[REVIEW] Assassin's Creed : SYNDICATE

Alexander Graham Bell, one of several historical celebrities I've met within mere moments of setting foot in Victorian London, has given me a rope launcher. Cool. With it I can quickly grapple my way to rooftops and create ziplines between buildings to slide across. It's fairly clunky and somewhat limited—I often find myself staring at a nearby roof and wondering why the hell I'm not allowed to sling over to it when I've reached smokestacks twice as far away—but it's still fun and gives me a way to escape, Batman-like, from a brawl I'm badly losing. It also provides an alternative to freerunning across rooftops, which feels the same as it does in other Assassin's Creed games: fun and dynamic at first, but ultimately a bit routine, and sometimes even exasperating. That's not a bad way to describe Assassin's Creed: Syndicate itself. There's a good first half where almost everything is fun and exciting, and slowly but surely it begins to drag.

As in past Assassin’s Creed games, you're once again inhabiting the bodies and memories of heroic assassins via a futuristic magic, virtual reality machine. There's a sprawling open-world you can explore by free-running and climbing. The streets are cluttered with innocent bystanders, angry policemen, and vicious members of an enemy faction. The map is covered with icons signifying collectibles, side and story missions, and vantage points: tall buildings you can scale to reveal even more locations of interest. Stealth is your primary tool, and missions typically involve careful infiltration, lurking above enemies, and taking them out before they know you're there. There are also a few tailing missions, where you must follow a target without being spotted, though I found them considerably more forgiving than I have in the past.

Syndicate offers up some other new toys and features, mostly cribbed from other open-world games but still enjoyable enough to freshen up the proceedings, at least for a while. There are horse-drawn carriages all over London, allowing for GT-esque hijacking, high-speed driving, and the comical bowling over of bowler-hatted Londoners. As you battle the Blighters, the gang that's taken control of London, you can employ thugs from your own gang, a la Saint's Row, to do some of your fighting for you. Combat is Arkham style as you take on huge crowds with counter-attacks, combos, and finishing moves. These things are initially fun—I really did enjoy my first handful of hours with the game—but by mid-Creed they mostly begin to feel like a chore. A late-game carriage-based story mission might have been bracing if you hadn't already taken dozens of carriage rides. Battling a half-dozen enemies is initially exciting, but hours in it becomes just another exercise in patient clicking.

You play Syndicate as Jacob and Evie Frye, a brother-sister assassin team who are both well-written and skillfully voiced. Jacob, while predictably cocky and sarcastic is still funny and likable, and Evie, the more serious of the two, is herself prone to moments of charm and levity. They're also superbly animated. It's not often a facial expression in a game will elicit an intended laugh, but it did here more than once. I liked both characters a lot, especially in the scenes they shared with one another.

The twins are often at odds with each other, too: Jacob wants to loosen the stranglehold of the Blighter gang and kill Templars, and Evie wants to hunt for a 'Piece of Eden,' a magical doohickey that grants eternal something-or-other. For most of the game, they're basically interchangeable to play: save for a few high-level abilities they have identical skill trees. Only near the end of the game do they really begin to feel distinct. Jacob is more of a brawler, Evie more focused on stealth, and crafting or unlocking gear like sneakier outfits or deadlier weapons can complement their respective toolkits. You can switch between them whenever you want in the open world, while story missions can only be performed by one or the other.

Heed that recommended 4GB video memory spec. With a mere 2GB in my Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 I was only able to run Syndicate with medium settings, getting an average of 40-45 fps. Pushing to high settings dropped me in the 30-35 fps range. Very high reduced the game to a slideshow. While the city looked OK on medium and high settings, the jagginess caused by lower AA settings was pretty distracting.

We also ran Syndicate on a stronger machine with a core i7-5960X @ 3GHz, 32GB RAM, and three GeForce GTX 980s. At 1920x1080 on the 'Ultra' preset we managed 60 fps indoors, but found it dropping to as low as 35 fps outside. Using MSAA2x + FXAA instead of MSAA4x + FXAA resulted in a solid 60+ fps in outdoor areas, and reducing shadow quality was helpful. With settings on the 'high' preset we got a steady 70 fps, peaking at 100 fps.

There are other enjoyable characters here and there, mostly historical celebrities that you'll trip over at every turn. You can go ghost hunting at the behest of Charles Dickens, help Florence Nightingale cure sick children, and assist Charles Darwin in brutally killing an entire building full of drug manufacturers with poisonous gas. That last part seems perhaps out of character for the famed English naturalist, who didn't typically ask strangers to kill scores of people (as far as I know). I kind of liked it, though. Rooting a game in real history is great, but so is taking liberties with it.

The story itself is impenetrable unless you've been taking detailed notes for the last 40 or 50 Creed games, which I admit I haven't. Thankfully, it's also limited to brief interludes and not remotely essential to understand. The main missions are typically better than anything else in the game, often taking place in huge areas crawling with foes and containing several side-objectives. To reach your target, you can contact a friendly character who might give you some additional information or coerce an enemy into allowing you access to a restricted area. Steal a key from someone else, kill an additional tasty target of opportunity, then sneak or fight your way to your main objective. Or, don't. Sometimes I tried to complete all the objectives, quietly stealthing and stabbing my way through the labyrinth. One time it was late and I wanted to go to bed, so I simply knifed the guy guarding the main door, entered the target's chamber, and immediately flattened him from a balcony. It took all of three minutes. Perfect! I like a mission that doesn't care how you beat it.

Less enjoyable are the repetitive side missions to liberate the various districts of London. Free children from oppressive sweatshops by killing all the evil foremen, assassinate Templars in well-guarded areas, perform bounty hunting missions by kidnapping a target and spiriting him away in a carriage, or engage in a battle at a gang stronghold. Each of these encounters are repeated all over London, again and again, offering little distinction from one another. It's not a cold heart that looks upon an icon reading 'Child Liberation' and decides not to bother, it's a bored one. Sorry, kids.

As I expected, I hit a few bugs. Once I fell through the world and into a white void, once I got stuck on some scenery, pinwheeling my arms until I died. Twice, story mission bugs halted my progress: one time someone I was supposed to follow wouldn't budge, requiring a restart, and another mission stuck me on an endless loading screen until I hunted through forums for a solution, which was to race to a checkpoint in a carriage before the characters finished a conversation. That took a half-dozen tries to accomplish. Ubisoft says a fix is forthcoming.

 The new toys and tools freshen up the formula, but after a while, for better and worse, it's still Assassin's Creed. As beautiful as London is, the buildings eventually become just a series of obstacles, things to run, rope, and clamber across without even really looking at them. The impressively bustling crowds become less captivating as you realize they're just a collection of robots that spawn the same series of underwhelming crowd events like 'catch the robber' or 'scare the bullies.' The final boss fight lets you swap back and forth between Evie and Jacob during the battle, a fine idea—but the fight itself is unimaginative and unrewarding, designed to be difficult above all else. Like diving into a pile of leaves from the top of Big Ben, the first time is a thrill, the fifth is a yawn. Assassin's Creed: Syndicate's new toys entertain for a while but the novelty ends hours before the game does.

                                            

Author : Saatvik Awasthi

[REVIEW] Assassin's Creed : UNITY

Paris in 1798, what a time to be alive. The streets are filthy with mud, blood and gunpowder smoke. Starving citizens bully perceived enemies of the state to hungry guillotine stands. Guards grapple violently with roaming anarchists. Above, you see burning effigies and spiked heads. Below, French Tricolor flags lie stamped into the dirt. Assassin's Creed Unity recreates all of this with astonishing clarity and sets it within the most detailed city I've ever seen in a game. If Unity was a game about absorbing the ambience of a remarkable period of history I could stamp a big "YES" on it and go home that's totally fictitious . Sadly, the truth is more problematic.

Assassin's Creed Unity is a game about exploring the city, scaling towers to unlock missions, jumping and stabbing. The professional killer of this adventure is Arno Dorian, a devilish young rogue with floppy hair and a grin that could melt wax. Born of wealth, he's quickly driven into the Assassin order by personal tragedy and there uses his remarkable skills of stabbing to seek revenge and win the affection of his cherished childhood friend, Elise. Naturally, there's also a convoluted plot involving the ongoing battle between the Assassins and the Templars, who are both manipulating the revolution for increasingly confusing reasons.

No longer are you pulled out of your exciting adventures to roleplay a more boring person.

This is complicated only slightly by the return of the ongoing Assassin's Creed metaplot. In this game you're playing a VR product produced by the evil Abstergo company, who are searching for the death site of a certain figure in Arno's life. The best thing about this is that it's delivered in brief and very infrequent cutscenes and voiceover skits from a couple of characters based in the present-day. No longer are you pulled out of your exciting assassin adventures to roleplay a more boring person. Instead, the present-day plot influences several quick but very entertaining interludes that leave your assassin faculties intact. I won't spoil them.

Almost the entire game is set in Paris. The return to a single-city setting reflects Unity's desire to strip down a series that's entertained many tangents over the years. There's no sign of the tower-defence of Revelations, or the assassin-training of Brotherhood, or the sailing of Assassin's Creed 4. Instead, Unity is about assassinations, and they're great.

Reviewed on: Core i5 3.3GHZ, 8GB RAM, Nvidia GTX970

Variable framerate: Yes

Anti-Aliasing: FXAA and MSAA

Misc. graphics options: Many, including individual quality settings for textures, shadows, ambient occlusion.

Remappable controls: Yes, for keyboard.

Gamepad support: Yes, recommended.

Assassin's Creed Unity runs smoothly on a GTX 970, averaging 50-55FPS with all settings on Ultra. For performance improvements, you can elect not to use Nvidia's soft shadowing tech to little visual difference. If you have an Nvidia card, grab the  ACU drivers. Turning off Vsync and AA and forcing at your GPU's driver level may help performance.AMD users have reported poor performance, and mid-range cards will struggle. When tested on a 670 framerates topped out at 30 on 'high' settings, but with plenty of drops, including consistent drops to 10FPS during cutscenes.

The act of hunting and efficiently dispatching an important target has been incidental to the series for too long, so I'm glad Unity does it justice. Targets are hidden away in in sandbox locations—castles, prisons, palaces—that you have to crack like a violent puzzles. At the start of the mission Arno, poised like a fancy Batman on some dark rooftop, assesses the area to pick out gaps in the target's defence and note local disturbances that could serve as a distraction. When the mission starts you're free to find your way in and approach the target however you wish.

These missions remind me favourably of Hitman: Blood Money. The levels lack the complexity of IO's sandboxes, but manipulating them is great fun. I whipped a cover off a hidden stash of food in front of a starving crowd. They flocked angrily to the cart and offered cover that got me closer to my target. I've set fire to sniper towers to expose targets, dabbled with poison and done other terrible things best left to discovery.

These missions are facilitated by a new stealth system. Unity finally has the crouch-walk the series has always needed, which means you can dart between cover spots without standing casually upright in full view like a gleaming beacon of guilt. There's also a clunky cover system that I found far too fiddly to use, and a new weapon—the phantom blade—a wrist-mounted miniature crossbow that lets you kill targets silently at range or send them berserk to cause a distraction.

Assassinations may be good, but the campaign is padded out with numerous set-up missions. While these are generally fine, and Arno puts in a good turn as an affable diet-Ezio, you're still following NPCs along dramatic rooftop routes, stealing things from heavily guarded areas, tackling street thieves and saving civvies from criminals—very familiar stuff for series fans. The close focus on everyday assassin business also puts more pressure on Assassin's Creed's core traversal systems, and while the freerunning moveset has been expanded for Unity, it can't quite handle the artfully crooked geometry of Paris.

There are now separate commands for freerunning up and down buildings, which is useful, but movement in all directions lacks precision. Simply climbing into a window can be a nightmare. Arno will vault across the gap, scrabble above it, drop below it, anything but get into the damn room. The window dance only grows angrier under fire.

There are dozens of simple manoeuvres like this that should be effortless, but aren't, and the streets of Paris are littered with detritus that can cause Arno unexpected indecision. Look out in particular for the assassin's greatest enemy, the small box, which Arno will sometimes mount as though it's the highest point in the world and take some coaxing to leap off. Attempting to climb a lumpy object like a market stall will cause moments of mid-air shivering as the movement system seems to shuffle through its library of thousands of animations for a solution. The 'leap into distant hay bale' command is the same as the 'climb down building' command, which has caused annoyance more than once.

Look out in particular for the assassin's greatest enemy: the small box.

I could list more. 80% of the time things work quite nicely, but for a game so reliant on traversal there's too much frustration. The system can make impossible leaps and spins look natural and beautiful, but it too often fails to divine the player's intent while executing the flair. Assassin's Creed has always had these problems, but the complex higgledy-piggledy streets and rooftops of Paris compound them. After a while I came to recognise certain angles and asset arrangements best avoided for the sake of speed.

Combat has been refreshed, too, with good intent but mixed results. In Black Flag and Assassin's Creed 3, you were immortal. You could chain execution moves together to dice up entire regiments without taking a hit. Not so in Unity. The counter button has been replaced by a parry command. Time the parry perfectly and Arno will execute a countering blow that will put the enemy off balance and open them up to follow up strikes, and brutal kill-moves when they're damaged enough. Arno can only suffer a few blows himself before being unceremoniously run-through, and can quite easily be shot to death in the middle of a fight.

I liked Arno's fragility so much that I didn't take any health upgrades until the final boss fight—combat should feel dangerous, but it shouldn't feel quite so out-of-control. Ubisoft have said that the new combat system is inspired by fencing, and while it has a little of the back-and-forth parry and riposte structure, it's remarkably sluggish. My button presses seemed lost amid long, complex animations, as though I was shouting combat instructions to Arno from a mile away, repeating myself occasionally for emphasis. On the plus side there's quite a bit of variety to the weapons at your disposal, even if the system itself feels sparse. You can choose to fight with swords; long weapons like spears, polearms and halberds; big weapons like axes and clubs and even rifles, which Arno uses as shooty clubs in close combat.

The wide range of weapons slot into an overwhelming suite of customisation options that let you choose Arno's hood, gloves, trousers and coat independently. Different items confer varying bonuses to your toughness and stealthiness, but these don't make much of a difference until the twilight stages of the game.

These are bought with in-game money, which you can earn by renovating and expanding your pet theatre, or by completing side missions. These vary widly in quality. Some are dull escort chores that have you fighting waves of guards as your charge relocates with the urgency of a dead slug. Better are the detective missions, which present you with clues in a crime scene so that you can correctly accuse one of several suspects. Solving crimes is easy when you have magic eyes that make clues glow.

You can skip all that and buy weapons and armour right away with real money via a microtransaction system that's cheeky at best and just depressing at worst. After buying the game for £40/$60, you're invited to spend more money to play less of the game. Fortunately it's easy to completely ignore this, but the same can't be said for the awful in-game chests and items ties into Unity's companion app and Initiates webgame. Initiates chests are littered all over Paris. If you try to open one the game minimises itself, opens your browser and attempts to connect to the Initiates site. It's intrusive, shatters the fantasy, and holds back items and features from players who don't want to waste time on webgames or apps. Horrible.

It's especially disappointing, because there's real beauty to be found in Unity. If you like to wander and become absorbed in a game world, Paris is stunning. I rarely gasp at things. I used to think that gasping was a theoretical action that people used in a purely illustrative sense, but one came unbidden when I climbed to the top of a spire to see a patch of golden sunlight moving over the Notre Dame cathedral. A haze rose up from the streets, and I could see every building for miles. Whether you're striding through dilapidated slums or royal palaces Unity realises urban filth and glittering opulence with equal devotion. The streets are packed with people, singing, fighting, kissing, dancing. I stood up after finishing the game and felt like I'd visited another place.

I've seen Arno perform a finishing move on the air as his victim six feet away crumples and dies.

That makes me dearly want to recommend Unity, but unless you have a seriously good graphics card, I can't. It's fluid and gorgeous on my GTX 970, but on mid-range cards like a 670, and even better cards, expect low and choppy frame-rates that worsen greatly during cut scenes. While my experience has been relatively clean, Unity is rife with widely reported bugs. I've seen the odd floating pedestrian, a few times I've seen Arno perform a finishing move on the air as his victim six feet away crumples and dies. The game also occasionally pauses for fifteen seconds or so at random points before resuming as normal. It's also crashed a few times. Others have reported disappearing faces, floating NPCs, ragdolls glitching into themselves and more severe stability problems.

The other huge failure is co-op. The new mode lets you summon up to three friends into your Paris to run around exploring, or to engage in a collection of heist and assassination missions. I almost had fun coordinating attacks with friends in these varied and lengthy missions, but not one co-op game has passed without a disconnection error, or a wrongly placed objective marker, or a target not spawning, or numerous other mission scripting errors. It just doesn't work.

If Ubisoft get it patched up, Unity could become a perfectly enjoyable part of the Assassin's Creed canon. It's a solid campaign elevated by quality assassination missions and an extraordinary setting that might just push the big number at the bottom of this review into the 80s, but with a big selling point out of operation, a raft of technical issues, performance problems, micro-transactions and stilted combat and free-running systems, Unity in its current state can only be considered a failed revolution. .

                                       

Author : Saatvik Awasthi

[REVIEW] Assassin's Creed : ROUGE

There’s no denying that Assassin’s Creed Rogue is fundamentally a redeployment of Black Flag’s winning formula in a new location, and it’s also true that it bears the crow’s feet and laugh lines of a graphics engine optimised for ageing last-gen consoles. But here’s the kicker: none of that gets in the way of your enjoyment. Not if you’re prepared to exercise a little patience in the opening hour or two.

Since you ask, that winning formula is as follows: you’re plonked on a beach with nothing but a colloquial British Isles accent (you’re Irishman Shay Cormac this time, fledgling assassin hoping to foil a Templar expedition for ancient artefacts) and exceptional parkour skills to your name. Oh, and a fully-crewed ship. Quite important, that, because your freedom to roam the seas, dock at any number of alluring locales or hurl cannon balls at other vessels still imbues Assassin's Creed with an irrepressible sense of adventure. Even the second time round.

Rogue is fundamentally a redeployment of Black Flag’s winning formula in a new location.

It’s while manning the wheel of the Morrigan that you’ll find Rogue’s most grabbing activities: attacking ships to plunder them for crew members and resources, which you spend on ship upgrades. So you can attack bigger ships, obviously. Or, you can go about it the old-school way and strip-mine each onshore location of all its treasure chests, shanties, Animus fragments, naval Animus fragments, Templar maps, native pillars, Viking swords… I’m probably forgetting a few more minimap trinkets. They’re dizzying in volume. Oh, and there’s a city management layer later on too. You’re quite the busy man.

There are billions of collectibles to pick up, of course, but the scenery across Rogue’s three game maps—New York, River Valley and the North Atlantic—provides a powerful incentive to hop from ledge to tree branch to cliff top in pursuit of the odd knick-knack. The northern lights cast a ghostly shimmer across the North Atlantic and its ice sheets which soothes your soul after a hard day’s stabbing, and River Valley’s craggy archipelagos and quaint lighthouses put a spring back in your step after your last whaling misadventure. The visuals are far from bleeding-edge, but Rogue manages a kind of rugged handsomeness through thoughtful large-scale environmental design. Of the game’s successes, its breezy and atmospheric setting might be the one it can actually call its own, rather than a continuation of Black Flag’s form.

It’s a double-edged sword of course, Ubisoft’s strategy to lean on Edward Kenway’s exploits as the foundation for Rogue. It means that if you got sick of that overlong trade-cannon-balls-then-board naval combat sequence the first time, you’re bored before you even begin in Rogue. And if the combat was starting to feel outmoded by AC’s contemporaries in 2013, it feels positively arthritic by now. If you’ve clocked in some hours Middle Earth: Shadow Of Mordor  or similar games, since guiding Kenway’s blade, the adjustment back to a slower pace and lessened precision here is tough and unflattering.


Then there are the other longstanding AC problems. The frustratingly imprecise parkour control; the lukewarm stealth mechanics; the uninspired and repetitive mission templates; the ten-hour-long tutorial sequence. The latter alone threatens to stifle the potential of Rogue’s open waters; the game is bizarrely reticent to let you loose on its prized open world until you've hit key story points.

It isn’t that Assassin’s Creed Rogue is without problems, or particularly fresh within the context of the series. Critically though, it puts you in a mindset in which you’re inclined to let a lot slide, because it’s one hell of a power fantasy. You begin as unknown assassin/pirate and quite quickly become the single most important man who ever lived. I’m not even referring to the main story missions explicitly—even outside of that, you’ve a ship full of sailors ready to die for you, all kinds of friends in high places, and basically own New York. That’s an addictive feeling. Rogue understands how to create a sense of adventure using old mechanics and new locales, and as such remains very playable despite the franchise-long problems AC endures in combat, mission design and story.
 

 

Author : Saatvik Awasthi

[REVIEW] StarWars : BattleFront

STAR WARS

BATTLE FRONT

There are no Gungans here. No pouty teenagers talking about sand. No tedious conversations about the taxation of trade routes. This is proper Star Wars. Speeder bikes, Stormtroopers, and Imperial walkers. Han Solo, lightsabers, and sarlacc pits. Battlefront is the most successful attempt yet to recreate the look and feel of the original trilogy in a game, but as an FPS, it doesn’t quite live up to those stunning production values.

In the thick of a 40-player battle, with X-wings screaming overhead, John Williams’ score blaring, and laser fire criss-crossing the battlefield, Star Wars Battlefront can feel like the most exciting game ever made. Its large-scale battles are chaotic, breathless explosions of iconic Star Wars imagery, and it’s hard not to get swept up in the spectacle. You really do feel like you’re in the films. In that respect, it’s a triumph.

There are four planets to fight on, each of which contain several maps. There’s the desert world of Tatooine, the forest moon of Endor, the snowy plains of Hoth, and a volcanic planet called Sullust. Powered by DICE’s Frostbite engine, they all look fantastic especially the dense foliage and towering trees of Endor. Maps include the crash site of a Rebel transport ship on Endor, Echo Base from the The Empire Strikes Back’s Battle of Hoth, and Tatooine’s Jundland Wastes. They’ve captured the lighting, atmosphere, colours, and general feel of the movie locations perfectly. 

And they’re full of neat little fan-pleasing details too, like the Ewoks on Endor who scurry into their treehouses when you approach, Tusken Raiders on Tatooine watching battles from afar, and mouse droids squeaking around Imperial bases. It’s clear the environment artists at DICE love Star Wars. They’re superficial details, of course, but add to the game’s impressive authenticity. Every prop, from vehicles to random crates, look like they’ve been plucked straight from the films.

Multiplayer infantry combat is the main focus of Battlefront. There are nine modes, ranging from smaller 3-6 player matches, to all-out battles for up to 40 people. These include the brilliant, hectic Walker Assault, which sees the Imperials defending a pair of AT-ATs and the Rebels trying to destroy them. And Supremacy, in which two teams of 20 fight for control of five points on a large map. These are by far the best modes the game has to offer, mixing infantry and vehicle combat at a frantic pace.

Unlike in previous Battlefront games, vehicles are accessed by picking up spinning power-ups. Grab an X-wing icon, hold down the activate button, and after a few seconds—providing you don’t get shot—you’ll magically appear in the air. Being able to see a vehicle on the battlefield, jump in, and take off seamlessly would have been much more immersive, but for whatever reason, you can’t. Vehicles you can control include AT-ATs, AT-STs, A-wings, X-wings, and TIE fighters. And if you’re lucky enough to grab a hero power-up, you can fly Slave I or the Millennium Falcon.

PERFORMANCE

Reviewed on : GeForce GTX 970, Intel i7-950, 16GB RAM


Graphics options : Resolution scale, graphics quality, texture quality, texture filtering, lighting quality, shadow quality, effects quality, post-process quality, mesh quality, terrain quality, terrain groundcover, anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, vertical sync, field of view, refresh rate, motion blur amount


Anti-Aliasing : Low, medium, high, or ultra


Remappable controls : Yes

On a GTX 970 with 16GB of RAM, Windows 10, and a relatively old i7, the game runs at a solid 60fps at 1080p with everything set to max. I was impressed that there was no shift in frame rate from the relatively empty Hoth to the busy, foliage-dense Endor.Check out MaximumPC's optimization guide to run the game smoothly on your PC.

This would be more exciting if the ship combat wasn’t basic to the point of feeling like a mini-game. There’s no weight or nuance to the flight model whatsoever, the differences between the ships are negligible, and the lock-on is so generous that it feels like it’s doing most of the work for you. This, combined with the weightless, floaty controls, reduces Star Wars’ famous dogfights to a joyless chore, and I’ve now reached the point where I just ignore starship power-ups if I see them. There’s a mode dedicated to ship combat, Fighter Squadron, but it’s a glorified shooting gallery.

It’s when you’re in the boots of a Stormtrooper or Rebel soldier that the game is at its best, but the infantry combat has a few problems of its own. The blasters look and sound amazing exactly as they do in the films—but they feel lightweight and weedy. And with such memorable names as the RT-97C, A280C, CA-87, T-21, and SE-14C, it’s difficult to tell them apart. Some have a faster rate of fire, some are more powerful, some take longer to overheat, but they all feel vaguely the same. The moment-to-moment FPS combat lacks punch, which is a problem in a game that’s largely about shooting people.

It’s in the smaller modes like Blast (team deathmatch, basically) and Cargo (capture the flag) that the cracks begin to show. The Star Wars buzz wears off and you realise that you’re playing a completely rote, by-the-numbers multiplayer FPS. You’re on Tatooine, and there’s a sandcrawler over there, but you’re still just sprinting in circles, killing, dying, killing, dying. Earn XP, unlock a better gun, kill, die, kill, die. Outside of the big 40-player modes, Battlefront is disappointingly generic, and no amount of beautifully crafted, authentically recreated nostalgia can mask that.

But it does have some ideas of its own, including the ability to play as a selection of famous Star Wars characters. The Empire gets Darth Vader, the Emperor, and Boba Fett, while Leia, Luke, and Han represent the Rebels. They have increased health, more powerful attacks, and unique powers including flying (Fett), force-choking (Vader), and dropping power-ups (Leia). I love watching players flee in terror as I approach them as Vader, but the heroes are far from invincible: it only takes the simplest of coordinated attacks by the opposing team to reduce their health to zero.

In Supremacy and Walker Assault, seeing Vader or Luke charging across the battlefield with their lightsabers glowing, or Boba Fett floating overhead launching rockets, is genuinely exciting, because it happens relatively rarely. But in Heroes vs Villains mode, where all six characters engage in battle at once, it just looks daft. I laugh every time the Emperor spins through the air like M. Bison doing a Psycho Crusher in Street Fighter—not helped by the fact that he sounds like Mr. Bean. With a few exceptions, the voice acting is terrible. Vader sounds like a man speaking into a pint glass, and Luke’s actor couldn’t sound less like Mark Hamill if he tried.

For £50, you don’t get much—and that price isn’t likely to fall any time soon. After 20 hours with the game, I feel like I’ve seen everything several times over. I’m bored of most of the maps, and only feel compelled to return to a handful of its nine modes. It feels like they’ve sliced the game in half to sell the rest as DLC, and the £50 they’re charging for the season pass is ridiculous. There’s little depth to uncover, which has really harmed its longevity for me. I don’t feel like my skills have developed in any meaningful way—as they would after 20 hours of something like Counter-Strike—because it’s so basic.

But games are for everyone, and not every player wants a super deep FPS to master. Battlefront is, for all its flaws, wonderfully accessible. It’s polished, easy to play, and the interface is simple and intuitive. They’ve created a game that anyone can play—from kids to adults—and that’s admirable. Everyone loves Star Wars, and Battlefront reflects that mainstream, cross-generational appeal. But the downside of chasing such a broad audience is that, as a competitive shooter, it’s fairly shallow.

It's a shame there's no single-player campaign either. A selection of fun missions that can be played in co-op or solo—a speeder bike chase through Endor, toppling AT-ATs on Hoth, invading Echo base as Vader—are proof that, if they were strung together with even a loose story, it could have worked. These missions, which replicate key scenes from the films with some artistic license, are among the most fun I had with the game—but there aren't enough of them.

Ultimately, the best rewards in Battlefront are the emotional ones: the thrill of weaving a speeder bike through the trees on Endor, seeing the twin suns of Tatooine, or watching Imperial walkers stomp across the Hoth snowfield. The addition of extra modes, weapons, heroes, and maps might improve the core shooter experience and give it some much-needed depth, but when it costs as much as the base game to get them, you have to question whether you’re willing to spend £100 to find out.

                             
                                       ###That's All Folks###

[REVIEW] RESIDENT EVIL: ZERO REMASTERED

                  

  RESIDENT EVIL: ZERO REMASTERED

Originally released for the Nintendo GameCube way back in 2002, Resident Evil 0 is a prequel set before the events of the first game. This PC version features upgraded visuals, modernised controls, widescreen support, improved sound, a new mode, and other tweaks, but the game itself remains unchanged. It’s a slow-paced, challenging survival horror in the mould of the original—recently given a new lease of life in the superb Resident Evil 0—but is ultimately an inferior game.

You can now control two characters simultaneously: STARS medic Rebecca Chambers and escaped convict Billy Coen. Rebecca can mix healing herbs and squeeze into small spaces, while Billy is better with guns and has more health. You can freely switch characters at the touch of a button, even if they’ve been separated—which happens almost constantly. Or, if they’re together, the AI will take over the other character and obediently follow you around. You can also change how the AI behaves in simple ways, like firing at enemies if they encounter them, or not if you want to conserve ammo.

It’s a system that creates some tense moments. Sending a character into an area the other can’t access, forcing them to go it alone, is always nerve-racking. And it factors into the puzzle design too. In an early level, Rebecca is trapped in a room and Billy has to help her escape by sending items down to her through a dumbwaiter. In another Billy has to hand-crank an elevator while she rides it. But with the exception of a few set-pieces, it feels like a gimmick included for the sake of it. It doesn’t change the Resident Evil formula in any meaningful way and becomes a chore.

Inventory management has always been laborious in Resident Evil games, but just about bearable. Here, though, with two characters to manage—and the removal of those magical boxes that let you access a pool of stashed items from multiple locations—you spend far too much time shuffling items around and wondering what to take or leave behind. You can, mercifully, drop items at your feet and they’ll remain there. But then you forget where you left something and are forced to backtrack to locate the damn thing to solve a puzzle later down the line. It’s one of the most frustrating, obtuse inventory systems in gaming history. There’s a constant feeling of anxiety as you encounter yet another important-looking item with a full inventory.

The opening, set aboard a zombie-filled train, is excellent. It’s familiar Resi stuff—finding keys, reading notes, solving puzzles—but it’s as well-designed as anything in the original. The cramped carriages are brilliantly claustrophobic, and the lavish Orient Express decor is beautiful. But then you leave the train and suddenly the game runs out of ideas. You find yourself in a mansion that’s actually an Umbrella facility. Sound familiar? There are a few new enemies, including zombie apes and annoying leech things, but you can’t shake the feeling of deja vu throughout. It has all the elements that make the first game an enduring classic, but they’ve been arranged in such a way that it feels like a bad cover version of a beloved song.

It’s a shame, because it looks stunning. This is a lavish, loving remaster, and the combination of detailed, atmospheric pre-rendered backgrounds and real-time lighting and shadows is masterfully done. I love the subtle animations too, like the wine bottle rolling around on a table in the train’s dining car. As well as the option to switch from the old ‘tank’ controls to a more modern movement style, there’s a new mode that lets you play as regular series villain and sinister sunglasses aficionado Albert Wesker. He has a range of superpowers, courtesy of the Uroboros virus, including running really fast and unleashing a blast of energy from his creepy glowing eyes. It’s one of those classic Resi gimmick modes, but doesn’t make up for the fact that the core game is so disappointing.

Resident Evil 0 looks amazing, especially considering it’s almost fifteen years old, but it feels like a pastiche of a much better game. Some people might find the need for constant, careful item management satisfyingly challenging, but to me it feels like unnecessary busywork. Throw in a messy, ludicrous storyline (even by Resident Evil standards) that clumsily tries to slot itself into the larger series mythology, unimaginative enemies, and a general feeling that you’ve done all this before, but better, and you’re left with a game that’s very hard to love.