What did you do with your extra hour? Us, we slept… Oh and played some big releases!
The Outer Worlds
Fancy some Fallout with a bit Futurama style thrown in, well that’s pretty much exactly what The Outer Worlds feels like and I love it!
Obsidian seem to have nailed it with The Outer Worlds. Not only have the delivered a really solid RPG. You can play it on gamepass for both Xbox One and PC which is honestly such good value it’s almost unbelievable. I guess that’s what happens when you’re owned by Microsoft though.
I’m roughly 6 hours in to the game, I’ve just departed the first location and so far I don’t have any major complaints. The quests have been enjoyable, the combat is fun. Not only that, but the characters and dialogue are all great too.
With my character I’ve decided to go for a someone who is good with words, able to talk their way out – or in, to most situations. As a result I’ve managed to be pretty good at talking around most situations. Whether that be persuading people do to things for me. Or talking people out of stupid decisions. There seems to be quite a lot of variety in how you can approach things, which is always great!
Honestly, I’d suggest going to try it for yourself, seeing as you can get your hands on it so cheap and easily.
Call of Duty Modern Warfare
For a while I was on the fence about the latest COD game. Mostly because I wasn’t sure how they were going to handle monitising it going forward. I didn’t want the game to end up being packed full of loot boxes and thankfully that isn’t the route they’re going. Because of that, I bought it.
I’ve only been playing the campaign so far, which means that’s all I will talk about for now. With no spoilers – obviously. Next week I’ll dig in to the multiplayer.
It’s been some years since I’ve played a COD campaign, and even more since I’ve enjoyed one. But, so far the campaign has been fun. Clearly they’re trying to go for a more serious approach to this years story and for the most part it works. Although I do think that it’s failed to really get any emotional kind of attachment so far.
They want you to care more about who lives and who dies. The problem is, is that some of the characters are so ‘flash in the pan’ that you don’t get time to know them. You can’t feel something just based on the relationship to another character alone. It’s almost as if as soon as they’re in the game they’re dead.
That aside, it’s been an enjoyable romp, swiftly moving between big action set pieces and the more tense close combat situations. Personally I’ve preferred the slower paced parts. They feel a little more exciting as they have good pacing to them. The action ebs and flows throughout, rather than being non-stop explosions. The missions at night have been by far the best for me.
Also, the cut scenes are probably some of the most detailed I think I’ve ever. With the gameplay visuals not being too far behind.
-Will
Days Gone
Okay so this should definitely be the last round up you hear me talk about Days Gone, for a while anyway as I finally completed the behemoth of a game.
I thoroughly enjoyed the hours I put into this game, but I honestly hadn’t expected to put so many in. Perhaps its because my way of playing games has changed since having my son, almost one year to the day (Happy first Birthday Travis for the 31st October). My sessions within Days Gone tended to only be 2-3 hour bursts in the evening, where prior story driven games I’d be able to plug at least 5 hours an evening into them. These days sleep takes more precedence than gaming hours sadly. But I digress…
Days Gone was a much better than I’d anticipated and especially read about. The reviews for it back in April were positive but seemingly lacked the wow factor previous Sony first party titles had put out such as Uncharted 4, Horizon, God Of War, Detroit and Spider-Man (what a combination). That said I still loved the experience of it. There were survival elements to the game such as keeping tabs on your bike fuel, crafting items and such, but not enough to make it a full on open world survival game.
The story seemed to go on and on and on, and that’s not a negative, I enjoyed it kept going and relished meeting new characters at camps to keep the story going. I also enjoyed that it ended up feeling as if the freakers and hordes were the lesser of enemies to be concerned with in this post apocalyptic world which was also inhabited by crazed cults and murderous gangs trying to survive, other humans became the bigger enemy.
I will say though, the O’Brian ending…Wow.
Concrete Genie
After completing Days Gone I moved onto Concrete Genie instantly and completed it in 2 rather decent evening sittings.
First up, the game is outright beautiful. The works of art you create through Desnka restoring the lights and trying to restore the soul of the city are amazing.
The genies that you create are really good fun too, really imaginative friends you can make to assist you through the city and sewers and really creative AI controls to help progress some puzzles.
The story is rather quite heart warming too, bringing Luna to life from the back of being bullied and having your note book torn to shreds, going from being bullied to being the hero that all the kids like, a tad cliche, but it was nice.
I was not expecting the change of pace though more so in particular the complete shift of controls and general objective. Painting master pieces on grimy walls to surfing through the city on a beam of colourful light emitted from your paintbrush and battling dark genies, real different change but equally enjoyable.
Would recommend grabbing Concrete Genie for various reasons, obviously because it’s stunning and genuinely a great game but also to show support to studios that are making AA games for PS4 exclusively that there is an audience for smaller adventures as well as grand epic AAA games. And the price, £22 for a new AA PS4 game is a steal. Go support PixelOpus and pick this up. Hopefully it’ll help to persuade Sony & PlayStation to make more of these little gems and equally release them physically.
– Murr
