Postal Redux is a slightly peculiar game. On the one hand, it’s a fairly simple shooter that uses an isometric perspective. You enter a level, there are a certain amount of enemies, you need to kill 96% of them. The game couldn’t be more straight forward. At the same time, it’s a game that goes out of it’s way to be edgy. Part of this is because the developers had hitherto been working on children’s games. So for them, Postal 1 was a way of letting off steam.

And to their credit, Postal 1 and it’s remaster Postal Redux are certainly as far away from a kid’s game as one can get. You play as the Postal dude, and you go postal across the course of 22 levels. You can shoot yourself, and indeed are encourage to shoot basically everything that moves. Animals, civilians, the police, clowns, it doesn’t matter. Now you can play through levels without killing civilians, but I think that’s missing the point really.

As for the gameplay itself, it’s fairly enjoyable if a little basic. You do get access to a whole host of different weapons, although ammo tends to be limited. You just run around shooting everything that moves. There are some health kits to pick up, and that’s about it. Every level is largely the same, at least in terms of objectives. The whole thing should only take you around 3 to 4 hours to complete. Once you’ve finished all 22 stages, the game is pretty much over. Fortunately you can play through every stage with a friend, if you know any sick puppies.

Regarding the rest of the game, there isn’t much to say. The soundtrack was extremely minimal even if the soundscape is appropriately mad. The graphics are decent and have certainly been touched up since the original release. The performance was alright considering this is an Unreal Engine 4 game. The plot barely exists. One thing to note is that the camera is a bit all over the place, with the perspective changing between levels. Also the train station level is weirdly hard. Oh and the AI bots (the clowns) are beyond useless.

And that’s about all I have to say about Postal Redux. I know it’s a short review, but this is a short game. It’s nothing special, but it is nice to see a remaster/remake that adds some new content for a relatively niche release. The gun-play is fine, nothing special but the weapon variety does help. I do wish that there was a bit more to do, that the bots were better and that the OST wasn’t so minimal. Otherwise what you see is what you get. Namely a isometric shooter for people who want society to EAT LEAD.

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Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a game by a different developer, that manages to feel exactly the same as Borderlands 2. There are some differences like new characters and so new skill trees. Generally speaking though this game hasn’t innovated, which is fine if you liked Borderlands 2. If you thought Borderlands 2 was pretty boring, then you are in trouble. Which means that I am in trouble. Of course there’s the entirely fair question, as to why I bought this game. The honest answer to that question is that my friend has a lousy PC. So in the search for co-op games we ended up on this one. Is it fun? Nope.

I’ll skim through the rationale for why I didn’t care for the game. Which should be fairly obvious between my last reviews and the TL;DR at the top. Essentially Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a looter shooter with bad loot and bad shooting. The cherries on top are of course; the weird vehicle controls, the annoying dialogue, the poor quest design and the generally tedious nature of the game’s level scaling system. There are some bright spots, like decent variety and the fact that the whole thing works in co-op, but generally speaking this game is a game for idiots. Combat is basic, the jokes fall flat, the game manages to feel extremely repetitive, most of the content is bland, it’s just a mess. Why this series became the series for co-op players is beyond me.

As for what this game adds to the series, well it has some background for the perennial favourite character of Handsome Jack. Who isn’t particularly interesting here, and is basically trying to be a hero but becomes a villain. The way this happens occurs slowly across missions, but essentially he goes from normal person to paranoid dictator in a gradual fashion. Yet it’s not handled very well, and it’s hard not to get the impression that our characters shouldn’t have sided with him once he started randomly executing civilians for the lols. The story also involves the vault hunters from previous games spoiling his plans to take control of the world, but they don’t do much. Honestly if you were a big Borderlands fan then I imagine you’ll find this game to be lacklustre in terms of exploring the characters.

Especially as the game otherwise doesn’t add that much. There are one or two new vehicles you get to use a handful of times. Plus the O2 mechanic, wherein you need oxygen to breathe but can also use this oxygen as a impromptu jetpack. Otherwise I can’t really think of anything outside of the new character classes. These are fine but I’m not playing through the game to max level 6 times. So the only thing I really noticed is that you can play as Claptrap. Which is about as much as fun as you’d expect.

With those new additions out of the way, I’ll just reiterate that Borderlands: The Pre-sequel really is more of the same. Just with Australian accents. The combat is the same, the weapon looting system is the same, the UI is the same, most of the enemies are the same, the mission is the same, the dialogue is of the same quality and so on. There really isn’t a lot that’s new. To the point that the O2 system which is arguably one of the biggest additions doesn’t do much. It gives you a new character item slot and it introduces some risk/reward to the game. As you need to breathe (albeit not if you play as Claptrap), you need O2. You can spend it to jump slightly further or revive your companions faster however. Outside of this though, it just makes the outdoor areas a bit tedious. As you need to camp near the O2 stations every now and then. The game does at least still have an appealing art-style. Outside of that though I can’t think of anything it does particularly well.

I mean for goodness sake, this game has missions where you need to hunt for audio logs that are hidden in an office, and then have to listen to them. There are missions where you need to guard a box as it slowly trundles along a conveyor belt while it’s under attack. Even finding these stupid missions can be a pest as they’re scattered around the world, and once you are a few levels above them they give you no XP. So if you need to keep up with the game’s level curve (lest you be punished by health sponge enemies), then you’ll need to quick travel to an area. Then possibly go to a new area from there. Then run to a bulletin board. So that you can pick up a quest that sucks. It’s just not a very well paced game, and even for a mindless shooter there’s so much downtime.

There are some design decisions that are questionable, like co-op making the game harder but these can be hand-waved away or at least justified. Yet the moment to moment gameplay feels at odds with itself. You want to shoot the dudes, but then you need to loot the dudes. So you need to open the inventory screen and faff around there. Then you need to slowly trundle towards the next objective. So that the game can give you another objective. Then another one. So that you can complete a quest that doesn’t give you enough XP. Meaning you need to run to a fast travel station and then fast travel to somewhere near another quest. That will involve shooting dudes, and looting the dudes, and looking at your inventory… and so on. It’s just a tedious game and I have to give credit to Borderlands 3 for improving on it.

In conclusion, I’ve run out of things to say and ways to re-iterate the main point. Namely the Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a pretty boring game. It doesn’t change much, and essentially feels like Borderlands 2 again. Which will be great for some people. I shudder to imagine who those people are, but they must exist. As for everyone else, if you want a co-op game look elsewhere. At the very least grab Borderlands 3 or Tiny Tina’s D&D styled mini-campaign before picking up Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.

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Quick Note: Yes this is a remaster of a remaster, Microsoft really did pull that stunt. For what it’s worth, you can’t buy Age of Empires 2: HD any more and all of the DLC for that version of the game has been included in Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition for free.

Oh Microsoft you cheeky swine, I’ve already bought 4 copies of Age of Empires 2 and yet here you are asking for me to buy it again. Were my purchases of the base game, the gold edition (with the expansions), the DS version and the initial HD remaster not enough for you? Evidently not, because here we are again and in spite of my better judgement I’ve gone and bought my 5th copy of this infernal game. Why did I do it? Well honestly because I waited years and then made a £4 impulse buy during the twitch event for the latest “hidden cup”. Which was fun to watch (except for the final) and so I felt like buying another version of the game for cheap wouldn’t be a terrible idea. I mean it has some new co-op maps, three new campaigns and uhhhh…. shiny graphics! Plus some Quality of Life (QoL) changes and some new civilizations. Oh and just under 300 CHEEVOS to gather, if you are so inclined. As it’s hard to review a remaster as opposed to the initial game, I’m just going to go through those points mentioned above one-by-one. If you haven’t played Age of Empires 2 for some reason, then just go grab when it’s on sale. Otherwise, read on!

To make things easy, let’s start off with the new campaigns which have been introduced for Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition. There are a grand total of three of them, with each campaign having 5 or 6 missions each. These missions are relatively varied and quite fun, although depending on your play-style they really can take a decent amount of time. Generally each campaign has sections where you have no villagers, and as such must make the most out of your modestly sized force. Alongside more traditional missions that let you play as per normal, albeit often with some restrictions. The most notable one is that in all of the campaigns, you aren’t allowed to just jump straight to the Imperial Age from mission one. Instead new tech and a larger population cap are gradually introduced over the length of each campaign. This is fine in principle, although in practice it means that you’ll often wrap up a campaign, start a new one and… oh we’re back to the Feudal Age with no villagers and a maximum population of 75. To be fair to these missions, you generally start with some units/structures already setup and often even some techs will have been researched (never had to research Loom for example). Regardless of the somewhat arbitrary limitations, the campaigns are all decently enjoyable and manage to feel varied enough that you’ll want to get through them all. Plus Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition has also reworked a bunch of the earlier campaigns from previous releases, including some balancing tweaks and an increased population cap for most of those campaign missions. Although it must be said, that the inclusion of the base game campaigns, expansion pack campaigns and then the DLC campaigns from AoE2:HD really does make the campaign menu a bit overwhelming at first.

Fortunately even if the campaign selection screen can be a bit overwhelming, the actual game isn’t. As mentioned before we now have SHINY NEW GRAPHICS (wow!!!), but honestly they are pretty shiny. Not only do we have new 4K resolution options, but there’s been a bunch of work done to make everything look more visually impressive even at 1080p. New building destruction animations, better zoom control functionality, new objects and effects for some buildings/units and the like are all included. As for the UI, it’s also been improved with the ability to see all faction traits alongside a real-time tracker which shows global production/research and also how many villagers are on each resource. There are also some relatively small gameplay tweaks like automatically re-seeding farms, the ability to rotate gates manually alongside a substantial improvement to the AI. Finally the soundtrack has been remastered, and some of the campaigns from Age of Empires 2: HD now have voice acting. Sure you don’t need much voice-acting, but it’s a nice little bonus and brings everything up to the same standard. Finally there are some more granular options in the menus, that let experienced players further control how the game operates. It’s basically a pretty extensive under-the-hood upgrade to the game, and it all adds up to make Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition the best way to play the game.

As for the multiplayer mode, aside from a new server hosting infrastructure and cross-play between Steam/Microsoft Store versions of the game, there’s some new content here too. First of all, there are now a batch of co-op scenario maps based on historic battles – just like those in Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition. While these don’t add a huge amount of content, it’s a nice addition and hopefully more are added in the future. There are also 4 new civilizations in the base game (Bulgarians, Lithuanians, Cumans and the Tartars) which can be played in Skirmish and Multiplayer modes. These new civilizations are a nice bonus and all have decent cavalry units, as would be expected for their history. The multiplayer mode also received a new game mode in the form of Empire Wars. This mode is quite similar to a normal game, but players now start in the Feudal Age and have a selection of pre-built units and buildings including around 27 villagers. It’s therefore a nice way to skip the initial Dark Ages slog and go straight to combat, although obviously this can be a headache for newer players or civilizations who benefit from a stronger economy in the very early game.

And that’s about “all” that’s been changed for Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition. I guess it goes without saying that as it’s the new version of Age of Empires 2, there are also a bunch of new DLC updates that have added a bunch of extra civilizations/campaigns. But I don’t own them, so I can only judge the remaster on it’s own merits. Which honestly is enough for me to give it a recommendation. The gameplay changes to the campaigns are modest but appreciated. The new soundtrack is genuinely great and makes the game feel much more enjoyable to play. The new graphics likewise look great, and the myriad small tweaks do a solid job of making the game feel more modern. The new campaigns are fun, and generally this is just a great little remaster. If you have an older version of the game, there’s plenty of new content here to enjoy. If you’ve never played it, then be sure to give it a go!

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I can understand anyone who thinks it’s churlish of me to review the Battlefield 3 campaign experience solely on it’s own merits. After all, the main selling point of the game was the multiplayer mode which has been the main selling point of every Battlefield game since the series began. Indeed the series entries I played the most of while growing up are BF2 and BF2142, neither of which has a campaign mode (at least on PC). So why bother reviewing the Battlefield 3 campaign, considering the fact that it was at best an extra little bonus like the co-op missions? Well because that’s all that remains of the game for most players as of the year 2024. Sure you can technically still join a game on PC and I think Xbox 360, but the player-base is tiny at this point and if you bought it on PS3 then… that’s a shame! As a consequence, I think it’s only fair to review the campaign, which is probably the only way you’ll get to “enjoy” the game going forwards. Unfortunately for Battlefield 3, the campaign makes Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 look like a visionary single player experience, one that it’s desperately trying (and failing) to emulate. Let’s go through the checklist together, dear reader;

• Contemporary FPS game: Check
• Regenerating health: Check
• Two weapon limit: Check
• You swap between characters to see the full scale of the conflict: Check
• The game is extremely linear: Check
• The game’s engine spawns enemies in pairs to mask hardware limitations: Check
• The main bad guy is using middle eastern rebels as fodder to initiate WW3: Check
• After a certain point in the game you start shooting Russians: Check
• The campaign takes about 6 hours: Check

After playing through both campaigns, the main differences that Battlefield 3 offers are an increased emphasis on Quick Time Events, less max HP for the player and slightly better vehicle sections. Otherwise you could honestly be forgiven for thinking that this was just another Cawadoody game. To be fair, there is also some environmental destruction going on, but it’s basically a gimmick and never really helps (or hinders) you. Expect for one section where you need to run up onto an overpass while infinitely respawning enemies shoot at you and all the cover on the bridge gets ruined in like two shots. Which is hardly a point in the game’s favour, let’s be honest.

Now as the gameplay is so standard, I think it’s fair to briefly mention the narrative. The way it works is simple, you spend most of the game being interrogated and your flashbacks serve as each individual mission of the campaign. This is a bit of a hazy mechanism when it comes to the multiple other characters who you don’t know anything about, but let’s ignore that for now. Essentially you are a MUHREEN and after bumbling around the Middle East you chase the head of a terrorist group, then the even more evil guy who was using him as a puppet. To the game’s credit the final mission is actually cool (QTEs notwithstanding seriously why does this stupid game love them so much) even if a lot of questions aren’t really answered. As for the rest of the narrative, it’s nothing special but nothing terrible either – par for the course for games of this genre and generation. Most characters are cool soldiers who are stoic and do soldier things but you have a designated smart ass in your squad and an overly ambitious colonel? major? Who cares. There are also two moments in the game when a character gets sad because their friend dies, which must have been a mandatory part of getting a game published on the Xbox 360. Overall I’d give this game an OK/10 for plot, it could’ve been one of those lazy Sunday afternoon rental movies although I think it would’ve been a bit too cliche.

As for the other aspects of the game that support the not-great combat, you’ve got an acceptable OST that is totally forgettable outside of the two times when they drop the Battlefield theme. These moments were cool, I guess, but if you didn’t care much about the series (understandable considering the last big release was BF2142 which was PC exclusive) then this probably didn’t do anything for you. The graphics and visual style are… fine but nothing really special and there isn’t a huge amount of environmental. You’ve got desert, forest, a nice villa and brown-and-bloom urban warfare. I can confirm that I didn’t encounter any bugs, which is good and everything generally ran fine on my humble Xbone although Battlefield 3 does seem to have some weird issues with frame-drops during areas with abrupt changes in lighting. Otherwise everything is just OK.

But my main issue with the campaign really is the gameplay, outside of the generally enjoyable tank mission and OK/10 jet mission it’s not great. A lot of set pieces involving enemies spawning in waves while you’re stuck in a position, or getting told to flank the enemy while your squad frantically try and order a pizza or something. The shooting feels OK, although the flinching from damage makes most weapons kind of a hassle to aim considering just how freakishly accurate the enemies are. There’s a stealth section of sorts, where you only have a knife and it kind of sucks. Fortunately it doesn’t last very long at all so swings and roundabouts. There are a lot of different weapons you can use, but it doesn’t matter much and you never run out of ammo so that’s either good or bad depending on your perspective. Occasionally you need to use a special weapon against vehicles, but don’t worry because you always magically regain more shots in the event that you manage to miss. Really though the combat is OK it’s just not great. Your squad will occasionally just start shooting a wall in front of them instead of the enemy, although they do actually deal damage unlike myriad other lousy FPS games so they can clear things up. As for the enemy, they love to either zerg rush your position or camp like boy scouts. Either way they’re kind of annoying, as they are extremely accurate and keep respawning in hard to predict ways. Was that the last enemy, or is another one about to materialise with little warning? Is there still one camping somewhere, and if so will they nearly insta-kill me as soon as I see them? These are the questions you will ask yourself at least once every level. Speaking of insta-kills, not only are there multiple QTEs in Battlefield 3 that you must pass successfully first time, but also some sections where not being in exactly the right place will instantly kill you. As will RPG enemies shooting vehicles that are near you, which would be fine if they didn’t just get spawned out of nowhere on multiple levels. Generally this is a game that wants you to go fast, but punishes you for doing so. Except on a couple of occasions, where if you don’t go fast enough you fail and have to go to the last check point. It’s just an inconsistent game.

So are there any parts of the Battlefield 3 campaign I actually quite liked? Well aside from that tank section (or section-and-a-half I suppose), I did find the two Spetnaz missions kind of fun although the bit where you need to chase that guy was annoying. I’m trying not to spoil anything, but if you play the game you’ll know which part I’m referring to. As mentioned the story is fine, probably not as good as the one in Cawadoody:MW2 but not terrible or overly tedious thanks to some decent voice acting. I suppose I should mention that the CHEEVOS for the game are actually implemented pretty well and offer an incentive to replay the campaign levels while the multiplayer ones aren’t totally rubbish. Finally I thought the first and last missions were a nice way of tying up the narrative, while the rest of the game had a decent pace and got stronger in the latter half. With all that being said, trying to copy Cawadoody is a mugs game and as a consequence the campaign just feels a bit… hopeless. The AI acts weird, the highly linear levels feel like an artificial constraint, there’s minimal gameplay variation between most parts of the campaign and generally it’s all just a bit lackluster. Not terrible but not good, is how I’d sum up the Battlefield 3 single player experience.

Therefore the most important question remains, would I recommend the Battlefield 3 campaign? No. I wouldn’t really recommend it to anyone and would just skip it unless you have a decent amount of nostalgia for the game. It has a few areas where it’s successfully above the average and a couple where it’s honestly slightly below average. The game is basically the same as this review, a meandering mess that doesn’t really go anywhere or answer any pertinent questions you might have. It’s just some filler, that distracted you from better things.

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Quick Note: It shouldn’t matter, but I’m reviewing the Xbox One version of this game – just in case it’s AMAZING on PS4 or something.

Oh Jagged Alliance: Rage, the critics and fans of the series have not been kind to you. You were to be a spirited spin-off of a venerable classic PC series, revitalised for a new age and of course a new customer base. Yet it’s hard to find anyone who has anything nice to say about this game. Even I can’t be too nice to a game that has so many issues, that it’s honestly concerning. I try to keep my reviews relatively short, but to describe all of the flaws in Jagged Alliance: Rage would take up basically my normal quota of 5ish paragraphs (plus 5ish lovely pictures). So I’ll just rattle them off in quick succession during this deftly written opener. The game looks mediocre, runs badly, crashes every few hours, has incredibly basic writing and characterisation, wastes a ton of time on inventory management, has limited enemy variety, inconsistent mechanics, a wonky difficulty curve, weird allocation of resources, some baffling design decisions and limited enemy AI. If (and it’s a big if) you can overlook all of that then you’ll find a decent turn based strategy experience. Now I know what you’re thinking “Big Boaby how am I meant to overlook the fact that apparently everything in this game is rubbish?”

Well I’ll tell you! You see, Jagged Alliance: Rage is an incredibly rough game that desperately needed a bit more time in development. I can easily envisage a version of the game that doesn’t run bad, doesn’t crash, has a bit more tweaking with regards to the inventory, item drops and enemy AI and would therefore be pretty solid. Unfortunately in spite of my sagely wisdom, I have to acknowledge the reality which is that this is the game we got, not necessarily the game we wanted. Despite this seemingly rushed (or underfunded?) development, the game still has a solid core where you are juggling stealth and normal combat in each level. Stealth is slightly overpowered, to the point that you’ll want to use it as often as possible as it grants instant killed at no cost. However, stealth also requires you to be out of position and understand the enemy patrol routes, which often requires an odd mix of haste and patience. You need to close the gap, while remaining undetected because sneaking is an alternative form of movement which eats up action points like nobody’s business. Before continuing I should explain that Jagged Alliance: Rage is a turn based game, where you move all of your guys and then the enemy gets to move all of theirs. Each character gets around 12ish action points per turn, with movement, shooting and using items all sharing this action point pool. You’ll therefore only be able to move a maximum of 12 spaces per turn (the map is split into grids of squares) or shoot around 4 times at the absolute maximum (many weapons require 5+ AP per shot). Enemies are relatively blind, but they can react to nearby gunfire, spot bodies and of course radio in your position which triggers an alarm which causes every enemy on the map to bum-rush your last recorded position. Stealth is therefore a great way to get kills without taking damage, but it involves a great deal of risk. Now you might be tempted to skip the stealthy route, but frankly because all of the enemies share vision and some of them are snipers and they all bum-rush you – things generally don’t go well. That’s not to say your necessarily stuffed, as you can make use of sight lines or bait them by having one guy distract them while the rest of your team sneaks around to deal with the enemy commander who summons reinforcements like an absolute jerk. But with that being said, stealth is generally the best option even if the intense gunfights can be quite fun to try and figure out. Yes the odds are against you, but if you can stop the enemy from getting vision (by shooting all the guys near you) then their comrades will keep running towards you like lemmings and you’ll be able to create effective killzones.

At least until you get unlucky with the hit%, or deal with a gun jamming. Which happens all the time to a ridiculous degree. Seriously you’d think that the guns were made out of unrealised aspirations and butter for how often they suddenly melt and fall apart in the middle of combat, to the point that I’d say a gun jams every… 5ish times it’s used if fires in bursts? You barely even have to reload in this game, because when your gun jams (and it will) unjamming it also counts as reloading. Don’t worry though, as your enemies guns will jam too if they live long enough. Then again, worry some more because unjamming a gun takes a lot of AP, which means you can shoot less, which means you’ll probably get shot more. Which is bad. I suppose you can just keep looting new guns and indeed you will throughout most of the game because guns continually get better while the enemies keep getting better armour, but once you’ve got a good gun with some weapon attachments it’s a real pain in the backside. To the game’s credit, Jagged Alliance: Rage has a weirdly comprehensive variety of guns and ammunition. To it’s disservice, you’ll spend way too much time looting every single enemy to see if they have the one ammo type you need because you can’t buy, sell or otherwise trade equipment. The game was smart enough to let you loot everyone remotely once a map has been fully cleared of hostiles, but it still takes a lot of time to optimise everyone’s inventory especially in the late game when you can have 4 mercenaries at a time.

Now you might be thinking something along the lines of “well managing 4 guns doesn’t sound too bad hrurhrdudhdurr” but I’ve got news for you PAL. Because Jagged Alliance: Rage also features a bunch of quasi-survival mechanics, which require items that also take up inventory space. You need to stay hydrated (but not fed), think about bandages to heal the bleeding debuffs, have medkits and revival syringes for when you mess up a combat encounter mid-level, have weapon repair kits and armour repair kits and grenades and antibiotics if you drink the dirty water. Then there’s the fact that I picked Ivan who is cool as a character, but is an alcoholic so I also always had to have beer on hand otherwise he would be bad at shooting people. So there’s a lot of faffing around, as you’ll probably want a gun that’s decent at ranged and a gun that’s OK close up for each character, both of which probably use different ammo types, then some healing supplies and some survival supplies, before we even consider stuff like carrying grenades or whatever. Fortunately Jagged Alliance: Rage is happy to just let you focus on the combat and the inventory stuff, as the plot is very basic and consists of a series of pre-baked levels that you can do at any time – so long you’re on the right Act (of which there are 3). To access these maps the game has an overview map, which you can move across with one space taking one hour. As it takes time, you need to bring water/booze or suffer debuffs from your team being dehydrated or in withdrawal. This brings us to the day night cycle. The way it works is pretty simple, each map can be played during the day or at night. If you play at night, enemies have reduced vision and everyone except for one or two out of the 7 potentially playable characters suffers a debuff to their aiming unless they’ve got night vision goggles equipped. You might therefore be tempted to wait for night to fall upon the map, so you can sneak around better (and have the sheer thrill of shooting out the lights) but good luck. There just isn’t enough non-dirty water in the game to wait for multiple turns. Plus the game sends out patrols from enemy bases that force you into semi-randomly generated battles.

Should you stumble upon one of these patrols, you enter one small map from a pre-baked selection that will feature a bunch of enemies on two sides. You’re able to sneak behind these guys, but generally these maps are fairly easy so I often didn’t really bother and only used stealth to wrap them up. As mentioned, enemies share vision so once most of the enemy squads are dead the few remaining enemies will often have lost sight of your squad. Letting you switch back to stealth for those 1-hit instant stealth melee kills. This happens more often than you’d think, because the AI loves having one or two squad members hang back and sit in overwatch constantly. Overwatch is actually one of very few abilities that the enemy uses, although the squad leaders and commanders have an annoying rally ability which gives everyone standing near them some extra AP. So you’ll quite often have some enemies rush towards you, run out of AP, then a squad leader appears seemingly out of nowhere and lets them all shoot your exposed team member. To compensate, each of your mercenaries get some unique “rage” abilities (hence why it’s Jagged Alliance: Rage) that range from great to OK. Ivan can taunt enemies and gets passive damage resistance, Fidel can suppress enemies in an area, Dr Q has some light healing abilities and can convert rage points into extra AP and so on. To get rage you need to get adrenalin, which comes from dealing and taking damage alongside some other effects (like having the shrapnel or infection debuff or drinking alcohol). Aside from the rage abilities, basically every action is determined by what equipment you have equipped and there aren’t skill trees or anything like that.

In conclusion then, Jagged Alliance: Rage is a game with plenty of issues but a nice balance of risk reward through the effectiveness of stealth, ability of enemies to rack up the damage through large numbers and extra AP abilities and the introduction of rage abilities which require you to take and deal damage or suffer from debuffs. This keeps the game fun and frantic, aside from the admittedly large amount of time you need to spend dealing with the inventory system and survival elements. The enemy variety is fine, but by tying abilities and damage to equipment Jagged Alliance: Rage is able to scale the difficulty with each batch of maps. As for variety and the other elements of the game like the OST, visuals and so on they’re pretty lacking. The music is fine and the maps are generally varied albeit fixed, so replayability isn’t the best. It’s a shame the performance isn’t great and that the characters are so bland, but you can’t have it all. I’d therefore say that Jagged Alliance: Rage is an OK/10 game. TBS fans might have a good time if they are patient, but for genre newcomers I would recommend another game like Wargroove or XCOM: Chimera Squad.

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Halo Wars 2 is quite a follow up act, as it has to compete with a game by the veritable but alas now defunct Ensemble Studios who made the first game. Fortunately Creative Assembly (CA) was up to the challenge, as they’ve managed to expand upon Halo Wars 1 while maintaining a high level of polish and some fun campaign mission design. For those who didn’t play the first game, Halo Wars was an attempt to bring RTS to consoles (specially the Xbox 360) which did away with most of the faff by streamlining base building, resources and unit types. That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of units, but every one is either an infantry unit, a vehicle, an air unit or a hero. There are very units in the game that are good against all of these unit types. As such most of the strategy is about building a balanced force and ordering units to fire against the enemy units they’re good against. So far, so standard. The twists that Halo Wars introduced were unit abilities, and commander abilities. The former are activated by hitting Y on the controller and range from grenades, to jet pack jumps through to cloaks and smoke screens. The latter are more substantial, basically functioning like the commander abilities in the later Command & Conquer games. By which I mean, you can spend money to call in a very powerful ability that can turn the tide of an engagement. These include calling in massive Area of Effect strikes that deal a lot of damage, healing all units in a radius for some time and deploying extra units or a temporary turret. The trick that CA have been able to pull off, admittedly by copying the work that Ensemble did, is to make all of these actions control well despite being performed on a controller.

To put this in more detail, just think for a second about how you hold your controller. You’ve got two thumb-sticks, two triggers, some face buttons and some bonus buttons above each trigger alongside a D-Pad. The A button selects units, you can double tap to select all units of the same type, hold it to select all units in a modest radius and hit the right button above the analogue to select all units on the screen. You move and attack with X, use abilities with Y, call in abilities by holding the left trigger and selecting an ability with the analogue stick and that’s about it. So if you want to attack the enemy you select all your units, advance them forwards the enemy, then begin selecting specific unit types and having them perform abilities and focus on certain targets. As a bonus all units can shoot while moving, but most struggle to hit enemies behind them. As for the humble D-Pad, it lets you instantly switch between a few camera targets – namely between your bases, your unit groups and any units under attack. If that’s not good enough then you can hold down the button above the left trigger to swoosh around the camera at speed. I don’t normally time discussing the control scheme of a game, but I think it’s worth doing with Halo Wars 2 because it really does feel quite seamless and it works well even in frantic moments. This is the main issue with RTS games on console, namely that they control badly. With this rubicon crossed, Halo Wars 2 then successfully manages to keep things fairly simple with regards to it’s economy and base building. Essentially there are some spots where you can build a full base, which grants you multiple connected building slots tied to that base. So you can’t build anywhere, and instead are funnelled towards fighting over these potential base locations. The game also does a good job in handling the relative scarcity of these building slots, because each building can only produce one thing at a time. So you can’t just spam units, because you don’t have enough buildings to do so – instead you basically are pushed towards having a balanced collection of forces. This is then compounded by the relativity tight unit cap (units cost between 2 to 9 population and you have an initial max of 80 which can be expanded up to 140). Why this matters is simple, basically you always need to juggle units and never feel like you can’t manage this task – leading to a game that lets you focus on the strategy. If you only have the ability to produce 8 buildings, and you need at least 1 of each resource structure (for the two resource types) then you have to weigh up the pros and cons of your base. You will probably want an infantry building, a vehicle building and an air production building. Maybe you don’t want one of these, but what it does is make base building intuitive and a series of snap judgements – thereby removing the urge to turtle and reducing the complexity for new comers. Of course you can just spam barracks and infantry rush your way to victory, but this is a risky strategy that won’t serve noobs well.

Speaking of turtling, you can only get 4 turrets per base and each turret has to be optimised. By default they’re good-ish against infantry and OK against air units. Each turret can then be upgraded to be optimised against air units, infantry units, vehicles or be turned into an artillery platform. That’s it. Oh and if the HQ is destroyed, then all of it’s connecting structures are instantly destroyed. So defending your base is a risky plan at the best of times, thereby further encouraging an offensive play style. Now some might be put off by this, but honestly it serves the game well to focus so heavily on offensive engagements because it thrusts the player away from the typical noob trap which is to overly focus on defensive play. It also gives the game more of a fast paced feel, which makes for an enjoyable campaign experience. Speaking of which, the campaign has a good tempo (outside of a slow first mission) that does a solid job of expanding on each unit in the UNSC arsenal. Initially it does feel a bit like a glorified tutorial, but it quickly casts this off with skill and introduces a series of enjoyable and largely different missions. There are a couple of defence focused missions, some based around skilful control of a small number of units, some that restrict the units you can build but not the quantity and others that just let you play a big battle against the enemy. Ultimately these missions are pretty well balanced and there are fleetingly rare instances where it feels unfair, while still offering some challenge. Especially for those who are willing and able to complete the optional side objectives, some of which can be quite challenging indeed. These campaign missions also feature some further optional bonuses in the former of “campaign logs” which are your typical lore nuggets masquerading as side content, alongside the return of skulls from the mainline Halo games. These skulls can be activated on playthroughs of campaign missions (after they’ve beaten normally for the first time) and activate some bonuses, drawbacks or double-edged swords for the player. Some examples include +50% HP for player units, basic infantry explode on death to damage nearby enemy units and all player units take gradual damage over time. To unlock these skulls, you need to complete some of the side objectives in each mission.

And even if you don’t care about the unlocks, you’ll have to concede that Halo Wars 2 is a high quality game. Not only does the gameplay function well, with simple concepts and great controls allowing a range of depth almost equivalent to a great PC RTS game but everything surrounding the game is handled well. First and foremost the graphics are great, I played on my humble Xbone and even paired with a cheap older TV in my office everything looked good. There’s a nice range of colours, explosions pop, everything is readily readable at a glance and in game everything is handled well. Then there are multiple cinematic cutscenes, which also look great and manage to convey the plot well. Unlike some other games (cough Destiny cough) the plot is pretty straight forward and you don’t need to be an expert on the lore to keep track of what’s going on, sure the writing doesn’t have the campy charm of say Red Alert 2 but everything is good enough. The soundtrack is decent, nothing amazing but dynamically adjusts with the amount of action on screen and fits the soundscape of the Halo series. Finally the two factions themselves are similar but different enough that they’re both fun to play, without one necessarily being more overpowered than the other. It’s therefore a game where I can’t think of any significant flaws, sure some of the finisher moves that occur in combat with hero units can feel a touch cheesy but that’s not a real issue. The commander call-ins can be annoying when they’re used on you, but again you also get to call them in on the other player so it’s not a huge deal – especially as they’re quite expensive (especially in the early game) and have relatively long cooldowns. Halo Wars 2 is just one of those games that had a clear vision and delivers it without any issue, enabling casual players to have a bit of fun while loading enough content into the game for players who want a more meaty challenge.

Speaking of content, aside from the campaign which has a modest 12 missions that can be played in co-op (expandable with two DLC purchases that give you more) you’ve also got two other game modes. The first and most obvious is the skirmish mode, which can be played against bots or people or a mix of both. This mode has 3 rule-sets available within it. There’s the standard “destroy the enemy’s base” (deathmatch) mode, a control points mode (domination) where you and your opponent are both competing to hold 3 control points on the map and finally a “strongholds” mode. This one is basically a twist on deathmatch, as both players are competing to control as many bases as possible and have unlimited resources. Each skirmish match can be played with up to 6 players in total, split between a maximum of two teams. Alongside the skirmish and campaign modes is a “Blitz” mode, which is essentially a tweaked version of the domination mode above. There are a couple of gimmicks, with the central one being that each player has a deck of virtual cards that allow them to call in units and commander abilities. This is necessary as there are no bases, nor any way to purchase units or buildings normally. Instead you have a total of 4 cards in your “hand” at a time and can use one of these to deploy the corresponding unit or ability to anywhere that you have vision. Additionally this mode only has one resource called energy, which pays for all cards. You have a modest income stream throughout each match, but the main way to gather more resources is to attack “energy cores” which drop in randomly across the map. To make things more complicated, cards can have attributes – for example a unit might explode on death to deal damage or steal life from enemies while attacking them. This is then compounded by the fact that some cards are specific to certain commanders, so you can’t use the “Mac blast” (basically a big ass cannon blast) with any UNSC commander other than Isabel. Not only does this help make things slightly less convoluted for newcomers (as it means you can roughly expect what sort of BS will be deployed by each commander) but it serves to help the game’s monetisation. Which is obviously the main concern of the players. Basically you want good cards, because they’re more powerful and if you get duplicates of a card, then that card levels up and becomes more powerful. Now you do get a decent amount of cards just by playing the game, in my case I got around 24 card packs by beating all of the campaign missions, getting a few level ups (from the campaign mission XP) and playing the game across a few days (one pack per day). With that being said, I can imagine someone who really wanted to win might be tempted to buy a batch of say… 23 card packs for just under 15 pounds (apparently the most bundle at the time I checked). Again for context, both of the DLC packs combined cost as much as this “most popular” card bundle.

In spite of this somewhat questionable microneutralisation strategy, I do have to admit that the Blitz mode is cool and manages to be fast paced and even more streamlined than the base game. The control points are captured instantly, you can summon units from your hand anywhere (although they have -50% HP and damage for 8 seconds if deployed outside your base) and it’s just a quicker way to play the game. Which is a good thing, because a match that can last 12 minutes max is more appealing than say a MOBA match that can last anywhere from 30 to 180 minutes depending on how bogged down everything gets. One last mode I haven’t mentioned is the Firefight mode, because you need to own the DLCs, and I don’t. This makes it exceedingly hard to review, as I’m sure you can imagine.

In conclusion then, Halo Wars 2 is a pretty fun console RTS game with high production value and one case of questionable micro-transactions. The campaign is fun and does a good job of introducing the UNSC arsenal while having decent mission variety, even if it’s fairly short. As for the other modes, skirmish is solid even there aren’t that many rulesets on offer, while the Blitz mode is an even more streamlined version of the game. It’s just an all-round well made game and one that I can easily recommend to RTS fans and even those who are bad at RTS games but are looking for a good entry point.

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Gears of War 5, or to give the game it’s full title, “Gears 5” is one of the rare Xbox One first party games to come out OK. As someone who actually bought an Xbox One console, I can confirm that most of the 1st party games are… just not that good unfortunately. Considering the fact that this is also a console that cost more than it’s main competitor, while having worse multiplatform game performance, it’s not surprising that the “Xbone” struggled to maintain much of a presence in the market. Sure it outsold the Wii U, but that’s really not saying much (and yes I bought one of those too, because I am an idiot). Fortunately for me and my very slow brain, Gears of War 5 is a game I was able to buy for a fitting 5 pounds and was worth the money! Now I’m only going to take a look at the campaign, because my friends won’t play this game and I am not paying a monthly subscription fee to use my own damn internet. As a consequence the campaign is all I have, which is a big factor behind why I waited until this game was cheap as chips.

So luckily for me the campaign is fine, not the best in my humble opinion but better than the campaign in Gears of War 4 and thus a good sign for the series as far as I’m concerned. Especially after that weird Funko-Pop gears game got announced, which frankly wasn’t a great sign. Now one of the main points of contention with the game, aside from it’s female protagonist, is the fact that there are open world sections. For many games this is an inoffensive, albeit somewhat bland way to expand the game’s length by having a bunch of side content available to pad the main missions. When the addition of side missions to Gears of War 5 was announced, I was pretty sceptical because the entire series is so dependent on cover based shooting and thus the way that individual stages are laid out. Therefore I thought, that having big mission areas would lead to either lousy gun-play or involved a ridiculous amount of work on the part of the developers. Fortunately the developers of the game have side stepped this entirely, by having the large areas be entirely free from enemies. You only encounter enemies while on foot and outside of the occasional ambush moment while collecting some small items, you’ll see each combat encounter coming a mile away. What the side missions add, are a way for the game to justify it’s other main addition which takes the form of a robot squad-mate that can deploy some abilities. This robot called Jack is a little floating guy who can reveal enemies, give you a health boost, deploy some traps or a big bulletproof shield, pickup weapons for you and even hijack enemies later in the campaign. As such he’s a pretty useful addition to the squad and the side missions are there to give you content to play, that ultimately exist to justify giving you items that unlock more upgrades for his abilities. The main way this works is that each of Jack’s abilities can be upgraded 3 times using “components” and have an ultimate upgrade that is free* but requires you to deal with the side missions. Components are lying around, much like the game’s collectibles and generally every side mission has a couple that are pretty blatantly presented to you.

Aside from these two ideas, namely the side missions and Jack the robot, Gears of War 5 doesn’t add too much. Which is honestly fine. I mean there are a couple of new enemies and the whole riding around in a vehicle thing is a nice gimmick, but the actual core of the game is much as you’d expect. You are a FUTURE SOLDIER in BIG ARMOUR that waddles around diving into every chest-high wall in sight. While migrating around a ruined world performing your bizarre mating ritual, you will often encounter groups of enemies who are themselves trying to copulate with every chest-high piece of masonry or naturally occurring rock formation in the area. This raw sexual tension and the competition that ensues invariably leads to a violent shoot-out, where the sheer variety of weapons and enemies can be exposed. Fortunately for Gears of War 5, it’s still a fun shooter and the active-reload gimmick is still a good idea all these years later, as are chainsaw bayonets, executions and the ability for both friends and foes to revive their injured comrades. One thing I will say, is that some of these new-ish enemies are frankly tedious to deal with. The shield robots which make whoever their guarding invulnerable just suck to play against. While the pouncers which jump around spraying you with needles are kinda tedious. These are minor niggles though, because the general is still fun. Wandering around with your team, getting head-shots, flanking enemies, managing ammo and so on doesn’t feel fresh but it does feel engaging.

But the campaign isn’t just shooting guys in the face, or at least it isn’t just normal combat encounters. You see the game also has a couple of sections where you’re basically wandering around getting exposition thrown at you. Now I can safely say, that the writing isn’t terrible – it’s just inconsistent. The squad level banter is exceedingly light hearted to the point this almost feels like a buddy game, for want of a better term. Yet the game keeps trying to be serious and gritty at the same time, so you end up bouncing between cheeky banter about how this guy’s a nerd or an asshole and then out of nowhere an “emotional” scene plays. During which our BADASS future soldiers are reduced to panicking rookies or teary eyed kids. It’s really weird, especially because all of the plot is (unsurprisingly) extremely scripted. I don’t want to spoil anything, but let’s just say everyone always wins all of the time except during cutscenes. Which is a classic drawback of AAA gaming and honestly reminds me of Borderlands 3, for better or in this case definitely for worse. In spite of this weird tonal back-and-forth the world building is still able to interesting, often in spite of itself and I have to give credit where credit is due. Gears of War 5 knows how to build up a background to an unpleasant regime, while still making the player feel like they are the good guys. It’s also a game that deftly makes use of existing characters, who largely carry the weight of the game. Mainly because JD, Del and Kat are kinda boring and while they occasionally have a good quip they are the “new kids on the block” and aren’t particularly interesting. Even Fahz, the other new-ish character manages to be more interesting – even if he abruptly undergoes a character change from total dick to normal guy while off-screen.

And there really isn’t much else to say, because the campaign really is so similar to the rest. I think the graphics are great and both the snowy areas in Act 2 and the Desert in Act 3 look really good, while the variety of areas across the game is actually pretty impressive. Compared to the earlier games in the series which were basically just urban rubble, abandoned bases and underground caverns the introduction of all this disperate areas is a nice touch. They have some environmental hazards at play, although to be fair these hazards are a bit schlocky for want of a better term. If you’re standing on ice, it might get shot and then you’ll drown like an idiot. Or while driving around, there might be a sand tornado that does damage to you. Either way they are nice touches, but don’t add much to the game overall. Similarly the soundtrack is decent and I even liked the pause/map screen music, which is a weird thing to say but it’s true. Finally there are some collectibles to find, which manage to be both well hidden and yet easy to spot when you are near them. All together it’s a pretty competently made game, which won’t shock anyone but is largely enjoyable. With that being said, there is one last thing I want to get off my chest. Namely that the boss fights are BAD. Seriously there are 3 major boss fights, two with the same boss-type, and none of them are that fun. The Act 3 boss fight is probably the most interesting even if it’s still a bit annoying, while the other two are trash. Seriously it’s mindboggling how much worse they are than the rest of the game, mainly because your squadmates are utterly useless during them. Which means you have to do everything, while dealing with the bosses who just so happen to have a billion health. Oh and you have to do them again from the start should you or one of those useless squad-mates manage to die. They’re less a test of skill and more a weird way to cap-off each chapter, again with the Act 3 boss being alright if a bit repetitive while the other two just screw up my goodwill towards the rest of the game. A game which is fine, it looks good and generally plays well (even if it likes to take away all your equipped guns a bit too often) while having some good writing hidden amidst the frequent tonal backlashes.

In conclusion then, Gears of War 5 is a fun little campaign experience that is basically exactly what you’d expect. It’s a highly linear, highly polished AAA shooting game with some good encounters and a handful of absolutely rubbish ones. It’s filled with returning characters and weapons, while introducing just enough to justify it’s existence. The new additions are largely good, even if they are somewhat par for the course (I mean an upgrade tree and open world areas, could you add anything more 8th console generation?) So it’s a game that I can tepidly recommend, so long as you have played a Gears of War game before. If you haven’t, play one of the earlier ones with a friend in co-op and if you didn’t like the earlier games then ignore my recommendation. Otherwise buckle up, buy this game on sale or 2nd hand and have an alright 11ish hours of action packed nonsense.

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Call of Juarez: The Cartel is a game that didn’t get off on the right foot, and as a consequence has basically faded from relevance entirely. It was an attempt to gently reboot the series into the frankly crowded field of contemporary FPS games and one that essentially failed. Call of Juarez: Gunslinger would come out a few years later and would actually be a success, both critically and commercially. Which means that Call of Juarez: The Cartel, for it’s merits and (numerous) flaws basically ended up as a dead end and quite possibly killed the series as a serious $60 AAA contender in it’s genre. Remember, Gunslinger was a budget game with budget aspirations, whereas The Cartel was a full budget game with the pre-requisite $60 price tag. So what caused Call of Juarez: The Cartel to be considered such a stinker?

Well to start off, it wasn’t the graphics which are nothing special but again aren’t particularly terrible and are basically fine. It also isn’t the writing, which while unintentionally cheesy and occasionally hilarious (again unintentionally) is mostly fine and actually delivers a surprisingly competent narrative. Of course by the standards of any other genre, Call of Juarez: The Cartel would be bad. We’re not talking about any other genre though, we’re talking about a FPS game, specifically a FPS game during the Call of Duty Modern Warfare era so having some occasionally interesting twists puts this game in pretty good stead. No the main issues with the game are simple and frankly what you’d expect. It’s a FPS game with regenerating health, inconsistent enemy damage, friendly AI that could charitably be described as useless, a strict 3 weapon limit (1 real gun and 2 pistols), wimpy grenades and an incredibly linear experience. To give an indiction of how the moment-to-moment gameplay feels, you are in a back alley shooting at clones of the same 4 guys who say the same handful of lines in every encounter. They will die in like 2 hits, but all the guns are inaccurate and aim-assist is for girls so if you’re playing on console then shooting is slightly tricky. Meanwhile your AI squad mates are shooting at the terrain that the bad guys are standing behind, and every 15 seconds will either say “DO U EVEN PRACTICE WITH DAT PIECE” or “TRY AIMING” if you miss, or “LEAVE SOME FOR US” or “U DONT HAVE TO DO DIS ALL BY URSELF” if you don’t. Rinse and repeat for around 4 and a half hours. Sometimes you drive a car (because the AI can’t) which handles badly and very occasionally you get to ride shotgun during scripted sequences, which are the same as the rest of the game but you can’t take cover. That’s about it.

Now to be fair there are three other mechanics which Call of Juarez: The Cartel brings to the table like an oblivious fat guy bringing hot dogs to a vegan BBQ. The first is that sometimes you kick a door down, which starts a slow motion sequence (just like the Matrix!!!) where you get to shoot some guys with your pistol. Then there are some cover shooting sequences where your heroic partners lay down covering fire while you flank a machine gun, which basically consist of the game saying “GO GO GO” or “NO GO NO GO” at the bottom of the screen. If you go while it says NO GO then you take a billion damage very quickly. Then once you flank the machine gun you uh, shoot the bad guys and the game carries on. These sections have their own unique backing track which gets abruptly shoved into the music mix while they’re taking place, just in case you struggled to read the only text on the screen. Finally the real meat of the game so to speak, is the “hidden agendas” mechanic. In theory it’s pretty cool, in practice it’s badly implemented so… points for trying I guess? The way it works is simple, you and your two shady cop partners each have little side objectives to complete. BEN MCGRAW the stern, angry, cowboy guy is basically stealing things for a prostitute he’s trying to get clean. EDDIE the loud mouthed hispanic is also swiping things because he’s in a lot of debt because he’s a gambler. Finally THE GIRL (Evans?) is swiping drugs because her brother is in a gang or something. What happens is occasionally someone calls your character mid-mission and says “hey bro can u steal something xoxo”. Then you are meant to PRESS X TO STEAL THING while no one else is looking. The problem is that this is the only way to level up your character, which gives access to better guns. Therefore I can only assume that you’d have to be a dumbass to deliberately screw up your buddies ability to have better guns. In practice it doesn’t really matter, because the starting guns are pretty much equal to the unlocks anyway. Also, in reality the AI is really dumb as established earlier. As a consequence, they are either following you (making this almost impossible because you have to do it sneakily) or are really far away. So you swipe things when they’re not up your butthole, which can be triggered by moving forwards to the next batch of baddies. I’m not sure what my partners in crime thought of me randomly running away during a bunch of gunfights only to return 2 minutes later with noticeably enlarged pockets, but hey whatever I wanna level up. I assume when playing with real people you basically steal them to look away for a sec, although my understanding is that you can gain XP by stopping them from stealing things. Again though doing this when within punching distance of the guy who actually bought the damn game is probably a bad idea.

So with the handful of “new” mechanics basically being the same as the rest of the game, we have an issue. Due to the fact that the core shooting isn’t great and that everything else is basically just a novelty, Call of Juarez: The Cartel struggles to really distinguish itself. Which if it were an honest to God cowboy game, wouldn’t be a big problem because there aren’t many of those. Unfortunately the series was trying to become a contemporary shooter, and there were a lot of those. As a result Call of Juarez: The Cartel got middling reviews and was deemed forgettable enough that it’s the only game in the series to be delisted from sale. I would complain about how seemingly every damn 7th generation console game seems to be suffering this fate lately (including Devil May Cry 4 and Spec Ops: The Line at time of writing) but that is par for the course now. If you don’t buy a game within 10 years of it being released, then it’s a total crap-shoot as to whether it’ll still be available for sale, or have received a half-arsed remaster, or just deleted entirely outside of piracy. I guess I should elaborate a bit on the plot, if only because there’s very little else to discuss other than the obligatory 7th generation totally dead multiplayer mode that no one cared about. So I’ll note that your three characters are each from different agencies, all of them are frankly a little but suspicious and all of them specialise in different weapons. In real terms this last bit doesn’t matter at all, but if you want all the CHEEVOS you’ll need to beat the game 3 times (once with each character) and then invent a time machine so you can go back to 2011 and maybe play this game online. The character dialogue is about what you’d expect, in the sense that it’s very silly and trying itself very seriously and has 3 stereotypes (Stern cowboy, goofy Mexican, sassy independent Black woman) yelling at each other because they’re all a bit crooked. Fortunately as mentioned the plot has a couple twists, that aren’t huge but are enough to keep things interesting and ensure that you can’t be certain as to what the heck is going on. It’s not amazing, but having news reports during the loading screens blabbing about what you’ve been up to is amusing and the game does a decent job of conveying it’s central point. Namely that the institutions your characters are serving, are just as dysfunctional as they are.

Now I could briefly mention that the driving sections are annoying because you keep getting shot constantly but can’t really do anything about it, or that the weapon selection is pretty boring, or that you have the ability to dual-wield your pistols (which kinda sucks honestly), or that you have a very limited “slow mo” concentration mode (with laughably bad “quips” that get used when you activate it), but honestly who cares. The game is fine. It’s a 7th generation console FPS with all the issues you’d expect, a slightly above story and the ability to play it in 3-player co-op. That’s about it, the plot is largely what you’d expect from Crooked Cops vs Cartels and neither the graphics nor soundtrack are noteworthy. In conclusion then, Call of Juarez: The Cartel is a mediocre 7th generation FPS with an OK plot and serviceable shooting. If you didn’t play this game, you didn’t really miss anything. If you want to play this game on the back of glowing review then you’ll need a 360 or PS3 (or just pirate it who cares, UBISOFT of all people won’t even sell it on PC). Would I recommend the game? No. Did I have a terrible time? No. It starts off badly and then becomes OK and has some occasionally interesting moments. That’s about as far as I’ll go, much like the series.

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Honestly I didn’t pay much for Warhammer: Chaosbane as it cost me 153 pennies thanks to a good deal. I’d bought it as a co-op game so that I’d be able to play it with my big buddy. Tragically his MIGHTY integrated graphics couldn’t handle the sheer indescribably adequate graphics of this beast of a game. As a consequence I played through it (all by myself ;-;) in 2 days. Altogether it took me 10ish hours before finishing up the campaign as the engineer class and reaching level 57. After blitzing through it, I can safely say that Warhammer: Chaosbane is definitely a video-game and is perfectly fine. It’s not great, it’s a bit monotonous, but seasoned Warhammer fans can rest assured that they’ll fight against all 4 of the Chaos Gods (well via their lackeys). You’ll even get to play a game with some mildly fun plot twists and decent enough characterisation of the setting. Unfortunately you don’t get to fight all 4 Gods and their servants simulatenously. To add insult to injury, the cannon-fodder you’re facing are both easy to deal with and pretty similar. You fight Nurgle beast-men, Khorne beast-men, Slannesh beast-men and Tzeentch beast-men and they’re all the same. Each God gets one or two gimmicks, one or two unique enemies (that die very quickly), some very slight roster tweaking and that’s it. You’ll kill the Nurgle baddies who have a damage over time de-buff, then fight the Khorne baddies who… uh… don’t. Then move onto the Slannesh baddies who don’t but uhm… sometimes give you a de-buff that means you take slightly more damage. Finally you’ll fight the Tzeentch bad guys, who do deal damage over time but THIS TIME in an area! Honestly it doesn’t change much. Then because your character gets more powerful faster than the baddies, each God gets easier to deal with. I only died once and that’s because my character got stuck. Like physically stuck in an area getting hammered by a semi-boss monster that is helpful repeated across all 4 Gods. It’s actually easy to defeat once you get access to your good abilities.

You see like any “good” ARPG, Warhammer: Chaosbane initially gives you a character that does feck-all for the few hours. Only as you level up you do you gain all of the stuff you need to play the game. The myriad abilities, upgrade points, more armour stats to compare in the inventory screen and so on. To the game’s credit, by the time you’re nearing the mid-game it’s all falling into place. You’ve got a pretty clear idea of what your build does, what abilities aren’t trash and what to focus on. To the game’s disservice, once you’ve reached that point it’s kinda over. Why? Well because you’re only going to become more and more overpowered to the point that the final boss fight took me 2 minutes. In fact I’d say that the main challenge of the campaign is the level pacing. As there is a lot of waddling through similar dungeons that aren’t particularly open, sometimes with backtracking thrown in (yay). In the first Act there are some timed missions to increase the stakes, but those steaks are then dropped on the restaurant floor and stomped on by the kitchen staff because the rest of the game is monotonous. Go here, clickclickclick on the baddies, move slightly forward, more clickclickclicking on the baddies, rinse and repeat for 10 hours. After you’ve semi-decently assembled your build , the only enemies that are occasionally concerning are the really big ones. They’re not even particularly strong, but they’re surrounded by really small enemies that act as bullet sponges. As stated the game has plenty of different builds across 6 characters. These 6 characters are only allowed 6 abilities at a time, with each ability having 3 tiers. These upgraded tiers are generally but not always better. As they sometimes deal different types of damage or trade a buff for more damage. That kind of thing. Ultimately by the twilight of Act 2 I was in the zone and nothing could hurt me because I had life-steal (well “life-gain on hit”) and could just clickclickclick my way through everything. Except the actual bosses which all have an invulnerability phase like the cowards they are. Fortunately you can easily defeat them by giving them a few seconds to take 5.

And at this point I don’t really have much to add. The game is now just about clicking on the bad guys and wandering through levels that only have 1 route. To be fair, sometimes there’s a side route! Which might lead to a chest, which could contain items, that are probably worse than the ones you have anyway. On that subject, unless I was blinded by the stupor that this game put me in you can’t sell items which is a novel change. Instead you can trade all the things you don’t want to the collectors guild. This levels up your collectors guild rank, which results in you occasionally receiving a passive perk. Much like the active perks you can only equip 6 (I think) passive perks at a time. These range from +10% health to +stackable buff when you make a boomboom and all that kind of stuff. They all sound lame but then they turn out to make your character freaking busted. It turns out +2.5% damage on every shot, stacking 10 times = +25% more damage basically all of the time. Then this boost means that you are essentially one hitting 98% of the bad guys. One other thing to mention about the perk system is that you have a set number of points. You do gain one or two per level up and these are then divvied out depending on your choices. For example you might always want the Tier 2 gun turret because it shoots rockets that make bosses a total joke. This tier 2 skill costs 10 skill points, and early on you might only have 20 skill points. Remember that these points are spent across all skill/perk slots. By the end of the game if you want everything maxed you need (potentially) 15*12 = 180 points. You probably won’t have 180 points by the late game, but fortunately the game has a SICK levelling system. You’ll hit Level 50 then hit level 0, panic, and then the game goes ahahahaahah no you’re on LEGENDARY level 0. You can therefore just keep grinding, if you are so inclined.

And uh other than that there are some side missions for you endure enjoy if you are the type of freak for whom mindlessly grinding is a fulfilling activity. These include a Boss Rush mode, where you fight bosses with some additional penalities applies to you or buffs applied to them, Relic Hunts which are the same thing but with whole levels (wow) and uh a Tower of Chaos mode where you fight your way through a tower where you can open a chest or keep going after every segment. If you open the chest, you get the loot. If you keep going the baddies get buffs but the chest gets better stuff in it. There’s also an “invasions” mode, but I honestly can’t remember what it’s meant to do as I lost interest. I’m assuming you just churn through the same content but with some arbitrary numbers changed so the ARPG addicts can brag about their items that no one else will ever care about. I think that’s about it, as mentioned the game does allow for online co-op with up to 3 of your big buddies so theoretically if you know 3 big fat greasy Warhammer nerds like me or 3 ARPG addicted losers (like you?) then you can have a great party game via either online or local co-op. The game also boasts that it has a great soundtrack but I couldn’t hear it over my character making things explode near endlessly, although the snippets I heard over “I CANT DO THAT YET” and BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG sounded fine enough. Similarly the graphics are good too (and there’s even a free 4K texture pack DLC). As for slowdown, I didn’t have any and only suffered 1 crash throughout my excursions (including one demon realm). In spite of there frequently being 50ish enemies on the screen getting exploded at once. Credit where credit is due, Warhammer: Chaosbane is an inoffensive game made by people who cared in a genre that’s for weirdos. Then again I can’t be too abrasive, as I paid for this game and finished it – obviously only because I care about my 0 readers so very very much.

In conclusion then Warhammer: Chaosbane is a game. More specifically it’s an ARPG that’s faithful enough to the Warhammer setting that provides up to 4 player co-op and can be classified as a OK experience. The graphics are decent, the plot has one or two mildly interesting twists and the slight spin on the “get a bunch of shit then sell it so you can not buy any of the vendor items because you’ll just find something better anyway” is a welcome change. The character builds? Yeah they’re fine too, as is the visual variety in the areas you fight across the game. The skills system? Yeah it’s a decent idea. There’s some stuff I didn’t bother mentioning like the fact that you can “bless items” with gems that drop or that there are legendary skill upgrade points but honestly this game is just clicking things and none of the extraneous faffing around the edges will ever change anyone’s mind about it. Altogether then Warhammer: Chaosbane is the boiled potato of the gaming world, nothing exciting but you would really have to go out of your way to be mad about it. Just a big, slightly under-seasoned but filling piece of content to distract you for a dozen hours. Alternatively you could watch like 6 good movies, but then again maybe you don’t care about Hollywood because they’re almost all tax cheats or child abusers. In which case Chaosbane will keep you mildly stimulated and perhaps even entertained!

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Diablo 2 is one of the most popular and influential PC games of all time, and over the years has garnered a massive fanbase across the globe. As not only one of Blizzard’s most popular games during it’s golden age, but also as a frequent addition to the myriad “greatest PC games of all time” lists I’d also felt like I was really missing out by not playing it. Now for a quick bit of context, I only really started caring about the PC during the 6th console generation and while I did plenty of older games I tended to stick with RTS games and some shooters. As such while I did buy Diablo 2 around 2005ish, I never really got into it and dropped it at the end of Act 1 in favour of playing more Red Alert 2 / World of Warcraft / Simcity 3000. Now that close to two decades have passed, I’ve finally gone back and played through the entirety of Diablo 2 after having played a couple of other ARPGs such as Torchlight 1 & 2, Titan Quest, W40K Inquisitor and even Diablo 3.

And boy oh boy do I not get it at all! That’s not to say it’s a bad game, but honestly the whole experience could be described as a graphically impressive treadmill. Maybe it’s due to the fact that I picked the Necromancer class and focused on my summon abilities, due to the fact that I thought it was pretty cool having a bunch of disposable goons in front of me. Maybe it’s the fact that I played a bunch of other successor games first, and so the novelty of Diablo 2 wasn’t there. Or maybe it’s just a case that I don’t see who this genre is for or why people bother with them. To give some context, once I hit around level 10 or so every fight played out exactly the same. My skeletons and golem would rush in, my mercenary rogue and skeleton mages would hang back, and I wander around occasionally resurrecting my minions or engaging in combat myself to expedite everything. This was every encounter for around 15 hours once I’d got my cool spells (prior to this I didn’t have a golem sadly). Now I can only assume people will point out “Hey LOSER, you can just play another class or build!!!” but that seems to be a solution that sounds great on paper but doesn’t actually achieve anything. I can say this with confidence because I initially played this game all those years ago as a… Paladin and it was really boring. Then while playing my Necromancer I switched between melee and ranged builds, then dabbled with the other spells and really the whole felt identical. I was wandering around like a big spooky simpleton, getting rushed by the same mobs and clicking on them ASAP before they made my health bar go down. Sure I could emulate President Trump and build a BIG BEAUTIFUL (bone) WALL to keep them at bay, or I could use an Iron Golem instead of a Flesh Golem but it really didn’t change the overall dynamics of the game at all. You’re just some feckless murder-hobo being pushed from big open plain to small dungeon to big open plain for about 20ish hours.

Fortunately the developers at Blizzard came up with an ingenious system by which losers gamers would be kept endlessly amused by this entertainment juggernaut. That solution? You can pick up items, that give you some bonuses to some stats that make you better at clicking on things! I guess the name for their MMO originated from players yelling “WOW!!!” at the prospect of fighting the same enemies in the same places over and over and over and over so they could have another Crossbow but this time with BIGGER NUMBERS. You probably think I’m probably being facetious (and I am) but honestly the max level is 100 and you can beat the game before you’re level 30. So why the hell would you spend the incredibly large amount of time grinding up that main number so that you can then grind for the other items that contribute to the little numbers? This is what I mean when I start my review with “I don’t get it”. It’s not that the combat is bad, as it’s fine and honestly the enemy variety is pretty decent for an RPG. There are cases where enemies are reskins, but it’s not a big issue and most enemies fit into a clear archetype that when combined results in some fun target prioritisation. But unlike say… Serious Sam which does the same thing in a frantic FPS environment where you are dealing with dozens and sometimes hundreds at a time, Diablo 2 is only giving you at most a room full of guys to deal with (around 20). Otherwise you’d just get melted by everyone punching you at the same time. Instead of having progressively higher stakes and needing to learn movement mechanics like in a good FPS game, you instead get a big ass unnecessary grind for you to brag about on the online servers (and/or forums). It’s baffling to me that this is not only one of the exemplars of Blizzard’s existence, but that this grinding simulator is held up as the pinnacle that inspired an entire genre of successors. Who the hell wants to do the Act 2 boss fight 50 times in a row so that they can maybe get the Ultimate Halberd of King Knut (+30 life +30 energy +1cm penis size +2 Dexterity +15% chance to cast bear mace (Level 3) on hit) so that they can then have a powerful build for when they replay the same game but at a higher difficulty level? Why do these people exist???

Of course I’m not being entirely fair, as there are a few points in the game where the gameplay changes. Don’t worry, there’s not a mandatory stealth section or anything. Instead when you have to face Bosses, you’ll quickly realise that they have a shitload generously large amount of health and deal a fucking retarded significant amount of damage. This changes the game a lot, because you lose a lot of gold (It’s your current level as a percentage of the gold you had) when you die and indeed when you die you need to find your corpse (to loot so that you can regain your EPIC gear), which in this case will be right next to the boss that just kicked your ass. Act 1 doesn’t really have a boss, but the final quests in Acts 2, 3 and 4 involve dealing with a very large demon that makes every other enemy in the game look like a pussy. In fact most of these bosses could shred through my big health golem very, very quickly and my other summons (and mercenary) even quicker! This obviously presented an issue, as even with my more powerful spells and abilities I was in trouble. Fortunately I devised an expert strategy that almost never failed, which was to bring a lot of potions… and use the shared section of my stash so I didn’t lose any gold when I died… and just teleport away when near death to regain health for free. So in a sense, they were kinda broken in terms of balancing and I was super broken. I did feel kinda bad, because it seemed like the heroic thing to do would be to rush in like a crusader of yore and batter them into submission, but even my fancy golden crossbow did bugger all damage to them and missed like a third of it’s shots. So each boss fight became a battle of attrition between my character and how many mana potions I could fit on my belt to keep spawning golems so that I could shoot more crossbow bolts that basically just tickled the bosses. I also tried melee and died really quickly. Plus I did try using spells, which did more damage (yay!) but meant that I burned through way more mana and so it was much harder to keep golem meat-shields around. I’m sure there’s some build that makes the bosses a cakewalk, but after double checking how to deal with the Act 2 boss without being a little cheating bitch I found out that my build was actually considered one of the best ones. Go figure.

On the subject of mercenaries, these are NPCs you can recruit that function as companions and followers. Unlike in many fully fledged RPG’s they have no dialogue (well, they say thanks you give them items) and don’t impact the plot at all, but they’re still useful to have. In my case I kept my starting rogue, as these mercenaries level up and have a variety of abilities they use automatically. They can also equip a weapon, a helmet and armour that you give them but not the other item slots such as rings, boots, gloves. On the flip side they don’t need ammo which is great, but when they die you need to pay to resurrect them. Which would be fine, if they weren’t suicidal when dealing with bosses. You see the companion AI is about the same as the minion AI which is the same as the enemy’s AI which is on the level of charging the nearest hostile and being dumbfounded by chasms. Due to this, I’d say keeping my emo rogue alive constituted almost the entirety of my gold expenditure throughout the game as death was free, shop items sucked and so many potions and teleport scrolls were dropped by the baddies that I never had to buy them. Even this source of expenditure was fairly low, except for the final boss when my occasional death to Diablo’s basically one-hit kill death-beam would cause them to kill themselves in solidarity. So even after abusing the stash gold loophole, I still had to pay some money to bring them back. Which would’ve been fine, if they had been able to avoid Diablo’s attacks, which they couldn’t, so they often died really, really quickly.

But all my negativity aside there are some aspects of Diablo 2 which are actually pretty impressive. First of all having the entire game be playable with friends (or randoms) is cool. No doubt about it, if you couldn’t afford an MMO then this was an interesting way to interact with people and I can say that even when I last played the game close to a decade after release it was still popular. Plus as mentioned there is plenty of enemy variety, you’ve got multiple classes with different builds and the challenge of grinding out the harder difficulties. Why you’d bother is a question I can’t answer, but if you enjoyed the game for whatever reason then hey you can play it with other weirdos online and there’s a ton of (repetitive) content to explore! Perhaps more noteworthy for me as someone who wasted around 20 hours of their fleeting, worthless existence on this game due to the peer pressure of strangers, I will admit that the art style is pretty good. There’s plenty of variety between the zones of each Act, with the general look and feel of each area being handled well. It’s a good looking game and the remaster does a solid job of bringing it up to modern standards, without losing any of the appeal. Even the font and UI have been chosen with care and the whole game successfully captures the feel of a Gothic low-fantasy world. The music is also a good accompaniment to the game, although I have to confess that it loops like a motherfucker because there aren’t really many tracks here. The ones that are there are good, but I’d personally say they kinda peak in Act 1. Last but certainly not least, the cinematics show that Blizzard really know what they’re doing in this department and as ever they’re great. Not only they are visually impressive, but they’re a good way of providing context to the events in the game’s world and are a good way of breaking up each Act. In fact I’d say they provide a better reward than the loot on offer, but I’m probably just biased because my class couldn’t use half the late(r) game equipment due to not having enough Strength.

In conclusion then Diablo 2 is a game I really don’t understand. It’s a perfectly serviceable ARPG for those who are desperately seeking more carpal tunnel syndrome in their lives, but for the typical player I don’t see the appeal. It’s a game that looks great and has a striking art-style, with well made accompanying music and plenty of content for you to grind through if that’s your bag. For those seeking a good story, that’s not here. For those seeking a varied and engaging combat experience, I don’t think that’s here either. Instead it’s an RPG for that subjection of RPG gamers who only wants to make the numbers go up. The plot is minimal, there are no choices, there isn’t even much of an ending, but there are numbers. By the light, are there numbers. So for those who love grinding, or are seeking a co-op game at short notice then by all means give Diablo 2 a go. But for me, it’s just the cause of one big inescapable question – Who are these games for???

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