Touche Turtle

I had great expectations for this movie. I grew up on Hammer Horror movies and I was keen to see a new take on a classic movie. First the positives: the gothic aura and dark atmosphere are great. They give off a dark and foreboding feeling that fits well with the story. Some of the acting is great: Wilhem DeFoe, Ralph Ineson and Simon McBurney are superb. The rest of the cast are pretty average. As for the rest of the movie, it was bland, and uninteresting. You felt nothing for the characters and their fate: you didn’t feel invested in them. There was no suspense, no terror, it was thoroughly disappointing. Like most modern cinema, it lacked substance.

No Time to Die is a betrayal to previous Bond movies. I’ve been a fan for a long time but this latest instalment is the antithesis of a Bond movie. Its weak storyline, coupled with an emasculated Bond epitomise modern cinema. Moreover, it reinforces Hollywood’s continuing trend to ruin successful franchises. It’s clear that Bond has no place in modern society and the only course of action is to ruin his character and replace it with something no one really wants. So as the Duke of Wellington once said: publish and be damned. Your audience will judge you for it.

The game just isn’t Battlefield. It’s almost like they’ve deliberately stripped away everything BF fans loved and replaced it with an atrocious carbon copy of COD. From a marketing point of view it’s difficult to understand; why take a game fans enjoy because it isn’t like COD, and offers something unique and replace it with a game that, well just like COD? The maps are massive, desolate wastelands that the player has to navigate for prolonged period without finding another soul. Pack sandwiches because it’s gonna be a long ride, or walk. 128 players simply doesn’t work and the maps have suffered in order to accommodate double the player count. It comes at a price: less destruction, less cover, less detail. Basically maps that are instantly forgettable. Then there’s no score board, no game chat, no class system and specialists that look like cartoon characters and have cheesy one-liners to match. In game, hit markers are all over the place. Sometimes they’re on point and on others you can put a full magazine into someone with no effect. I’m a BF veteran and have played since BF1942, and this is easily the worst BF to date. While all previous games have had difficult launches beset by problems they all came through in the end because they retained the core BF gameplay. BF2042 doesn’t, and no amount of patches will save it. I persisted for a while, but I’ve gone back to BF1 and BFV. Everything about these games is so much better. It’s a sad day but it looks like BF is finished.