Titanfall review

Our final Titanfall review has been produced following a week of testing on the game's live servers. The following is the finished version of the 'review in progress' that we posted last week - so if large parts of it feel familiar, that's why.

Titanfall is the last place you'd expect to find restraint. This is a big money multiplayer shooter where robots called titans are summoned from space, where jetpack-equipped 'pilots' dash over, alongside and through sci-fi cityscapes. It's a game where you'll run up a wall, jet into the air, lock onto a platoon of grunts with your smart pistol and eliminate them all as you land. It's a game where you'll drop a 40-foot titan onto another 40-foot titan just to see if you can.

It's a game where you will do all of these things repeatably thanks to lean, intelligent multiplayer design. Matches are limited to 12 players split into two teams, and this restricted headcount is the foundation for all of Titanfall's other successes. Lower numbers enable the game to incorporate immediate respawns without upsetting its competitive balance, and an intelligent dynamic spawn system means that when you die you pop back near-instantly a short distance from the next big fight. The game ensures that you are doing something exciting for the entire duration of each ten- to fifteen-minute match.

Titanfall's other features provide plenty of strategic options, but its manageable scope means that you always have the opportunity to use them. This is what the latter Battlefield games got wrong. It's great to offer the player interesting objectives, vehicles or weapons, but they mean less if that player spends their time queueing, respawning or running to get to the next firefight. Titanfall never wastes your time. You always have the option to go and do something more exciting, to play better, or to try to generate another of the 'you had to be there' stories that the game excels at.

Here's a story, then. It's the closing minutes of a capture the flag match, and my team has a single point advantage - but the enemy has our flag. We're playing on Boneyard, a winding series of desert canyons where small military bunkers are linked by aerial ziplines. I sprint out of our base and, jetting into the air, use a bunker wall to pick up some momentum. I fling myself off, grab a zipline, and gain more speed: then I'm across a rooftop, through a short passageway, and up off the top of a defensive tower to ensure that I come down on the enemy base from above. Three enemy titans prowl the open area outside. Two are 'auto-titans', meaning that they are being controlled by the AI while their pilots are elsewhere. The third is manned. I activate my cloaking device to slip by them.

The moment I touch the flag, I'm highlighted on the HUD of every player on the map. I glance at my own titanfall timer. Thirty seconds to go. There are NPC soldiers in the enemy base, and each one felled cuts a few seconds off my titanfall timer. I stop, crouch, and kill a few more before rushing towards the precipitous drop to the desert floor. Leaping from the enemy base, I jump onto the roof of the manned enemy titan and unload half a clip into its innards. It's not enough to disable it, but it's enough to make the pilot disembark to try to dislodge me. By that point I'm away, jetting onto the next titan, buying myself the seconds I need to...

My titanfall timer hits zero. I aim at a point on the ground in the midst of the enemy titans and hit the 'V' key.

My Ogre titan smacks into the ground on all fours, hunched like a silverback. I leap towards it and it holds out its arm to help me climb inside. As its interface comes online, I'm already hammering the key to deploy electrified smoke. Then, in the midst of the chaos, I'm away, thundering across the desert towards our base, carrying the enemy flag towards the line of friendly titans that stride out to meet me. It feels incredible.

This series of moments is useful because it highlights how Titanfall's best qualities come from lots of individually well-designed parts operating together. As a footsoldier you always have access to a broad range of movement abilities that turn you into a cross between TF2's Scout and Tribes: Ascend's Pathfinder. You can double jump, zipline and wallrun at will, and with a bit of time you start to learn how these can be used in tandem. Wallrunning, for example, speeds you up - it's by chaining together wallruns without stopping that you build up titan-beating momentum. In the same way that a good Tribes player learns to see each hill as component parts of a longer route, so do Titanfall's city blocks eventually start to look like inviting, freeform obstacle courses.

How you choose to use your special abilities alongside your mobility is up to you. You might be a sniper who uses freerunning and a cloaking device to escape when your vantage point is discovered, or a close-quarters brawler who uses stims for a speed and health boost between firefights. You might spec for covert ops but swap out the cloaking device for a special vision mode that lets you see enemies through walls.

In each case you'll also be making decisions about whether to hunt other players or stop to kill the platoons of NPC minions that spawn throughout each match. Doing the latter might reveal your position on the minimap, but it'll also shave seconds off your titanfall timer. At first, the presence of AI cannon fodder seems like a way of counterbalancing the reduced player count, but they actually function like creeps in Dota 2. 'Farming' is a legitimate strategy, and some teams may choose to equip one player with a minion-slaughtering smart pistol so that they can be the first to bring a titan into play.

How they choose to kit out and use that titan is entirely up to them. Placed on auto, a sturdy Ogre could hold a capture point in Hardpoint Domination mode. Alternatively, an auto-titan with a projectile-deflecting Vortex Shield could be lead through the streets to open the enemy to a flanking assault by on-foot pilots. You might prefer to take charge yourself, nipping at the enemy in a nimble Stryder chassis equipped with hit-and-run quad rockets.

The point is that you will constantly have interesting decisions to make, loadouts to tinker with, and daring plays to make. The game showers you with unlocks, but the most interesting changes to your playstyle come with experience, as you learn to combine game features in new and exciting ways.

You can also tweak your experience with 'burn cards', disposable unlocks that allow you to access certain bonuses for one life only. They scale in power with rarity - the most basic allow you temporary access to weapons you haven't unlocked yet, and the most advanced grant you instant titans, reveal all enemies on your minimap, or grant you a permanent cloak when you stop shooting. Burn cards could have been a hook for some truly awful monetisation, but thankfully that's not the case. They are dished out with such frequency that after a few hours of play I never entered a match with anything less than a full set.

There are 14 maps. The majority offer a mixture of open and urban environments - the former being the preserve of titans, the latter offering cover to on-foot pilots. One map, set in a prison, links open courtyards with sweeping internal roadways at multiple levels of elevation, giving titans rare access to the game's vertical dimension. Another, a smuggling outpost, mixes complicated nests of buildings with a wide-open bay area where titans can spar with each other in the shallow water.

Almost all of the maps succeed at feeling like real places. Interiors are littered with detritus - bookshelves, upended tables, pots and pans, scattered papers - that make them look as if they have been abandoned in a hurry. Each map has a distinct palette, and there's a level of design skill evident in their buildings and backdrops that creates a feeling of occupying a piece of well-constructed, if familiar, sci-fi concept art.

Texture quality and character detail both fall below modern standards when viewed up close, but they are compensated by unfaltering 60 frames per second at 1080p and phenomenal animation. Titanfall looks much better in motion than it does in screenshots, and again this is down to the small details. Titans in particular are more expressive and human than the mechs you might be used to. They brace against damage, lean into sprints, and dismember each other in a variety of colourful ways. Even an action as simple as reloading a chaingun is rendered with care and attention to detail.

The vast majority of your time with the game is spent in traditional multiplayer, which is divided into five modes. Minions, hackable turrets and titans are common to all five, but one of them - Last Titan Standing - is remarkable for working more like World of Tanks than regular Titanfall. Each player spawns inside their custom mech, and whichever team is able to destroy all of the enemy's titans is the winner. This turns Titanfall into a class-based vehicle game of sorts, where interactions between titan abilities become more important than they are in other modes.

Those others include Attrition, where kills against minions, titans and players are added up into an overall score for each team, and Hardpoint Domination, where teams fight over capture point scattered over the map. Capture The Flag is included without many changes to the formula, but feels considerably revitalised by Titanfall's new ideas. The weak link in the set is Pilot Hunter, a team deathmatch mode where only kills against players count towards each team's score. It's fine on paper, but in practice it's the only mode where you're really conscious of the fact that there are only six players on the enemy team. Whenever I found myself unsure about what to do, I was playing Pilot Hunter.

Then there's the campaign. It is, functionally, a narrative strung out across nine multiplayer missions that alternate between Hardpoint Domination and Attrition mode. Beyond narrative context provided by introductory intro and outro sequences, these missions play much like any other match.

This is not a substitute for a singleplayer campaign, but it is a novel alternative. The scale of some of these introductory sequences is impressive - one team might land in dropships while other receives a briefing underground, or warp in from a space battle in orbit, or crashland and have to storm into the map proper via its external defences. The game gets its Call of Duty-style scripted sequences, but crams them into an economical slice of time before the match proper. This is a smart refocusing of the genre onto its key strengths. That said, there are players who will miss having something to play while they're offline, and who will be frustrated by the way Titanfall casts you as an anonymous soldier in a story that is played out in voiceover by characters you're never personally involved with. It's also a shame that the campaign doesn't branch in any meaningful way based on who wins or loses.

If Titanfall had been released 15 years ago, I suspect we'd be talking about it today in the same hushed tones reserved for Tribes 2 or Team Fortress 2. This game is every bit good enough, moment-to-moment, to be a part of that legacy. Its weaknesses are not a product of its design, but its structure: where the former is characterised by admirable restraint, the latter is held back by lamentable restrictions.

The notion of the shooter as an MMOish 'service' manifests in ugly ways. There's no LAN or offline support of any kind. You can form a party with your friends and queue for games, but you can't create your own private lobbies or dedicated servers. You can't even queue to play a specific map on a specific gamemode - you can choose to play Capture The Flag, for example, but you've got no say on where you end up doing it.

It is also extremely expensive for a modern PC game - £45/$60, plus a forthcoming £20/$25 season pass if you wish to keep up with the latest maps - and it struggles to make a claim for its long-term viability. There's no support for clans or the professional scene. There are no community features at all, really, and their absence holds the game back from attracting the hobbyist shooter crowd - the people who could ensure that the game stays lively after the buzz of launch fades. If DLC map packs divide the player base as badly as they did with Battlefield 3, I'm not sure that Titanfall will be quite the same game in six months.

This is a shame, because the things you do in Titanfall are likely to be some of the most exciting things you do in any game this year. It is clearly the work of sharp, analytical designers, and it deserves to penetrate the thick layer of cynicism that traditionally surrounds big budget shooters. I wish that this same intelligence and restraint were evident in the business culture that surrounds it.

If you choose to invest in Titanfall, make it your mission to track down the stories that emerge when all of its systems come together and sing. They are why this genre became so popular in the first place, and Titanfall is a fine way to rediscover that attraction. Just endeavour to get your money's worth while the honeymoon lasts.

Need For Speed: Rivals Review

Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit’s greatest contribution to seamless play was Autolog; for follow-up Most Wanted, it was EasyDrive. Rivals’ intended equivalent is AllDrive, a system that transplants players into other drivers’ games in service of Ghost Games’ goal of “destroying the boundary between single- and multiplayer”. It might have worked, too, if the challenges of developing a next- and cross-gen game hadn’t so sorely hobbled Rivals’ potential.

The payoff is that Rivals is beautiful on PS4, Xbox One and PC – all three versions were tested for this review – taking full advantage of DICE’s Frostbite 3 tech. Redview County combines elements of California and Europe, resulting in a diverse environment that even occasionally recalls OutRun. Expansive dust-blown desert tracks, tightly wound snow-covered tarmac and bucolic vineyards all sit within a few miles of each other, but somehow cohere into a naturalistic world. Cars shimmer with surface moisture as the space around them fills with leaves, snow, rain or whichever other particle effect is being shown off. And the day/night cycle and dynamic weather system transform the world to such an extent that you’ll trek back to some places just to see them under new conditions.

Ghost Games’ debut feels like an amalgamation of Criterion’s previous two Need For Speeds – and no wonder, given that 80 per cent of Criterion joined Ghost earlier this year – though Hot Pursuit’s influence is more keenly felt. Rivals has brought Most Wanted’s open-world design and EasyDrive into the mix, but its urban sprawl has been abandoned in favour of Hot Pursuit’s sinuous country roads and weighty handling model. You can choose between Cop and Racer careers, too, switching allegiances whenever you want, your progress dictated by the completion of Speedlists, a selection of tasks themed around three driving styles.

Whichever faction you pick, the map is bristling with challenges, triggered by pulling up to the relevant junction or roadway and tapping a button. Hot Pursuit, Interceptor and Time Trial events are shared by both sides, while bespoke events are limited to one. Racers can trigger head-to-heads with AI or human drivers, while Cops can begin ad-hoc pursuits by simply switching on their sirens near a Racer, or take on Rapid Response missions, which require quick, clean drives.

A new risk-reward mechanic makes the Racer career the more exciting of the two. You still amass Speed Points (SP) for racing, bombing through speed cameras and terrorising other drivers with near misses, but now you must bank them at Hideouts dotted across the map. The longer you stay on the road, the higher your Heat level (and multiplier, up to a maximum of 10x) gets, and the more SP you’ll earn for feats of wheelmanship. The problem is, you’ll also become a more valuable target, and if you’re busted, you’ll lose the lot. It’s an excellent system, one that adds to the irresistible sense of misbehaviour while you’re on the road.

The Cop career is more pedestrian, since you’re never in jeopardy of losing SP, nor is there ever any risk that your events will be interrupted – whereas a Racer’s time trial could spontaneously become a car chase, too, if you’re unfortunate enough to attract the attention of a patrol car en route. As well as SP gained from events, you’ll also confiscate it from Racers, those with higher Heat levels yielding greater hauls. But there’s something inherently less satisfying about chasing down AI Racers when compared with escaping AI Cops.

Somewhere in among all this, buried beneath the obligatory particle effects and a bundle of frustratingly underpolished systems, there’s a classic racing game. But you’ll have to wade through so many annoyances to get to it that its pleasures erode quickly. It starts with the small niggles, such as the fact that the GPS system doesn’t reroute if you move closer to, say, another Repair Shop than the one you initially set. But there are more fundamental problems in play.

Rivals’ fictional Redview County is both beautiful and expansive, but AllDrive limits you to the company of just five other players at a time. The result is that, on a server populated by strangers at least, you’ll rarely cross paths with a human driver. You can set a GPS route to someone, but the EasyDrive drop-down menu doesn’t give any clue as to who’s nearest, or whether they’re playing as a Cop or a Racer. Unless you’re using the second-screen Need For Speed Network app, this means you have to dip into the main map; the game can’t be paused, so this leaves you unable to steer your car, putting your precious SP at risk. And once you’ve hared along the roadway to try to meet up, you might find they’ve already entered a Hideout to bank their SP.

Playing with friends improves things significantly; a little communication lets you take advantage of the fact that every event in the game can be undertaken cooperatively. But this rather undermines the promise of AllDrive. Autolog seamlessly delivers new challenges and maintains an atmosphere of social competition, but AllDrive’s limitations force you to seek out your own fun. Ghost has tried to compensate by filling Redview’s roads with AI drivers, but they only serve to highlight how rarely you’ll interact with other players.

These all-too-rare occasions spent enjoying Rivals’ skillfully engineered handling alongside someone else offer confirmation of Ghost’s ambitious vision for a new Need For Speed. But outside of them, dazzling 1080p visuals, astonishing weather effects and a sense of competition feel like too high a price to pay for such a profound dip in the series’ mechanical polish. Rivals’ systems show potential, but it is considerably less than the game it might have been.

Need For Speed Rivals is out now on 360, PC, PS3, PS4 and Xbox One.

Call of Duty: Ghosts Review

Call of Duty: Ghosts will be damned if you peek away from your screen. Boredom is absolutely not allowed as the campaign pelts you with action vignettes—including a scene directly snagged from the opening of The Dark Knight Rises—and repeats its mantra ad nauseam: “Keep moving!”

I’m in space, I’m underwater, I’m piloting a dog, I’m piloting an Apache, I’m driving a tank that handles like a Lamborghini—all without ever really learning a new skill. The Apache, for instance, is magically repulsed from the ground—it’s like piloting an air hockey disc—so finesse is unnecessary. On-screen cues tell you what you need to know as you’re plunged into an airstrike: fire flares when an enemy locks on, left mouse button to fire your cannon, hold down the center mouse button to lock on with missiles. Then go to town.

It’s fun in that it’s something exciting to see and do: a theme park ride where I’m given an airsoft rifle to pelt the animatronics with. And it’s a brilliant ride. There are pyrotechnics, car chases, submarines, and drone strikes. Once scene has me rappelling down a skyscraper and shooting guards through the windows—and then the skyscraper collapses while I’m in it. It’s every action scene Hollywood has imagined for the past 20 years packed into five to six hours of super-stylish interactive montages, and wrapped up in a goofy, inoffensive story about brothers trying to live up to their dad’s super-soldier status.

Call of daddy

It’s fun, but it’s not engaging—Ghosts’ campaign is even more passive than Telltale’s recent point-and-clickers. In The Wolf Among Us, I have choices. In Ghosts, I do the Right Thing or fail. Frustratingly, even the decision to follow the constantly barked “keep moving” order can get me killed. That repeated flavor dialog should be ignored: save heroics for the scripted moments, stay crouched, and pop up sporadically to shoot at the bad guys.

Blowing up boats while remotely piloting a drone is fun and not at all challenging.
In rare instances, I was able to part from my squad, flank the enemy, and wipe them out with the advantage, but that kind of tactical planning was a sparsely present treat. It appeared once more in a jungle mission which put columns of guards between me and my squad, arming me only with a silenced pistol and sensor to detect nearby enemies. That was the only time I was given a goal and left to achieve it without explicit instructions for every action.

That was also the only time I got a magic bad guy sensor, and that’s another of the campaign’s failings: it fires off interesting ideas and then instantly forgets about them. Near the beginning, I’m introduced to my canine companion, Riley, and I can mark targets for him to quietly de-jugular. I did that once, when ordered to, and never again. Later, I get to use a remote-controlled sniper rifle to clear out a stadium. It’s a great gadget that I’d have liked to plop down on my own a few times, but it never shows up again. Both weapons are like toys that I get to demo in the store, but never get to take home.

Sgt. Shark is awfully testy today.
But we get bored of toys after we take them home, whereas if we stay in the toy store, poking at everything that requires batteries, nothing needs to do more than light up and make noise to keep us entertained. And you won’t ever be bored, because Ghosts’ novelties are brilliant and bright, full of life and then whisked away before they can be broken open and revealed to be little electronic tricks.

If you buy Ghosts just for the multiplayer, I will say that you should at least play the campaign long enough to get to the first obligatory space scene. It’s fantastic. It’s Gravity with guns. I wish the whole thing had been in space.

Call of shooty

The multiplayer is more Call of Duty® Multiplayer. It’s about flanking, out flanking, and milliseconds of animation that determine who lives and who dies. The maps are circular arenas dressed in gray military garb, pulling assets from the dullest bits of the campaign’s setting. Instead of a space station and tropical shipwreck, the maps are Busted Up Train Yard and Overcast Snowy Place.

In most modes, death nearly always comes from behind or upon rounding a corner and shooting too slowly to avoid a knife to the gut. There’s no front line, so every kill is likely to instaspawn your foe somewhere behind you, making matches a dizzying circular chase sequence.

Getting knifed from around a corner is something I excel at.
Guns are plentiful and nuanced, though every vital stat, from how long it takes to raise the iron sights to recoil and spread, is experienced in milliseconds of surprise action. Everyone swirls around the map like disoriented flies, and I either catch glimpses of their feet under collapsed steel girders, or run face first into them as our beelines intersect, reacting with spasms more often than cool tactical awareness. At pub levels, Ghosts’ multiplayer is whack-a-mole to Counter-Strike’s chess game.

An exception is Search and Rescue, which gives teams bomb and defend objectives, and players one life per round unless a team member collects their dog tag to revive them. That encourages teammates to stick together, generating group engagements at range that I heavily prefer over darting around like an armed insect.

I also enjoy, as I have in past CoDs, the Ground War mode. With bigger maps and 12-14 players, there’s more room to breathe and more teammates to rely on during firefights. It’s in that mode that I discovered that going prone is practically an invisibility cloak. I was able to camp out by a capture point picking off enemy after enemy for nearly an entire round, often after they ran right over me. It was fun target practice for me, but probably a frustration for the other team, which eventually had to run around the perimeter until it found a back to knife.

Call me maybe

Even in the modes I enjoy, I don’t want to stay for long. The “one more round” syndrome just isn’t present for me in Ghosts. In previous CoDs, the drive to unlock and try out a new weapon might have kept me going, but that’s been replaced with Squad Points. Accrued through good play, the points can be spent to unlock any weapon at any time if you save them up. I appreciate that this is more respectful of players’ time, as well as returning CoD fans’ desire to get right to the gun they’re happy with, but it nullifies any sense of accomplishment the progression system once had.

Defending a point is easy when lying down makes you invisible.
But it isn’t just the progression system, or the complex-to-the-point-of-silliness soldier customization, or the boring killstreak rewards that make me tire so quickly of Ghosts multiplayer. It’s that, like the campaign, it’s about constant forward momentum, but unlike the campaign, it never changes. The matches go by too fast to ever develop a rhythm or personality. From one map to the next, it’s run, run, run. There are no nail-biters, no heroics, and no rivalries. There are no brilliant shots that I want to run to show YouTube, unless it’s an accidental trick grenade throw. There are no moments when I pull back from my display, rub my forehead, and say, “I can’t believe I did that.” Moments like that happen all the time for me in Unreal Tournament 2K4, Tribes: Ascend, Battlefield 4, Rising Storm, and earlier Call of Duty games.

Ghosts multiplayer is a game of snap decisions, mechanics, and mistakes—"should have gone prone instead of firing, shouldn’t have reloaded after that last kill, should have turned around instead of sprinting"—and it is freakishly nuanced and can absolutely be mastered. I respect those with the drive to master it, but it’s too bleak and severe for my tastes, and feels like preparing for ritual combat more than enjoying a game.

Actually, delete my number

The cooperative Extinction mode is much better: four players versus waves of aliens, with money earned for each kill, and weapons and defenses to buy. It’s a healthy application of a formula we’re used to, but it doesn’t do anything I wouldn’t rather do in Left 4 Dead or Killing Floor, and it feels like a side note compared to the effort put into the campaign and competitive multiplayer. When I started, the keys used to buy my character’s special items—ammo crates, turrets, and so on—weren’t even bound. My options were indicated with a four-way cross which looks like it’s meant for a D-pad, and when I did bind the keys, the menu called them “killstreak rewards.”

The aliens eat sunsets. Give us your sunsets!
That doesn’t damn Ghosts as an icky console port, because my experience was otherwise well-optimized for medium to high-end PCs. I ran it fine on a mid-range build, and on a silly-powerful machine (Core i7-4950X, 16GB RAM, and two GTX Titans) the campaign ran at a silky and gorgeous 100-plus frames-per-second, with water and lighting effects that made me stop to gawk a few times (when I was allowed to). The only technical problem I encountered was sudden framerate dips in the menus, which are a just a nuisance—the same never happened to me while playing.

The netcode in multiplayer is as robust as usual, but not better than previous CoD games. There were still a few times where I swear a hit registered on me before I saw my opponent’s character model round a corner. These details have become a part of serious CoD play—some complain, but others master the nuances to gain an advantage. I’m not in either camp: I’m only bothered when synchronization issues cause frustration or feel unfair, and so far they’ve been too slight and sporadic to bother me.

In multiplayer, you have about 30 frames in which to shoot first.
What does bother me is how tired and cold Ghosts feels. I didn’t touch on the campaign’s story much, but its attempts to tug heart strings are cringe-ably cheesy, and the multiplayer seems bored of itself, changing systems just so they’ll be different from Modern Warfare.

I don’t doubt that every gun, perk, and killstreak reward in Ghosts was implemented and tweaked with a fine brush, but painting in every individual eyelash of the Mona Lisa wouldn’t make it a better painting. That’s what’s been happening to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare since 2007—little bits have been scraped off and painted over again and again. With a broader brush, Activision and its studios might stop noodling around in the corners of Modern Warfare’s greatness and paint something actually modern.

Battlefield 4 Review

The first time I tried to fly a helicopter, a few good men died on the landing pad. On attempt two, I got airborne before landing in the ocean. On lucky number three, I flew that bird as god intended, making long sweeps around hotspots and waiting for Wagner to kick in. This is the life, I thought, lazily hovering towards an enemy squad. Too low; the blades hit a tree, I lost control, grunts scattered below, and the ground span wildly – dead. Multi-kill! Taking out enemies this way is one of the many reasons Battlefield 4 is amazing.

Housekeeping first though, because the singleplayer campaign isn't one of them. The best you can say is it's a well-executed take on this generation's familiar FPS cliches, until an abrupt and disappointing multiple-choice ending. Firing the guns feels great, but the entire exercise has an air of redundancy – enemy behaviour you've seen before, scene ideas you've played before, and even the seemingly-obligatory torture scene. The template for this stuff is 2007's Modern Warfare, and despite BF4's near-constant spectacle, the years have not been kind.

Still: who cares? Battlefield has a singleplayer campaign because it has to have one, but this series is so loved because of multiplayer. The key feature is destructibility; any structure can be chipped away by gunfire or blown apart by explosions. It's one of those things that sounds like an incidental feature until you pop off a few shots at a tank then hide in a building – at which point the tank's driver, quite sensibly, fires at the wall and takes you and the house with it.

The destructibility gives this world an atmosphere, makes it feel more solid. Bullets chew up masonry as you fire down corridors, explosions puff out obscuring clouds of dust, and shelter becomes open ground. This theatre of war crumbles during the show, and it's an environment done full justice by surround sound that picks out skittering footsteps, the crack of a sniper's bullet, or the overwhelming impact of a tank shot.

The polish extends far beyond BF4's more obvious charms to systems like squad spawning or the AI mic chatter that flags enemy targets. These tie together large groups of players and large objective-based maps, forging fast links between random players and giving reinforcement waves an underlying rhythm. So many small features are a delight; I love 'spotting' enemies by pulling the R2 trigger, which means you forego opening fire for a second to flag their position for the team. It's a slightly risky choice but a heavily rewarded one, so players like me keep on doing it, and the whole squad benefits.

Guiding behaviour like this is the mark of a great developer, but what makes Battlefield brilliant is in how this setup leads to endless one-off situations and emergent battles. Multiplayer's main mode is Conquest, where three to five objectives have to be fought over and held – some of these are flags in mini-arenas, and some of them are flags on things like a skyscraper.

With friends like these …

I remember the first time I fought on top of the skyscraper, because it was going well. We had an awesome group of six or seven locking it down, I'd got a few kills, and everything was peachy until an alarm started going off. The four guys near me got up, turned around and jumped off the building. I looked down to see their parachutes blossoming up one-by-one, and was thinking 'how beautiful' as the skyscraper collapsed and killed me.

You don't get that in Call of Duty. And these marquee moments are matched to a more extended beat, the way that Battlefield produces great strings of stories during multiplayer. I played on Zavod 311, a sweeping map punctuated by empty tank factories, and fell in with a soldier called Poopagore (a pretty tame handle by FPS standards). Initially we just happened to be in the same fight. Then we started following each other around, watching each other's back, and using the squad spawn system to stay together.

Soon enough we'd both tweaked our loadouts so we were carrying defibrillators to revive the other when things went wrong. Poopagore found a tank, and in a mad five-minute spell we took every Conquest marker. We hid out in factory gantries and spotted targets for each other, flew choppers on wild sorties in the enemy's general direction, and took out a three-man squad in an instant with synchronised grenades. Over a 42-minute match, this random person and I didn't exchange a word but played together in an awesome one-off buddy movie.

It has to be said that, for anyone familiar with Battlefield 3, this is more of the same with welcome tweaks – new features include things like leaning out of cover to fire, which slots into your move-set neatly but hardly revolutionises things. It would be easy to be sniffy about the similarities between the two games, but fundamentally Dice has done the right thing – BF4 plays superbly, a mighty game in its own right, and is simply glorious in action.

On the level

It's outside the matches themselves that things get uglier. The first problem is that encrusted around progression is a gradual and grinding unlock/upgrade system, so most of the guns and kit are locked until you've spent hours and hours and hours levelling up. And then levelling up individual weapons for upgrades like handles and sights, and upgrading your vehicle boosts, and perk packages. This type of thing clearly has a place, but BF4's formulaic take feels pointlessly expansive, something that may serve its hardcore fanbase but rather restricts things for those who only want to play every so often.

Still: grinding out reflex sights isn't ideal, but I can live with it. Far harder to take is the heavy hand of the bean-counting overlords at EA, who do not like the idea of customers only paying them once. BF4 costs £40, or if you want to wait for the next-gen versions closer to £50. For this not-inconsiderable ticket price you might expect to have bought the greater part of Battlefield 4 – but then the menus spend most of their time suggesting otherwise.

A slow clap please for Battlefield Premium, a year-round calendar of DLC content and extras for another £40, and something BF4 is constantly forcing into your sight. It certainly has a premium position on the game's starting menu, and even modes like the 'My Soldier' customisation also funnels you towards – what? Premium knives, premium paint, 12 golden premium 'Battlepacks', premium customisation and premium events. The slogan for Battlefield Premium is, I kid you not: 'Own more, be more.' I mean, tell us what you really think.

It's as well to remember at times like these that Battlefield is a toy and not a lifestyle choice. The really unfortunate thing with this Premium nonsense is that the greater body of players are made to feel like they're travelling in economy class, so that the core fans can be milked. I'm not anti-DLC, but the way Battlefield Premium constantly thrusts at you just feels grubby. It's not a nice way to treat paying customers, and it's a pity to see it besmirch such a great game.

Gran Turismo 6 Review

Polyphony Digital’s Gran Turismo series has always been without substitute. There are those that try, and some get close, but it’s hard to duplicate, let alone emulate, the amount of staggering detail that goes into the end product.

Nowhere is that sentiment more evident than in Gran Turismo 6, the latest entry in the series. Gran Turismo 6 is everything fans could hope for, offering a ton of content for the hardcore and the casual gamer, and proving that there is no replacement for Sony‘s racing franchise.

Across the board, Polyphony has streamlined the Gran Turismo experience. From the in-game menu layout to the helpful tutorial prompts, the developer has taken strides to deliver a racing game that is complex yet clear. The sheer amount of races, cars, and options that are at players’ fingertips is staggering, but it’s all laid out in a nice organized fashion with clear explanations of how each element of the game works.

At the same time, Polyphony hasn’t reinvented the wheel. Players still take part in six sets of class-based races, advancing only after they complete a license test. Those tests can be as simple as making a turn in a pre-determined time or beating a specific lap time, but they get more complex and unforgiving as players progress. What’s different this time around is players can earn enough stars to unlock a new license test by picking and choosing which races from the healthy selections to complete. There’s a lot of freedom to the progression, which is a nice addition to a franchise that used to be very restrictive.

For Gran Turismo fans this will sound familiar, and that’s true of the package as a whole. Players earn credits by completing races within each license class, and they can use those credits to purchase new cars. In turn, players can tune and improve those cars until they become a player’s own personal roadster, also using in-game credits. There’s somewhere in the vicinity of 1,200 cars available, and each has its own personality, advantages, and disadvantages. And trust us when we say players will feel the difference, especially when they start making the jump to high performance vehicles. [It should also be noted that although microtransactions are now a part of the GT business model, unlocking cars through the natural progression has not been affected.]

But what most fans are here to read about is the racing, the crème de la crème of Gran Turismo 6. From the very first race, Gran Turismo 6 asserts itself as one of the most polished sim racers on the market, one that is deep but also willing to teach. The game offers no quarter when it comes to handling or speed, but rewards players who learn and evolve as they go. At the beginning, players might take each turn with gusto, but they will soon understand how to approach a variety of turns with a variety of vehicles. The first set of races are basically like appetizers, setting the stage for what is to come before the first license test breaks players of their bad habits. And with that solid foundation, and a shiny new “B” license, the game then starts to introduce more nuanced concepts. Some of these concepts take some patience to learn, but executing a race with minimal missteps is rewarding.

Gran Turismo 6 isn’t wholly focused on straight simulation racing either, it actually packs a surprising amount of variety. The coffee break challenges have returned, as have some one-off races with unique vehicles, but the real treat this time around are the moon rover events. These show that although Polyphony loves diving deep into car culture they also want to deliver a product with some personality. But what’s most important about these events is they are completely optional, meaning players who want the full sim experience can avoid them altogether.

While the racing is engaging and the race options are bountiful, the presentation in Gran Turismo 6 feels a little lacking. The car models are still incredible, but after seeing what next-gen consoles can deliver it’s hard not to wish Polyphony had waited, as hard as that might have been. However, if we’re comparing this to current-gen titles, which is the only fair way to approach things, Gran Turismo 6 still runs at a very high level with a silky smooth frame rate, beautiful reflections, and great weather and day/night effects. The only visual fail is with the crowds watching the races which look as if they were inserted from the earliest Gran Turismo titles. My only true gripe with the game’s presentation is the disconnect between the visuals and the audio. The cars look more realistic than they ever have, but their engines sound too much like one another and that sound isn’t very dynamic. The same goes for the goofy bumper car sounds when colliding with other vehicles or walls.

And while we’re on the topic of the game’s shortcomings, Gran Turismo 6 could still use some work in the A.I. department. Most race opponents simply go about their business; they never jockey for position or truly challenge the player. It’s almost as if the racers in Gran Turismo 6 are locked into their position and have little drive to improve let alone win. Sure, the harder license races offer a greater challenge, but that has little to do with the A.I.’s decisions on the track and more to do with the track layouts themselves and the competition’s selection of vehicle.

That doesn’t diminish the racing overall, though, as the true fun in Gran Turismo 6 comes from getting around the track in a precise, clean manner. And even then, once things transition into multiplayer Gran Turismo 6 starts to pick up. Races are more challenging because everyone has found their car of choice, but the victories are also more rewarding. There are also plenty of online options to choose from, with a wealth of parameters (drift, go-kart, etc.). It’s not perfect, but it keeps the experience going.

All in all, Gran Turismo 6 delivers sim racing at a peak level. From the visuals to the races to the car choices, Polyphony Digital has upped their game once again, showing why they are the name in the genre. Polyphony has also made a game that’s surprisingly accessible and less restrictive than past iterations. GT 6 also gives players a wealth of fun distractions that, while purely optional, help give the game some personality.

Still, even amidst all of the game’s standout qualities, there are places it could certainly improve, especially in with the way opponent A.I. reacts. Online multiplayer alleviates that issue, but this is a franchise built around the single player race, and we hope the PS4 will come in to make things even better. That being said, there is just so much content packed into this game that poor A.I. is tolerable, especially since the racing is so much fun even without opponents. Gran Turismo 6 is a fitting send-off to the PS3 and comes highly recommended.

Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag Review

Of the many games that launched as cross-generation titles, Assassin’s Creed 4 stands out on the PlayStation 4 as one game that might be worth a second look on the new hardware.   The pirate-themed adventure is one that was already one of the most outstanding Assassin’s Creed games in recent memory, but the better visuals, PS Vita Remote Play features, and exclusive content, make this one launch title for the PlayStation 4 that could bridge the gap until new games start rolling out in 2014.

Like its predecessors, Assassin’s Creed 4 is another massive historical adventure.  Ubisoft puts players into the shoes of Edward Kenway, direct ancestor of the characters in Assassin’s Creed 3.  It takes some of the most popular features found in the 2012 release, like sailing and sea battles, and builds an impressive game around the premise.  Set in the Caribbean, this Kenway is a pirate, who finds himself thrown into the mix of the series long struggle between the Templars and the Assassins.

Black Flag on the PS4 isn’t offering anything that really separates it from the last-gen versions, when it comes to gameplay.  It’s a carbon copy of what can be found on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.  The game also relies heavily on a lot of the systems that have been built up throughout the series.  The combat, exploration, and mission structure are wholly familiar to what we’ve seen from the  previous games in the series, games that certainly aren’t lacking in content, and neither is this one.  There is plenty to explore in Black Flag.  The major changes between this game and others in the series is in the significant chunk of sea faring.

Ubisoft has struggled over the years to implement new features into Assassin’s Creed.  These elements have been hit and miss, but naval combat and naval mechanics are a breath of fresh air for the series.  Even though a large portion of the game is built around these mechanics, it feels better blended into what you’ve come to expect from an Assassin’s Creed game.   Your ship, The Jackdaw, is your main method of transportation when hopping from island to island, and there’s plenty of trouble to get into, collectibles to find, and world to explore.  The sense of ownership and upgrade possibilities make exploring all of the sea-faring land-based content in the game a worthwhile experience in progressing your ship’s abilities.

If anything, it’s some of the legacy mission structures and gameplay aspects that really hold this Assassin’s Creed game back.   Assassin’s Creed 4 is a familiar experience on solid ground.  The combat encounters still don’t feel very challenging.  The free running systems still feel like they need some refinement to avoid some of the frequent missteps you can encounter.  The penalty for breaking stealth is minimal, and right from the very beginning, Edward feels like the most powerful man in the city, without ever making any progression to that point.  This stuff doesn’t make the Assassin’s Creed 4 experience a bad one, by any means, it’s just gameplay that feels like it could be refined to make the Assassin’s Creed games even more immersing going forward.   But there is a lot to do on the ground.  Assassination contracts, Synchronization Points, Seashanty Collections, Treasures to be found, and Animus fragments to be discovered — there’s no shortage of things to keep you busy.

This is something that a lot of open world games never get right.  They offer a lot of content, but there’s never any real hook to get it all done.  In Assassin’s Creed 4, since the naval aspects of the game are so good, you’re inclined to continually progress your adventure through the game’s many ways of earning cash and upgrades for your vessel.  In short, it’s one of the best open world games for those who like to collect.

It’s not the best showcase for what the new hardware can deliver, but it’s impressive regardless.  There’s a distinct visual upgrade when playing on the PlayStation 4.  You’ll get an eyeful of high-resolution textures in the PS4 version of Black Flag.  The ocean and its crashing waves look more realistic.  The lush tropical environments are blooming with color, and impressive vegetation. Just about every facet of the game’s visuals has been improved considerably, and Assassin’s Creed fans will definitely get a glimpse of what to expect from the series going forward — at least when it comes to visuals.

Edward Kenway is one of the more likable protagonists in recent memory.  He’s certainly more interesting that Conor was in Assassin’s Creed 3.  Furthermore, Assassin’s Creed 4 doesn’t follow the same story path that previous games did.  There’s a more natural progression towards Kenway becoming an Assassin.  The way that the story unfolds is more welcoming to those who wish to just explore the life of a pirate in this time period.  The story almost feels secondary for a large portion of the game.  Though it is an interesting one, once Ubisoft decides to start unravelling its threads.  Kenway’s goals at the game’s onset are to simply gain money, the goals are what you would expect from a pirate.  This initial story thread aligns perfectly with what you’re doing for the first half of the game.  Ubisoft still grounds itself with some of its old ties.  You’ve got the Animus, and Abstergo, but it just feels less reliant on these themes to make for a more enjoyable and well told story than it has in the past.  Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag is one of the more memorable stories in the series, and one that fans of the franchise should enjoy thoroughly.

For those that own the PlayStation Vita, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is probably the best showcase for the remote play features that we’ve tested since launch.  While it’s novel in some games, the nature and pace of Black Flag are a natural fit for playing it on the handheld.  The game seems to run more smoothly on the PS Vita than others we’ve played, but it’s not nearly as beautiful as it is in full-blown 1080p.  The most impressive thing is just how well the game blends to the limited control scheme on the device.  And given the sheer size and scope of this game, we’re willing to bet there’s going to be numerous occasions where you’ll want to take your adventure mobile.

While the storyline of ACIV can run you up to 40 hours to complete in its entirety, there’s a whole world of online content to explore as well.  Following in the tradition set with Brotherhood, this multiplayer has familiar aspects as well as some brand new modes to try out. Black Flag’s multiplayer component is familiar in that it’s themed in the same way as previous games.  The Abstergo labs and Animus aspects of multiplayer are prevalent once again.  Much like your experience in the single player mode, the multiplayer has the same back story that has the Abstergo corporation facilitating all of these pirate-themed competitive and cooperative modes.

A lot of the core features in multiplayer are the same though, with game modes having new iterations.  The very essence of the multiplayer is a hide and seek style mode, where you seek out other players while trying to remain disguised and undetected.  But there are quite a few variations on this premise.  And there are countless variations that can now be established in the game’s new Game Lab feature, which allows players to customize games modes for both public consumption and private matches.

There’s also a new cooperative mode called Wolfpack.   This mode puts players in groups, where they must perform a variety of different tasks.  Teams will be asked to take down assassination targets, defend chests from other pluderers, and other different types of modes that depend on you working with your online friends, instead of against.

All in all, the online offering for Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag is one of the biggest we’ve seen, equaling the massive content found in the single player portion of the game.  It’s an acquired taste though.  Assassin’s Creed multiplayer isn’t for everyone, and not everyone will get the hours of enjoyment out of this side of the game that are possible.

The Verdict

Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag is right up there with the best games in the series.  Building a game entirely around the sea based features found in ACIII sounded gimmicky when it was announced earlier this year, but Ubisoft nailed it on all fronts.  It’s a beautiful game, it’s fun to play, and it’ll last you tens of hours to complete.  What more can you ask for?  We’ll likely be seeing more of Assassin’s Creed in 2014, and just what’s up their sleeve for the next game, just got a lot more interesting.