons feeling quite distinct from one another. The open nature of Zeta Halo feels like you have room to experiment around with how you want to tackle different combat. The enemy AI feels smart in a way that makes sense and the friendly AI marines can hold their own in combat effectively, at least on heroic difficulty.

Aside from the open world design Halo Infinite decided to incorporate for the first time, the big new mechanic the game has included is the grapple hook. I was somewhat weary when the grapple hook was first shown off in previews until I got to play around with it myself. The grapple hook makes traversing around the open world so much fun, allowing you to zip distances quickly and traverse the steepest of cliff faces with relative ease. The grapple hook can be very handy in combat by smashing yourself into enemies.

The presentation of Halo Infinite is top notch. Jen Taylor’s performance made me want to keep pressing forward through the story to see how the relationship of her character, The Weapon, with the stoic Master Chief played out over the course of the game.

There are a few notable drawbacks that the game does have. The story hooks that were setup in Halo 5: Guardians were binned off (for better or worse), most likely due to negative feedback from fans. It felt that there was little to no connecting story tissue between the events of this game and Halo 5: Guardians, so I was unclear on what led up to the events of Halo Infinite. The origins of The Banished are left unexplained to players, unless they had played Halo Wars 2, and the events that led up to the opening cutscene will likely leave many players scratching their heads with confusion. Much of the story is focused on the events that happened prior to Infinite, instead of the here and now with Chief and The Weapon.

While the open outdoor areas of Zeta Halo had various green lands and barren cliff faces to zip about with the grapple shot, the indoor areas that were played during the story mission were a different matter. The Forerunner corridors all had the same cold, metallic-grey look and feel to them. It would be nice to have some more visual variety those levels, but I suspect this is another result of the turbulent development process the game went through.

Co-op online was a mixed bag. While I had fun messing about in the open world with my friend, as well as coming up with different tactics to defeat the tougher bosses, the linear levels didn't feel like they were designed with co-op in mind. Firing your weapon and the hit being registered by an enemy had a noticeable delay. The most frequent bug was the game not registering the equipment that I wanted to switch to, which always seemed to happen in the middle of a firefight. The only resolution was to ask my friend to kill me to death, which he happily obliged. Thanks, Aaron.

Overall, I had a fun time playing through Halo Infinite. The game takes a good step of trying to win back the fans of the 21-year-old franchise by looking back at what made the Halo franchise so fun to play in first place. If Microsoft and 343 continue to make this upward trend for the Halo franchise, at least with the single player campaign, I look forward to seeing what they have next instore for us in the future.

Three word review: Not Evolved Enough

Halo 5: Guardians feels like a game with an identity crisis; while 343i is putting their own mark on the franchise, instead of rehashing the same thing that Bungie has done with Halo for nine years, but also not getting what made the games resonate with fans so well.

There as some good things about the game. As you are always playing in a squad with three other AI-controlled Spartans by your side, Halo 5: Guardians give the player the ability to issue commands to your team; you can order them to move to a specific area, attack a specific enemy, pick up a certain weapon, heal you, etc. This command feature was something that I wish I had when playing Halo: Reach, a game where you supposed to be one member of a team but the game did very little to make you feel that you were part of a coordinated team.

The Promethean weapons, something that was a frequent complaint of being underwhelming to use, have been tweaked to make them a much more viable option in combat, even on harder difficulty levels.

The game also runs at a 60 frames per second. With the inclusion of the dynamic resolution, the action always remains at a silky smooth frame rate no matter how much action appears on screen.

However, Halo 5: Guardians is riddled with many problems that more or less persist from start to finish. You’re frequently bouncing from one planet to the next with each level, so you don’t get a real feel for the setting that you’re in before whisked away to some place different. The levels themselves, aside from a couple that I quote enjoyed, lack the interesting level design that I had come to expect from the franchise.

A gameplay tweak added to Halo 5: Guardians is the ability to use site-aim on nearly every weapon in the game, something that those who are versed in the Call of Duty series will be familiar with. While I don’t find this a problem in of itself, it’s an odd addition to make for the game that I never felt was needed, which further muddies the series identity. Is 343i trying to modernise the Halo franchise in a way that brings it up along with other modern first person shooters today? Or is 343i trying to entice the Call of Duty crowd over with features that they will be comfortable with.

The presentation seems to be all over the place too. Cutscenes feel that they’re only there to give the player the least amount of plot before awkwardly fading to black. I’m unsure if this is a result of running out of time or budget or a result of the story being reworked or a combination of the three. The game also features talented actors, such as Laura Bailey and Nathan Fillion, but they’re barely present in the story or gameplay that it makes you wonder why 343i went to the effort to hire such talent.

Along with the presentation issues with the story itself; the story does a very poor job of establishing the characters, the setting, and the stakes. There are some interesting themes that are brought up in the story, such as rebuilding in a post galactic war time where resuming your old life might bring back old tensions between independent living and the threat of government overreach, the idea of artificial intelligence being used to govern a colony, even though that AI is slowly breaking down, and the changing face of allies and enemies. All of these themes are never given any time to be fully fleshed out and explored before being binned and something else is brought to the forefront of the story. It’s like the developers couldn’t decide what kind of story they wanted to tell, so they mashed all their ideas into one game, making it come across as diluted as a result.

As a result of the messy presentation and story, it can be hard to really get a grasp on the urgency of the events that are unfolding before you, which makes it difficult to get invested. I never really held the stories in previous Halo games with any esteem but I always had a good idea of the setting I was in, the characters that I was with, and the stakes that were presented before me.

Halo 5: Guardians is not a bad game; I still had fun with the game despite the issues. However, Halo 5: Guardians isn’t a particularly good game, which is a problem for a first-party Microsoft title for the Xbox One. This is a game that I can only recommend to those who have a gap in their library and the game is going cheap in the Microsoft Store. I can only envision myself replaying this game if I were doing a run through the entire series from start to finish. Halo 5: Guardians is a game that doesn’t know what it wants to be; does it want to a Halo game or does it want to be like every other modern day shooter that was coming out in the mid-2010s?

Return to Castle Wolfenstein was a game that I had played back in the early 2000s but never played past the first three levels. After playing Raven Software’s 2009 Wolfenstein entry earlier in the year, I thought I would revisit Return to Castle Wolfenstein and give the game a fair shake.

Despite the game being released in 2001, thus being one of the first games to make use of the id Tech 3 engine to power it, the game still looks relatively good for its age. Levels are not a straight forward corridor that you follow along to the end of the level; there’s no golden arrow on the screen to lead you down the critical path. There are a few times that game will present the objective behind a locked door and it's up to you to find an alternate path, almost like the level itself is a puzzle.

Gunplay works well enough, as one would expect for a game using the engine that powered id’s Quake III Arena, and the sound design for each weapon makes them feel powerful and equally dangerous, especially those being used by the Nazis soldiers.

There’s also a nice variety to the objectives of the levels too. A good majority of the levels are a straightforward gun-down-all-the-Nazis-until-you-reach-the-end type of objectives, sometimes while picking up a specific item within the level. However, there were a couple of the levels that require you to play through quietly as you’re infiltrating a stronghold. A particular highlight was quietly navigating through a village and assassinating high-valued Nazis without setting off any alarms.

However, there are a few niggling issues that I had with the game that I fear may turn people away from the game.

While I liked that I had navigate the levels without the game explicitly telling me which way to go, there were a few occasions where I was stumped on how to progress. A door I needed to go through would be locked so I have to spend a good 10 minutes exploring every nook and cranny for a missed switch or vent that will allow me to continue with the game. One level had me backtracking close to the beginning to go through a door that I had missed on my initial pass.

Along with the obtuse level navigation, enemy placement within levels often feels sadistic. There were a number of times that enemy soldiers would cut me down because they were hiding in an obscure corner of the room. While one can quick save and quick load throughout the game, which does mitigate the problem, these incidents always felt cheap in terms of providing a genuine challenge throughout the levels.

The “X-Creatures” are total bullshit. There’s no other way to say out that doesn’t express my frustration towards these enemies. The “X-Creatures” leap across the level with such speed that it makes it difficult to accurately shoot them before they’re on top of you. Not only that, the “X-Creatures’” electrical attacks deals so much damage to the player that they’ll rip through your health and armour in a matter of seconds. While there are only a small number of encounters with them, I wouldn’t be surprised if these enemies were the cause of many rage quits back when the game first released.

There’s also redundancy with the weapons, which is a common problem with shooters of the era. You could use dual wielding pistols in the game…or you could use the machine gun that you’ve been using since the start of the game. You could pick up a silencer for your pistol, to allow you to pick off enemies quietly…or you could use the silenced machine gun that deals more damage and has a larger clip.

The biggest offense of the game is that it doesn’t really feel much like a game that’s part of the Wolfenstein series; the game lacks any real identity that makes it stand out. Yes, you kill Nazis and deal with some supernatural creatures but B.J. Blazkowicz, the player character of every Wolfenstein game, is not much of a character. B.J. doesn’t speak any lines and barely appears in any of the cutscenes. If it wasn’t for a few characters mentioning Blazkowicz’s name in the cutscenes, which only serve to establish brief context to the level missions, you could have slapped any name on the box and called it a day.

In conclusion, while I did largely enjoy my time with Return to Castle Wolfenstein, more so than I expected, I would be hard pressed to recommend the game to people to play. There are better Wolfenstein games alreay out there, as well as better first person shooters in the id Tech 3 engine. However, for less than £5 on Steam and GOG, it's a low barrier of entry for the curious.

Homefront is first person shooter that tries to set itself apart from other games in its genre but ends up being a poor imitation of its contemporaries.

The game is set in the United States of America being occupied by the Greater Korean Republic, after the unification of North Korea and South Korea. Instead of being a soldier that’s part of an invasion force in a foreign country, the player is witnessing the events of their home country being controlled by an aggressive foreign power.

There are very few positive things I can say about the game.

Homefront does make an effect to mix up the gameplay. One level will have you sneaking through an enemy base camp, where you’ll have to quietly snipe lookouts to allow you to pass through undetected. Another level has you flying a helicopter, where you’re tasked in protecting supply vehicles from oncoming attacks.

I guess I could say that the checkpoint system was surprisingly well placed throughout each of the levels, which is something that is very much appreciated when playing the game on the hardest difficulty. The game will even allow you to load up a level at any checkpoint that you’ve passed through, to which players who enjoying hunting hidden collectibles would appreciate when going back for collectibles they have missed.

Now on to the bad…

The graphics and presentation was very bland and fuzzy on screen. If someone were to show me footage of this game and told me this was a late era PlayStation 2/Xbox game, I would believe them. For a game released in 2011, after the likes of Call of Duty series has shown what graphical fidelity and details can be achieved on the seventh generation of games console, I was surprised how poor the game looked in comparison.

With a game set during an occupied United States, it’s expected that the game would want to show the horror and devastation the Greater Korean Republic have caused during their occupation. So much so that the game will frequently make you slowly walk through resistance camps and shanty towns as an NPC dumps story exposition on you. While I appreciate the game doing a “show, don’t tell” as it presents its story, it became increasingly irritating when the game was spoon feeding the story to me when I wanted to get to the next combat arena.

On the gameplay side of things, a lot of the weapons feel very similar to one another; pick up one automatic rifle and you’ve pretty much got a feel for how the majority of the weapons feel in the game. The “snap-to-aim” system, clearly lifted from Call of Duty, feels very hit and miss on whether it will lock on to an enemy. There were times when the aim will refuse to snap to an enemy close to me, but then there were times the system will snap to an enemy a hundred yards away.

Speaking of the numerous enemy soldiers that you’ll have to face in the game, they will fill your body with hot lead as soon as you show a nano-inch of your body out the open. They can be unfairly accurate at times, as well as being able to absorb an absurd amount of damage from your own attacks.

You’ll fight alongside characters that you will not care about; many of the NPCs lack any interesting depth, other than the action movie role trope they’ve been designated to play out. The game will do its best to conjure up emotion of characters that have been killed at the hands of the Koreans, but you’ll wondering how long it will be before the scripted event finishes so you can move on.

The story is nothing to write home about either. The game doesn’t have much of an ending; the game feels like it just stops because it has run out of time and budget to continue on. In fact, you can hit the credit roll in as little as four hours, which can work in the game’s favour considering it has so little to offer the player. I played the game through twice, as I blasted through it so quickly. (First playthrough on the easy difficulty, second playthrough on the hardest difficulty)

In conclusion, it feels that the scope the developers had for the game was bigger than the time and budget could accommodate. While I appreciate the game trying to put a unique spin on the modern day shooter, it ultimately feels like another ten-a-penny Call of Duty: Modern Warfare clone. Homefront wasn’t bad or frustrating enough to cause me abandon midway through; the game was functional and entertaining enough to hold my attention. The Call of Duty series gets mocked for being the same game over and over again, but at least I know that there’s almost always a high level of design and polish that comes with the Call of Duty games.

Toy Story 3 is a surprisingly well platformer that feels like a lot of care went into its development, something that is not usually associated with film tie-in games.

The game is made of two halves; the first half of the game is a “story mode” where you go through levels based from the Toy Story 3 film, with the second half, called “Toy Box”, is an open-hub area that gives the player the ability to take on bite-sized quests, earn gold, and customise their own little western town.

The story takes starts off in Bonnie’s bedroom, with Andy’s toys tell Bonnie’s toys the events of Toy Story 3 that had already occurred. This is an interesting framing device as this gives the level designers freedom on the design of the levels, while explaining away any inconsistencies, with the events seen in the film, as Ham taking creative liberties with his storytelling.

You take control of Woody, Buzz, and Jessie, switching between the three of them at the press of the button. All three characters act very similar to one another (jump, double jump, charge attack, etc.) while each having their own unique ability that allows them to traverse specific environmental obstacles; Buzz can throw Jessie or Woody long distances, Woody can use his pull-string to lasso across large gaps, and Jessie can balance on very small platforms.

The platforming may not be the most polished compared to a Nintendo platformer but the levels feel like they’ve been designed with the limitations of the jumping in mind, so I always felt that I had good control over my jumps. However, there were a few times when Woody wouldn’t register that I wanted to grab onto a ledge, leading him to fall to his doom. Fortunately, the game is kind enough to respawn you back to where you were with no penalty, so my frustration was kept to a minimum.

No two levels are the same. One level will have you exploring around Andy’s room and then the following level will be a full realisation of the Buzz Lightyear game that Rex is seen playing in Toy Story 2. The levels that I enjoyed the most were the ones from Bonnie’s imagination, as she’s narrating what’s going on in the level as she’s playing. A few of the levels go on a little too long for my liking but many of the levels are less than 20 minutes to reach the end.

The Toy Box mode is probably where I spent the majority of my four to six hour gameplay time on. Most of the fun comes from building your little town, customising the look and placements of the buildings, while doing little mission for the townsfolk. There’s a bit of variety of tasks that can be done in this mode, from taking photos for Wheezy to helping Slinky take care of his animal farm. Some of the tasks in the Toy Box mode get a bit tedious after a while, mainly the ones that had you changing the look of the townsfolk to specific outfits, required by many of the pictogram missions.

In conclusion, I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed myself with Toy Story 3. It was well put together and with a lot of creative ideas put into the levels. It’s a shame that Toy Story 3 is only playable on the console hardware that it came out on, as I can imagine that this game would be something that young fans of the Toy Story films would enjoy today and in the future. The game is clearly built with young audiences in mind but the simplicity and ease of the game doesn’t compromise the fun.

Life Is Strange is an episodic adventure game, similar to TellTale’s game model that they popularised with The Walking Dead back in 2012. However, to set itself apart from TellTale’s work, Life Is Strange incorporates a time rewind mechanic that allows Max Caulfield, who players take the role of, to rewind time to solve puzzles to unravel the mysteries that are occurring in Max’s hometown of Arcadia Bay.

The rewind time mechanic is the big draw to the game. As Max Caulfield, the player can rewind time at the press of a button to undo actions and conversations with NPCs. Only a small amount of time can be rewound but it’s enough for the player to learn a critical piece of information from an NPC, rewind time and then use that information to affect the outcome of the conversation in a different way. Environmental puzzles will require the player to observe their environment and find way to manipulate the chain of events in a way that allows the player to progress past an obstacle. Sometimes this will require multiple rewinds to get the series of events correct but it does feel satisfying working out what needs to be manipulated to achieve Max’s goal.

The art style is another strong point for the game. It’s evident that Life Is Strange was made on a relatively small budget, given how stiff the facial animations are and the limited motion capture of the NPCs. However, the game has a brushed water colour painting effect used in lieu of high resolution textures and the effect really makes the game standout on its own. If you take the time explore the environment to get familiar with the world of Arcadia Bay, you’ll certainly get an appreciation of the art style, especially how it’s used for the letters and photographs the player will come across throughout the game.

Voice work is a noteworthy positive of the game. While the dialogue can throw out some cringe inducing lines, most likely from the writers doing their best to replicate the common vernacular of teens in the early to mid-2010s, the voice actors do a good job with the lines they are given. A special mention goes to Ashely Burch, voicing the scene stealing Chloe Price, who delivers her lines with such conviction that she manages to break beyond the cringe barrier and convince me that they’re something that Chloe would actually say.

Despite the game being, for the most part, a teen drama, the game isn’t afraid to explore dark and difficult themes that I have not seen in other games. However, I felt that some of the themes and story moment weren’t as fleshed out as I would like, most likely due to the short episodes that the story had to adhere to. It felt as if the writers had a lot of good ideas that they want to include but didn’t have the runway to fully explore them.

There are a few things that may turn off to the game to some players when getting acquainted with the game, especially with the first episode.

The game has a slow burn to it. While I personally didn’t mind the slow pace, as it allowed me to take in the world and little character details that you pick up from exploring the environment, some people may lose interest before the story kicks it up a notch.

I enjoyed using the time rewind ability throughout the game but I feel the game could have done more establish the rules with how this ability works. Max will also demonstrate time travel abilities without any foreshadowing, such as the ability to use photographs to travel to several years in the past. While this adds interesting twists and turns to the story, it feels if the writers were adding new abilities for Max when it was convenient for the story. Maybe there wasn’t enough time or budget to provide explanation to these powers, given the length of each episode is only a few hours.

I did also have a few technical problems with my latest playthrough on the Xbox 360. Aside from some lighting oddities and lip sync issues that cropped up here and there, the biggest technical issues that frequently occurred for me was vertical tearing of the image across the screen. This issue seemed to be most noticeable when Max was in the more open environments, such as outside her school.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Life Is Strange. While there are a few issues I had with the game, most likely due to the limited scope the game was built within, I believe that the positives of the game greatly outshine the problems. I wouldn’t mind seeing Life Is Strange revisiting the time rewind ability, if only to have to see it fully fleshed out. If you’ve enjoyed TellTale’s game, I would strong recommend giving Life Is Strange a go, especially as the first episode is free to playthrough.

Wolfenstein feels like a game that Raven Software was trying to breathe some fresh air into the franchise by taking inspiration from other shooters popular shooters at the time. But in doing so, the Wolfenstein fails to stand out, let alone stand aside with its contemporaries.

Wolfenstein has the player controlling B.J. Blazkowicz as he aids a resistance group in the fictional German town of Isenstadt. From the start of the game, Blazkowicz obtains a mysterious medallion from Nazis soldier that grants him up to four powers that aid him in combat various ways.

The medallion that B.J. gets to use throughout the game grants the player powers that can be activated using the D-Pad on the controller, giving the player a way to augment their way of shooting Nazis. Powers range from giving the player to move faster and see enemies in the environment, to creating a shield to absorb damage and increase damage output from their own weapons.

However, while the powers are invaluable to help you in a tough fight, the pool of Veil Energy is pretty small, even when fully upgrading the pool to maximum, which I found out that always depleted while in the middle of a firefight.

Also, I found the powers to not be particularly fun or interesting to use. The powers barely feel like they’re tied into the design of the game and the levels; they feel more of an afterthought during the development. Sure, you’ll have specific parts of the level where a power will allow you to pass through a wall, but they’re not integrated into the level in way that allowed me to bypass enemy encounters or setup clever ambushes. The Veil mechanic feels underdeveloped and underutilised, leading me to believe that the mechanic was more of an afterthought during the game’s design.

I appreciated the more open level hub design that the game opted go with for this iteration of Wolfenstein. While the levels themselves are in their own self-contained instance, the player, as B.J., has to walk on foot to get to those instances. Along the way, the player can ambush, or be ambushed, by Nazis soldiers, as well as collect treasures and visit the shop for supplies. However, having to do some extra leg work before being able to continue the story levels does get a bit annoying after a time. The enemy encounters in the hub are randomised, so there were a couple of occasions where I would stumble upon a couple of tough super Nazi soldiers that would tax at my resources.

Unfortunately, Wolfenstein is a game that was largely forgotten about for a reason; it came out at a time when there were plenty of better shooters with light RPG mechanics. While the game certainly isn’t bad, you’ve already played this time of game several times already. As Wolfenstein isn’t available on digital stores, nor backwards compatible on modern consoles, I would not recommend tracking down a copy to experience the game for yourself.

I paid £6.53 for my copy of Watch Dogs.

While the game hints at the unique aspect of being able to hack anything and everything in a game world, a world clearly inspired by Rockstar's GTA games, the promise of an interesting hacking mechanic is the only thing the game has going for it.

Aiden Pearce is on a personal vendetta to get revenge on those who killed his niece, after a hit was put out Aiden for doing a hacking job. He also bails on his nephew’s birthday party. What a shitty uncle.

I did not care for the story one bit. After a few missions, I was at a lost on the reasons or context as to why Aiden was taking these jobs, or how they related to his revenge mission. Many of the missions that Aiden does involve breaking the law, which is ironic because there is a side quest activity where Aiden has to stop people from breaking the law.

The hacking, something that always kept Watch Dogs on my radar, is just a gloried use button to achieve a single action. Want to steal money from an NPC? Push square. Hacked. Want to use a camera to spy on people? Push square. Hacked. Want to detonate a transformer box? Push square. Hacked. Also boom.

Occasionally, a hack will require you to solve a simple pipe puzzle, to make a blue line connect to a box, but that’s as deep as the mechanic gets.

To be fair, I found the hacking shined for me when I hacked in the city infrastructure to help me lose my pursuers while in a car. The hacking allows you to manipulate the environment, such as raising bridges or changing the traffic lights to cause an accident, to hinder those who were chasing me.

The latter missions lean more heavily towards third-person gun fights, which is frustrating because the shooting mechanics does not feel great, and it doesn’t take many shots to bring Aiden down (even on the normal difficulty).

Overall, Watch Dogs is another boilerplate Ubisoft sandbox game that has a plethora of boring side activities pasted all over the game map. The driving is bad. The shooting is bad. The hacking is boring. The story is terrible. Aiden is unlikeable. The game wasn’t bad enough for me to bin off my playthrough but were times where it got close. If you’re looking for a good GTA-inspired open world sandbox game, check out Sleeping Dogs.

In summary, I want my £6.53 back.

Sackboy: A Big Adventure obviously takes inspiration from Nintendo's Super Mario 3D World, from the level variety to the stickers that you collect at the end of each level. Unfortunately, Sackboy is a game that I found to be a mixed bag of quality.

The jumping mechanics feel underdeveloped and often too shallow to be effective. I would frequently fall short of an enemy I'm trying to hit on the head and end up in the enemy's reach to attack me. Or I would fall into a pit, leading to my death.

This wouldn't be so much of an issue if the game didn't insist on punishing the player twice for dying. The first punishment is losing out on earning the "Ace" level medal, earned by completing a level without losing a life. However, the game will also punish the player by removing 10% of the total orbs that have been collected in the level. If a player was trying to earn the gold medal for collecting a specific number of orbs in a level, and they were to die near the end, a 10% reduction could potentially cost the player that medal, forcing a level restart.

However, there are levels that feel like a lot of thought and creativity has been put in by the developers. When the level design works with the limited jumping mechanics, the game can be a lot of fun. The most memorable levels are the ones that play along to a licenced music track.

I think there’s a lot of potential for the Sackboy franchise. If there’s only one thing I want in a sequel, it would be to make the game as polished as a Mario title. If you’re a PlayStation owner who always wanted to have a 3D platformer like Mario, you'll definitely have a fun time. However, if you’ve played a Mario title released within the last 10 years, you may find Sackboy a bit lacking.

Being a game released in 2003, I had a lot of fun working out the platforming puzzles without modern design that obviously highlights what and where you should climb. The hint system does enough to prod you in the right direction without the game outright holding your hand. The dagger of time alleviates some of the fatal mistakes by allowing you to rewind time and have another ago, assuming you have enough sand to do so.

However, the combat was the single biggest point of frustration for me. While the combat is serviceable when dealing with a handful of enemies, there are five or six instances where the game will force you into combat challenges where you need to deal with wave after wave of enemies. As these combat challenges usually happen in small rooms, the enemies will easily gang up on you, knock you down, letting the other enemies continuously deal damage, before you have the chance to get up and block/dodge their attacks.

It's because of these moments that I will never pick this game up ever again.

Never have I played a game that has given me so many mixed feelings during my playthrough.

My playthrough was on patch 1.6 version of the game on a PlayStation 5.

===The stuff I liked===

I thought the setting of Night City is an interesting one. I think it’s the one distinguishing thing that makes Cyberpunk 2077 standout from other contemporary open world games. A lot of care and attention is on show with how detailed Night City is, even if the quality is not consistent across the board.

Voice acting is another highlight for the game. I very much enjoyed Cherami Leigh’s performance as female V, as well as enjoying the work of many of the supporting cast.

The side gig activities do a good job of having them take place in unique environments, so while you’re doing the same three or four objectives, I always felt that each area had me think of different ways to complete them.


===The stuff I disliked===

Going for a stealth build feels largely inconsequential to the story at large. If you want to challenge yourself by ghosting your way through missions, you’ll only end up taking much longer to play through the game. The game doesn’t react to how you complete missions, unless an optional objective specifically tells you to ghost through a level. It feels that the quest design was largely done with gunfights in mind.

The upgrade tree is expansive but uninspiring. I found myself having a hard time on what to spend my upgrade perks on. Most upgrades that are offered to you are small percentage increments, usually something like “increase critical damage by 5% for pistols”. None of the upgrades really change the way you play the game; the way you play the game at the start will largely play the same as it will do at the end. I really wished the upgrade perks was done away with and the cybernetic body parts dictated your play style, based on how the player spend their body attribute points.

Bugs. Despite being on the latest version of the game, at the time of writing, I experienced a surprisingly high number of bugs over my ~75 hour playthrough. Nothing that halted my progress to finish the game but it’s clear that this game is still riddled with problems, at least on the PS5.
Some notable bugs I had
- Random items floating in the air
- Low quality textures/shallow draw distances
- V’s voice changing from female to male when talking between two different characters (had to load a previous save to fix)
- Objects in the hands of NPCs being a couple of feet away from their hands, but moving about in the air as if they’re in their hands
- Missing voice clips/sound effects
- Enemies going into an alert phase for no reason.

The driving in the game is not very good. There is a plethora of vehicles you have access to but I found myself sticking to Jackie’s bike most of the time because it was the only vehicle that had decent handling.

The presentation. I grew tired with being made to sit down and have characters talk at me. Sitting and talking was what I remember mostly doing in the main quest. It wouldn’t be so much of an issue for me if they weren’t all presented from V’s perspective. I want to see my V physically react and emote during these dialogue moments, like you see with Geralt in The Witcher 3. Instead, I found myself getting bored and browsing on my phone than paying attention to the dialogue moments. It seems that CDPR prioritised the main quest to deliver plot via dialogue than having the plot meld nicely with the gameplay.

Overall, the game is…fine for the most part. If it wasn’t for setting of Night City, I believe the game would have completely forgettable. The game was enjoyable enough to have me stick with it for 75 hours. However, everything the game has to offer, in terms of its gameplay mechanics, other games have done them far better. There’s a good foundation for me to be interested in a sequel.

The Force Unleashed is a game that I wish was more of an evolution of the Jedi Outcast/Jedi Academy games. While it was fun to lift up Stormtroopers to torment them, using the Force as a weapon was more difficult than it should have been. No matter how far I played through the game, I always seemed to struggle to get thrown objects to hit the targets I am aiming for. Sometimes my Force lightning will arc out and hit multiple foes, other times will just target a single enemy despite being part of a group.

The story feels like it was written by a horny 14-year-old going through an edgy phase. Many of the worlds that you visit are grim and dark. Juno Eclipse wears her uniform in such a way to show off flesh to (bonk!) send our protagonist to horny jail when first laying eyes on her, and she gets no further development after that. Even the name “Starkiller” makes me roll my eyes roll. I don’t care much about the Star Wars canon these days but the sheer power the Starkiller is able to demonstrate gets the point of ridiculousness. Pulling a Star Destroyer from the sky and crashing it to the ground looks cool in cutscenes but then it makes me wonder why Starkiller can’t use that level of power while playing the actual game.

Despite my issues with the game, I did have a fun time replaying it. There’s something satisfying about blasting open a door with Force push and shocking everyone to death. Despite the grim look of the environments, the levels are varied enough to keep things fresh and interesting. Some levels incorporate the use of Force powers to create openings or platforms to progress. While almost every boss is some type of lightsaber wielder, each one requires different tactics to bring them down.

While The Force Unleashed won’t be in my personal top 10 list of favourite Star Wars games, the way the Force has been given life in the form of a physics engine, as well as being easily accessible on PC and Xbox, makes it worth checking out by those who might be curious.