Animal Crossing New Horizons

The other game I've been playing recently on Switch 2 is Animal Crossing. I returned to this after five years and decided to make a fresh start with a new island as I'd forgotten a lot of the mechanics and surprises. The new HD graphics and general polish make this feel like a whole new game, and I've quickly got back into the daily rhythm of collecting fruit, digging for fossils, fishing, bug hunting, snowman building and general pottering around in small doses.

I suspect I am going to rack up a whole extra year of daily play on this!

No Man's Sky : Remnant

The game No Man's Sky continues to evolve in surprising and enjoyable ways. The latest Remnant expedition introduces a gravity gun and some new options for customising the Colossus crawler with a flatbed tipper chassis, and then sets you loose on a planet where you collect industrial scrap that you load into your truck and take across hazardous terrain to a recycling centre where you launch it into various fiery furnaces for nanites. It becomes even more fun (and nerve wracking) when some of the waste you collect is volatile, either toxic, radioactive or explosive, and you have to carefully avoid craters and rough terrain for fear of it all going boom, like the old film Wages of Fear about truckers transporting dynamite through the jungle. 

There are other options to choose tank tracks, off-road tyres or spider legs for your vehicle, depending on the terrain. The final upgrade adds a scoop to the front that lets you happily bulldoze through rocks, plants and (ahem) wildlife  collecting resources as you go. 

I've been playing this mainly on Switch 2, but it also cross saves seamlessly to my PS5 and MacOs versions of the game. This particular expedition is somewhat unusual as it's all based on a single planet rather than the regular planet hopping, so the multiplayer can have lots of other people driving around at the same time. There is some speculation that this is a network stress test for the forthcoming Light No Fire game which also promises massively multiplayer co-op play.

Siren’s Rest

This is the DLC for Still Wakes the Deep and is set 11 years after the catastrophe that sent the Beira D crashing beneath the waves. You play as a diver called Mhairi who is exploring the twisted remains of the rig, looking for an explanation as to the cause of the disaster, and also to resolve a personal connection to the rig. You get to explore some of the same locations as the main game, but this time from a very different perspective as the scattered habitation modules are canted at crazy angles and are covered in seaweed and rust. 

The gameplay sees you swim through the wreckage, searching for clues and taking pictures to document your findings. It’s a very different experience, and diving felt very claustrophobic at times squeezing through narrow spaces trailing a fragile umbilical that is all that links you to the diving bell with a limited supply of air. The lighting is another big factor that adds to the immersion as your head torch flickers and you have to rely on eerie red flares to light the way. 

I would definitely recommend buying both the main game and dlc, and playing them one after the other.

Still Wakes the Deep

This game is set in 1975 aboard a North Sea oil rig, the Berra D. You play as Caz McCleary, a Glaswegian electrician who has taken an offshore job to get away from a spot of bother back home only to find that things are about to get a whole lot worse. The tyrannical rig boss Renwick has his card marked and is about to sack McCleary when a panicky report of trouble with the drill comes in and the platform is rocked with explosions and even stranger things. Caz now finds himself in a race against time to save the rig and his fellow workers and friends, whilst confronting the problems in his life that he has run away from.

The story is mostly linear as you make your way through different parts of the rig as the situation rapidly deteriorates. You have interactions with different crew members as well as flash back memories to your relationship with your partner that you have left back home. The voice acting is all top notch, with a healthy amount of realistically salty language and a conclusion that is genuinely heart rending. 

The game is from developers Chinese Room who were responsible for Everybody's Gone To The Rapture, and this game has the same stunningly realised sense of place and time, but where that game had the hedgerows and quaint village houses of the English countryside, this one is on a rusty, storm lashed rig where you can almost smell the salt air and the oil. 

Lost Records : Bloom and Rage

This game opens with you playing as a 40 something woman called Swann, driving back to your home town that you left 27 years previously, to meet up with old friends. Your memories of the summer before you moved away are hazy, but one thing is clear - why have you now got a parcel addressed to Bloom and Rage, the punk band that you were part of, way back when?

The narrative flips from the present day, in a bar waiting for your friends, to a halcyon summer in the mid 90's, where you first met your friends - skateboarder Autumn, riot grrrl Nora and Kat, the youngest of the group but a sparky firecracker nonetheless. Together, you confront a bully, explore the local woods and unravel a mystery that gets stranger the more you dig into it.

Swann, starts out as a shy loner, but gradually blossoms, documenting events through the lens of her camcorder as an aspiring videographer. There's a nice gameplay loop of collecting different short clips and assembling them into a narrative that makes sense of the unfolding events. There is a great level of detail to uncover as you record things around you from the mundane, to the natural flora and fauna of the woods to the strange and possibly sinister. 

There are strong elements of shows like Twin Peaks and Stranger Things, with a nostalgic 90s style soundtrack and many period appropriate details to pick up on. The plot has some shocking twists and genuinely creepy moments, held together with the grounded reality as you re-unite with your old friends in the present. The narrative choices that you make in the past have an effect on your current relationships as you talk about who you were back then and try to remember why you lost touch.

One interesting choice is that events in the present are seen mostly from a first person perspective, whereas the past is third person except for the times when you are looking through your camcorder. The graphics are all gorgeously detailed with great voice acting and music too. This is definitely one of the most emotionally engaging games I've played since Firewatch. Highly recommended.

Road 96

The country of Petria is facing a critical election. Ten years earlier, the country saw a devastating terrorist attack on the border that left many people dead. The incumbent President Tyrak has promised further crackdowns on the terrorists to keep the country safe, whereas the challenger Florres has been labelled a sympathiser. You are one of many teenagers who have run away from home to make a break for the border in the hope of crossing and finding a better life. 

You make your way north, hitching rides, working odd jobs to make a little money for food or to pay for a bus ride, and resting when you can to prepare for the risks of the crossing. On the way, each teen you play as will encounter a series of characters, learning a little more about them on each attempt. There's the idealistic Zoe, another teen runaway like yourself, young hacker Alex trying to find what happened to his parents on the day of the attack, trucker John struggling with his own memories, Police Officer Fanny whose job is to track down and send runaways into detention centres, bumbling bank robbers Stan and Mitch, media influencer Sonya and the sinister taxi driver Jarod. Each encounter presents choices that affect the story - will you support the political campaign of Florres, advocate for the direct action of the brigades or keep your head down and try to cross over without getting too involved?

The graphics are cell shaded and effective at conveying the variety of environments that you pass through - abandoned diners, gas stations, trailer parks and motels. The music is similarly good, with some nice 80s themed electronica and rock that you collect on cassettes as you find them during the story. The gameplay is mostly choosing different dialogue options (which is occasionally frustrating as the options float in the middle of the screen and can be tricky to select the one you want if other things are happening), but there are also some fun mini games - air hockey, arcade cabinets, pumping gas and serving drinks in a bar where you need to remember who has ordered what as you hunt through the bottles on the shelf. You can also find yourself driving or trying to escape the police in a chase sequence.

The conclusion of the story is heart wrenching as the back stories and unexpected connections between the characters are revealed, and the events of election day play out depending on the choices you have made. Definitely one of the most affecting games I've played since Firewatch a couple of years ago. 

No Man's Sky Cursed / Beachhead Redux

 Two short expeditions to report on. The first was a spooky setting timed to coincide with Halloween where the boundaries of reality were breaking down, time was speeding up and weird phantom creatures were attacking unless you managed to hold them back by crafting fuel for a reality stabiliser. There was a great sense of tension and strangeness to this one as you hopped from portal to portal in a race against time. The reward was a sweet Millennium Falcon style S class ship!

The second two week expedition was a chance to replay one of the early ones and was mainly freighter based with the final reward being a frigate based on the Normandy from Mass Effect - a very cool addition to any fleet!

The Crew 2

The Crew 2 was Ubisoft's answer to Forza Horizons, with hundreds of vehicles, events and challenges spread across a (slightly condensed) map of the whole USA. It's an online, massively multiplayer world with other players showing up for races, but you can effectively play it as a single player game if you want. It follows the classic formula of driving to icons on the map (or fast travelling in the menu) and competing in various sorts of races, time trials and stunt challenges. As well as cars, there are also motorbikes, monster trucks, off roaders, speedboats, hovercraft, and stunt and racing planes. 

I picked this up as part of my PS+ sub, and as well as the base game there are literally hundreds of free DLC events and extra content drops, but in the end I mostly stuck to the story missions which are effectively scavenger hunts where you are given a postcard style clue to a location and tasked with working out where it is and driving there to unlock the next stage. After twelve or so stages, you are rewarded with a shiny new car. These missions give you a good excuse to criss cross the USA and take in all of the iconic locations across the vast map. 

The graphics are pretty good on the whole - perhaps the cities aren't quite as detailed as those in the Watchdogs series, but the wide open landscapes, small towns, mountains and woods can be spectacular as the day/night cycle progresses and the weather changes in real time. The driving/flying model is mostly arcady but feels satisfying enough, especially from the in car cockpit view. 

I think that I'll keep this one installed for a while, just as something to drop into when I fancy a drive.

No Man's Sky - Aquarius

 To take advantage of the dramatic new ocean tech in No Man's Sky, we now have an expedition themed around a new fishing mechanic with some interesting challenges along the way. I particularly liked the new fishing skiff which is a little floating platform with a built in storage area that you can place in the middle of the ocean and cast your line from. This is one of the few expeditions that I have completed on Switch and PS5 versions, simply because it is a relaxing way to spend a bit of time catching weird fish on even weirder alien seas.

LA Noire

I originally played this when it first came out on X-Box 360 and fancied revisiting it to see how it holds up, picking up a remastered version on PS5 which included all of the DLC goodies.

The setting is 1940s Los Angeles where you play as Cole Phelps, a returning GI war hero who takes on a job as a beat cop before rising through the ranks as a detective working traffic, homicide, vice and arson cases. Each case opens with a cut scene to establish the crime and usually a briefing at the station before you get in your car to head to the crime scene. You are mostly working with a partner who can chip in with advice or may have an agenda of their own, notably the massively sleazy Roy Earle who you are partnered with on the vice desk. Casing the crime scene involves searching for clues, with optional haptic buzzes to let you know when you are near something you can examine. Some items can be further manipulated and zoomed in on for a closer look

This being a hard boiled detective story, there are also a lot of dead bodies along the way. That you have to examine in detail. A large number of these are women who have been murdered in gruesome ways, making this a game that can be quite disturbing in places and definitely not suitable for children. 

When you have enough clues, you can interrogate the suspects, watching their reactions before deciding how to proceed - do you act as a good cop and believe them or go bad cop and press them to reveal more? If you spot a lie you can accuse them directly and present them with the appropriate bit of evidence. The final denouement is usually back at the station where you charge someone and close the case. Some cases have multiple suspects that you can grill and either one could be guilty - you decide! If you miss a clue or take the wrong choices when interviewing, you could send an innocent person to prison - the game will continue, and you have to live with the consequences.

There are also twists in the overarching plot, where cases turn out to be related in unexpected ways and may throw new light on previous decisions. It wouldn't be 1940s Los Angeles without a reference to the infamous Black Dahlia murder and other cases in the game have roots in real life occurrences too. The city is lovingly recreated, as this fascinating account of someone who played the game with their elderly father who had grown up in that era with a policeman father shows. The city can feel a little empty compared to other open world games, but there are various landmarks to visit and collectibles to collect if you are so inclined. You can also take a break from whatever case you're on to investigate various street crimes that you pick up on over the radio.

Given that this is a PS3 era game, some of the character models are a little stiff, but the famed facial animations still hold up today with the starring role of Phelps being played by Aaron Staton (of Mad Men fame) and easily recognisable. The music and sound effects are equally good, with a particular highlight being a performance in a jazz club from a chanteuse femme fatale who turns out to be a key person of interest.

The conclusion to the story is not surprisingly downbeat, bringing to mind films like Chinatown and LA Confidential, mixing murder, drugs, vice and corruption going all the way to the top. It's a definite must play if you enjoy this genre.

 

No Man’s Sky - Liquidators

A new update and a new expedition are a great excuse to jump back into No Man’s Sky. The Worlds update brings some great graphical improvements including volumetric clouds, weather and vast ocean storms. Water landings (if you have the appropriate mod on your ship) are now a thing and it’s quite a rush to drop out of orbit through storm clouds and set down in a rolling sea. This is just part one of the Worlds upgrade so it will be interesting to see what comes next - apparently this is some of the same tech that will be used in Hello Games’ new project “Light No Fire”

The Liquidators expedition this time is a bug hunt, with plenty of squamous xeno monstrosities to blast using a tricked out Minotaur mech exocraft. The flamethrower arm is a particularly satisfying upgrade as one of the expedition rewards.

Watchdogs 2

 In this game the action moves from the Windy City of Chicago to the sun-kissed (and occasionally foggy) streets of San Francisco. The protagonist also changes from the dour Aiden Pearce to the happy-go-lucky Marcus Holloway, who proves his mettle by breaking into an evil surveillance tech company to erase himself from their database and is invited to join hacktivist group DedSec to go and hack everything in sight.

Gameplay is similar to the first game, but with a few new twists. Remote control drones - both flying and wheeled - make an early appearance, allowing Marcus to scope out an area and lay traps for guards before breaking in. As well as the evil tech bro villain, you get to take down biker and drug gangs, a sinister tech based religious cult (no prizes for guessing what this is based on) and an Internet search company complete with a Silicon Valley campus headquarters. 

Some missions require a bit of lateral thinking to find a way onto rooftop locations, but there are usually fork lift trucks and scissor lifts parked nearby, and even cranes that allow you to hoist yourself up on a precarious looking platform. I love the way that Marcus sits down crosslegged with his laptop when he is remotely hacking one of these things as it bounces around in an alarming fashion.

The network hacking puzzles are back, with the occasional added frustration of timed levels that are triggered by moving certain tiles. The trick with these is to set as many nodes correctly as you can before triggering the timed sections. The difficulty level is also reasonable - there aren't as many frustrating points as the first game, and the final mission is also pitched at the right point so it is challenging but completable in a couple of attempts.

The side missions are similarly good, with each one being triggered by hacking a particular phone and getting involved. There's an enjoyable Uber driver style taxi game with getting passengers to their destinations on time without upsetting them by crashing or in one case performing stunt jumps for an internet influencer to post on her channel for likes. I also enjoyed the challenge of taking a selfie at each notable location in San Francisco and posting it on a photo sharing app on your in game phone, getting comments from your team mates.

The level progression is linked to gaining followers for your own DedSec app by each audacious hack adding so many additional followers. It feels a little hokey, but it fits the theme. The banter between the DadSec team members in the HQ hack space is nicely done and you get to know each of them in turn. A particular highlight is when the team has to go on the run and ends up at a Burning Man style festival in the middle of nowhere to regroup.

The graphics are very nice, making use of some wide open spaces looking out across the bay as you speed across the Golden Gate bridge. Locations include the city itself with enjoyably steep streets, Oakland, Alcatraz and Silicon Valley on a decent sized (but not overwhelming) map. 

It's a great game and on a par with Watchdogs Legion for me.

Watch Dogs

After playing Watch Dogs Legion recently, I was interested to go back to the first game in the series to see how it compared. The main character is Aiden Pearce, a dour cyber vigilante very much in the mould of Reese from Person of Interest, who is on a mission of revenge after the death of his young niece. He does this by tracking down and hacking a variety of criminal gangs and corrupt fixers in the underworld of a realistically rendered Chicago and surrounds. 

A lot of the gadgets from the latter game are missing here, making it a challenge to try and infiltrate various gang hideouts by hacking security cameras while remaining hidden. If you time it right you can take down a guard silently, but there's no way of hiding the bodies so there's a good chance that the alarm will be raised fairly quickly. You can also set things to explode remotely to kill someone if you time it right, but this also alerts anyone else nearby. There are only a couple of silent weapons available, so things usually escalate into a firefight fairly quickly. Even on the easy settings these can be quite tough, especially when enemies dressed in bullet proof armour make an appearance. 

As well as gang members, the police are pretty sharp at taking an interest in your activities with a cat and mouse game of trying to evade attention by ducking down side alleys and hiding from surveillance helicopters. The driving is satisfying with noticeable differences between the different vehicles available and the ability to shake off pursuit by switching traffic lights, exploding steam pipes (which I assume is a thing in Chicago) or most entertainingly by triggering one of the many elevating bridges over the river. If you time it right, you can jump over gap as the bridge raises and leave anyone chasing you on the wrong side.

Whilst walking down the street you can hack any phone in the vicinity, listening in on conversations, getting the location of crimes and stolen items, and draining bank accounts into your own. This is a handy source of funds for buying guns and ammo, explosives, drugs and electronic parts for gadgets, but it seems a little bit unethical for someone who is supposed to be a vigilante fighting crime to be ripping off innocent passers by. I think that I had over a million dollars in my account at the end of the game, but unlike the GTA games where you can buy fancy houses and apartments, my character still seemed to be living in a dumpster.

The side missions are entertaining, and a good way to earn experience points and upgrade your skill tree quickly (which is something of a necessity). I especially enjoyed the random vigilante missions where you get a tip off to a location where a crime is predicted to be about to happen and have to scan the crowd to find the potential victim and perpetrator, and then time your intervention to save the day. This has the effect of also boosting your reputation which cancels out the negative impact you get if you happen to run over a bystander while speeding down a street while escaping. 

The missions are mostly fun, but there are occasional huge spikes in difficulty towards the end of the game. The story line is also quite grim with the villain being a sordid old business tycoon pretty obviously based on Rupert Murdoch, with drugs, gang violence and human trafficking thrown into the mix. It's never really explored where Aiden gets his l33t hacking skillz from and the Dedsec group are mostly in the background. I did finish the main storyline and most of the side missions, clocking up 49 hours in this compared with 73 hours in Legion.

Graphically, it's pretty good on the PS5 and runs smoothly during the inevitable chases. It's particularly impressive with rainy streets and night time illuminations. I remember a bit of controversy when it was initially released with the actual game not matching up to the pre-release screenshots and trailers but I had no complaints. 

Watch Dogs 2 next!

Watch Dogs Legion : Bloodlines

OK, so I finished the Watch Dogs Legion main story (which was part of my PS+ subscription) then I noticed that the Bloodlines DLC was on sale, so I went and downloaded it. 

This one features Aiden Pearce, the protagonist from the original Watch Dogs (which I still haven't played) who seems to be more focussed on direct action rather than stealth, giving a different feel to the missions here. They are set just before the events of the main story, but I didn't mind going back to that point with a different perspective. The side missions here are a variety of tasks to upgrade your kit, with some nice new toys to play with notably a new spider bot that can convert into a drone to fly into hard to reach locations. 

There also seemed to be more car chases and gun play on offer in this story, which features some noticeably tougher adversaries. The final boss battle also ramps up the difficulty and took me a few attempts to complete. Not quite enough to put me off, but I was glad to finish it so I could return to exploring the rain slicked streets of London

Watch Dogs Legion

On the surface this is a GTA style game - driving around an open world city, completing missions and side quests, but there is enough here to give it a distinct flavour of its own. The premise is that the game is set in near future dystopian London where you play as part of a hacker collective, framed for a series of terrorist bombings and hunted by a paramilitary security force that now seems to be in charge of the city. There is not a main protagonist and the twist is that you can recruit anyone you see on the street to your cause - you can scan them to see their personality quirks and skills, and complete a mission to get them onside. Different operatives will help in various ways - a construction worker can walk through a building site without being challenged or a hacker can make short work of security systems.

The missions generally involve infiltrating a building to get access to information or release a hostage. There is always a choice of ways to achieve the objective - hijacking a construction drone to find a way in from the roof, taking over cctv cameras to disable alarms remotely, sending in a spider drone to scuttle through ventilation ducts, stealthing your way through knocking out guards one by one or if all else fails shooting everyone, although that tends to escalate quickly when the guards start calling in reinforcements. 

The environments range from swanky city offices, to government buildings, refugee camps, building sites, railway stations, gangster lockups, sewers and even good old Buckingham Palace. The sense of place is fabulous - it’s not exactly a one to one recreation of London, but all of the well known landmarks are present in sufficient detail that I was able to navigate my way through Kings Cross to Camden via the Euston Road by following my nose. Wandering around and listening to conversations is quite uncanny, and a pleasant change from the usual American settings for games like this.

The soundtrack is equally on point, with one of the highlights being an in game podcast featuring Andy Zaltzman and Alice Fraser reprising their Bugle podcast personas and commenting on the in game politics.

The storyline has you investigating shady government agencies, a brutal crime syndicate, and the neo-fascist Albion Security company, trying to find out who is pulling the strings and what their ultimate plans are. There are some fun side missions where you can liberate a district by stirring up dissent, sticking up posters on walls and freeing prisoners from police stations. This not only gives you in game currency to spend on customizing your team and tech points to upgrade your gear, but also some unique recruits including barristers to get any arrested operatives out of prison and paramedics to heal injuries faster. Other fun recruits included a stage magician who could hypnotize guards and a spy with a stealth car and a selection of gadgets. 

My number one recruit was a middle aged woman from Northern Ireland with a nice line in hacking skills and I really enjoyed the banter with the team AI called Bagley who is on hand to tell you what to do. There’s a nice coda mission involving Bagley at the end which was actually quite moving.

In conclusion, this is was one of the best games I’ve played recently and is especially recommended if you’ve ever been to London and wondered what it would be like to drive around it like a maniac.

Snuffkin : Melody of Moominvalley

I've loved the Moomin stories of Tove Jansson ever since I was gifted a copy of Comet in Moominland by a Finnish friend of my mum's when I was small. Every now and then I return to the stories, or watch the animated series, and I never fail to be delighted by them.

This game is a wonderful evocation of Moominvalley, where you play as Snuffkin the wanderer, searching for his missing pal Moomintroll. The gameplay is fairly simple - exploring Moominvalley's caves and islands, a bit of light puzzle solving using the different musical instruments that you pick up along the way and stealthily avoiding policemen as you remove pesky signs from the park that the Hemulen park keeper has placed to forbid all fun. There's even a chase where you run away from the terrible Groke, but there is nothing too difficult here. 

The joy of this game is in the art which captures the feel of Jansson's iconic illustrations and the music, a delightful ambient soundtrack produced in collaboration with Sigur Ros. The soundtrack is also available on iTunes and is a very relaxing listen.

I played this on Switch and it's also available for PC on Steam. Highly recommended!

Control

 I missed out on Control when it first came out, but when I heard it was related to the Alan Wake storyline and that it was included in my PS+ subscription I added it to my download queue.

The story starts innocently enough. You play as Jesse Faden who arrives at the front desk of the Federal Bureau of Control offices looking for news of her missing brother after an unexplained 'altered world event' in her home town of Ordinary. Things rapidly get very strange indeed as you head deeper into the FBC building, known as the Oldest House. Mysterious alarms sound, possessed office workers float in mid-air and the whole place periodically reconfigures itself around you. Before long you find out that the whole place has been corrupted by something called 'The Hiss', you acquire a gun (of sorts) and people start referring to you as the Director. Curiouser and curiouser. 

High points of the game include the bizarre story and some of the most realistic / otherworldly level design that I can think of. Vast atriums of glass and stone, office cubicles strewn with secret files, hidden walkways and tunnels, and the very foundations deep within the earth. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it hangs together with a sort of dreamlike logic. I never really worked out why some sections involved exploring a mysterious motel that you are transported to after pulling a light switch three times, but maybe I missed a crucial memo somewhere.

You also rapidly gain phenomenal powers, including the ability to levitate and throw things ranging from chunks of masonry to forklift trucks at the enemies. Just about everything is destructible and it is fun to storm through an innocent looking office, sending desks flying. By the end of the game you really feel like a superpowered federal agent.

Your gun morphs into different forms at will, and fortunately it automatically recharges so you never run out of ammo, which is handy as there are a lot of bad guys to deal with, resulting in some epic battles over multiple levels. This is probably one of the best parts of the game, and a complete contrast to Alan Wake where you are forced to conserve every single bullet and torch battery.

The bad guys don't show a lot of variety, and eventually become more of an irritation to be dealt with before you get on with the exploration and puzzle solving aspects of the game. The characteristic orange glare as they materialise is a nifty visual effect though.

There are a *lot* of side quests and collectible items, including memos and case notes to read through, some of which tie into familiar events and characters from Bright Falls. This originally came out before Alan Wake II and is really more of a teaser for that game, but there are some nice easter egg references to pick up on. There is more music from Old Gods of Asgard, with a particularly memorable section involving a running battle through a maze that reconfigures itself as you run through it like something out of the movie Inception. 

Good fun, and Remedy are now a developer that I would definitely consider picking up any new release from.

Spider-Man : Miles Morales

 Spider-Man was one of my favourite games of the PS4 era, so I was pleased to see that this sequel / expansion was available in the PS+ library. After a brief introductory chapter, Peter Parker leaves New York in the sole care of new kid on the block Miles Morales, a spider person with his own twist on the familiar spider powers. As well as the standard kicks, punches and dodges, Miles has some very nifty bio-electric powers that be be used to zap bad guys, boost your speed or even drain or charge various electrical gizmos that crop up in the course of the story.

Talking of the story, apart from an appearance by The Rhino at the very start of the game, there is a new set of antagonists here with an intriguing plot about the amoral Roxxon corporation installing volatile reactors in the middle of Miles' neighbourhood (because reasons) and a mysterious Underground group opposing them with terroristy tactics. There are a couple of other side plots that get fleshed out in side missions, random street crimes to stop and various bits and pieces to collect. The end of the game is surprisingly emotional, with a really nice coda set of collectibles to finish the game.

The graphics on PS5 are not surprisingly excellent and the Dual Sense controller is put to good use with various haptic buzzes linked to the electric powers and the reactive triggers used in web slinging. The game also loads quickly, and the fast travel is pretty much instant too. 

Highly recommended!

Alan Wake II

 I’ve been a fan of Alan Wake since playing the original on Xbox 360 back in 2010. This sequel picks up thirteen years after the original story with FBI agent Saga Anderson investigating events in the town of Bright Falls with partner Alex Casey. There’s a strong Nordic noir feel to this side of the story, with various Finnish ex-pat characters in the town, references to Norse mythology (notably the in game heavy metal band Old Gods of Asgard) and the lead character wearing a sensible woolly jumper. 

The plot alternates between Saga and Alan Wake himself, who is trapped in a nightmarish version of New York with dreamlike repeating loops, memories of gruesome murders and a hilarious musical sequence set in a TV studio. The visual effects really make use of the processing power of the PS5 with real time shadows and seamless integration of live action cut scene sequences, rain pounding scuzzy streets and midnight forests and full surround sound effects and music.

There are some good twists to the gameplay and puzzle solving with Saga pinning clues to a murder board in her Mind Place and Alan re-writing reality to unravel the scenes in the dark place. There are some very creepy environments and some jump scares that really caught me out.

Highly recommended.

This is a live performance of one of the in-game songs from the Game Awards

The Old Gods of Asgard - Herald of Darkness

Deus Ex Machina

So, that's Deus Ex : Human Revolution done and dusted.

It's something of a curate's egg of a game. The near-future dystopian cyberpunk setting, with computer hacking, bionic augmentations and amoral corporations replacing nation governments is hardly original. However, it's well done, particularly in the details found in numerous emails, ebooks and newspapers that can be picked up and read as you progress from a post industrial Detroit to the Blade Runner-esque sprawl of Hengsha in China. The game gives enormous freedom in tackling each encounter, from stealthy sneaking to furious firefights, which may be helped or hindered by the augmentation upgrades that you choose to enable.

The bad parts are the repetitive nature of some of the environments. I know that we live in a global village, but will a toilet in a convention centre in Detroit be exactly the same as the one in an apartment building in China, down to the video screen by the hand basin and the identical ventilation shaft behind the second cubicle to crawl through? Similarly, every computer, everywhere in the world has the same lock screen wall paper with the only difference being the layout of the file structures that you hack through to gain access. The final third of the game, after the openness of the earlier city based environments is disappointingly linear, but the most egregious fault is the boss fights which remove every option except an overblown shoot out with an angry cyborg.

However, on balance the good points far outweigh the bad, and it is a polished, engaging experience with a lot going for it.

The next question is, what am I going to play next? I've dabbled with Mass Effect, but it just hasn't grabbed me in the same way as Deus Ex did as a role playing experience. Grand Theft Auto V has been announced, so maybe it's time to revisit GTA IV? After reading rumours that the new game is going to be set in Los Angeles (or at least Los Santos), I fired up GTA:San Andreas and spent a happy hour riding a motor bike from Las Venturas, down the coast to Los Santos, through the back woods up in to San Fiero and then back through the desert to where I started. Listening to Country & Western songs. Aces