James Filby

Good God its interminable. One boring drawn out pseudo-artsy nonsense badly written scene after another stuffed with dull, overly long musical segments and nothing interesting to say beyond the same old retrodden ground that's been done so much better by other movies. So horribly dull and stilted and tropey and pedestrian. It so desperately wants to be From Dusk Til Dawn but without that movies charm or surprise.

My God. This might be one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Baffling, devoid of any tension or horror and utterly self-absorbed. Do you like grass? You're going to be looking at a LOT of it. 40% of this movie is out of focus shots of grass. Brown grass. Sometimes people lie in the grass. Sometimes its just grass. Do you like looking at a completely black screen? Because you're going to see a lot of that too. Another 40% of this movie is shot in complete and total darkness. Mostly the important bits where you could really do with it not being shot in total darkness. The other 20% is smash cuts with practically no dialogue. No exposition. Nothing. There are also donkeys. Are they significant? Symbolic? I don't care, and by the mid-point of this utter disaster, neither will you. Do you care about plot or characters? Do you like to identify and connect with the people in a movie? Well. Tough. This isn't for you. They could have literally taken every single actor out of this film and it would have made absolutely no difference. That isn't hyperbole. People die in this film, and I couldn't care less about a single one of them. They're barely set dressing. This film has been praised for being deep and mysterious. It isn't. Its just bad. Badly shot. Badly written. Badly acted. Badly directed. Its a boring dirge of a self-indulgant non-movie. It falis as a film and it fails as a piece of art. Robbie Banfitch, if you happen to read this, please don't make another movie. Spare us all the pain.

This thing is a meas. Let's start graphics. It looks nice, most of the time, other than it has that 'everything smeared in vaseline' look that aggressively upscaled games have. Other than that it's pretty pleasant to look at. Sound design is pretty abysmal. The sound that's there is good, the score is very pleasing and it's all well done, there's just so little of it. There's practically no ambient sound anywhere. Every bustling spaceport or snowy city is just weirdly and consistently silent. Gameplay is where things really start to fall apart. So, if you're expecting to use that fancy blaster of yours that you can spend so long upgrading, then forget it. This is a pure stealth game, and not a good one. This is basically the worst Assassin's Creed game, but in Star Wars trousers. You're going to be sneaking and crouching to pick up some McGuffin or another from the centre of a room 99% of the time. When things DO get loud, the gunplay is just awful. Enemies are brain dead, simply swarming your position, standing an inch from you and shooting you point blank in the face while you 'pew-pew' at them with your laughably ineffective pea-shooter. Awful. Those open worlds? Empty. Entirely bereft of anything interesting or exciting. There's the occasional radiant event, of which there seems to be precisely one type, but there's little point in them because there's really nothing of note to pick up in terms of loot. Yes , there are collectibles, but they're all so utterly banal there's very little reason to chase them down. Now, let's talk about bugs. They are constant and they are everywhere. From weird interactions with NPCs, to broken AI, visual glitches, hard crashes, absolutely every single aspect of this game is broken to a lesser or greater extent. Worse than this, I have just had a playthrough stopped dead by a game-breaking mission bug. I'm so incredibly appalled at the state of this game that I've requested a refund, and it's certainly the last Ubisoft game I'll be buying without a VERY steep discount.

The opening hours of this game are a lot of fun. It's a 3D Stardew Valley rip-off and, while it is very much a rip-off, it is a good one. A lot of the issues have been fixed (Xbox Series X), although I did have a couple of crashes to desktop. Characters are interesting, the gameplay is solid, this should have been a really good time. However. This isn't a game about farming. This is a game about hitting literally thousands of trash bags for hours and hours and hours. I'm not being hyperbolic, or exaggerating in any way. Once you reach the underwater levels you will spend hours on end slowly floating around and hammering the 'X' button. It is awful. Soul destroying. The most tedious, dull, gaming experience I have ever had the misfortune to endure and the most egregious example of padding a game out I have ever encountered. Even using area clearing tools makes the experience only ever so slightly less painful. I got about two thirds of the way through before I gave up, utterly defeated. My actual job is more fun and less time consuming than this, literal, trash.

What starts out as a quirky, intriguing journey through an unusual apocalypse filled with thought provoking symbolism in its first half, descends in to a half-baked, baffling, self-indulgent, awful, mess in its second. There are some clever and interesting themes here, the comparison between Elvis and Hitler is a fascinating and repeating theme. Consumerism, death (and the constant existential fear or it), urban life, are all tacked sucessfully in the opening half of the movie. The second half, however, descends into absolute decadent twaddle. Nothing is explained, nothing is made clear, and everything seems to be designed for no other purpose than critics to coo over. This is the most unsatisfying movie I have ever had the misfortune to have watched, and very definitely amongst the worst.

I expected this to play like a 13 year old game, I didn't expect it to look like hot garbage on the PS4 pro though. I am stunned that this was released in this state. Visuals are muddy and low poly, but that's nowhere near the worst. The background pops in and out constantly. There are red artifacts that look like Lego bricks which flash all around the environment. The distant islands look like they're full of some kind of constantly flashing disco trees, I've seen the shadows lift completely off objects in cut scenes. This thing is an absolute mess. And that raytracing? Not a big deal at all. Terrible.

I was really looking forward to this based on the trailer and, honestly, I should have just stopped there as that's where all the best bits of the film are. While Charles himself raises some smiles, the rest of the movie is entirely dull. Utterly predictable story beats, shallow characters, and poor writing render the rest of the movie completely pedestrian. None of the characters are properly built up, leading to them feeling very two dimensional - even Charles himself follows a very predictable arc. Everything about the movie is completely safe, there's nothing and nobody here that elicits any kind of real emotion from a viewer perspective. There's no real threat, no real feeling of kinship with the characters. The whole movie really is paper-thin. A really disappointing experience.

Reviewed on Switch. Horrendous. Glitchy, ugly, and technically inept. The graphics are awful, some of the worst I've seen on the Switch. This game was clearly designed for current-gen consoles, and the compromises made for the Switch are glaring. Everything is muddy and unclear, pop-in is ubiquitous and egregious, the frame rate constantly hitches. Glitches are abound, with Sonic frequently becoming trapped on level geometry, requiring a game. It's a real technical mess on the Switch. Very disappointing. Stick with 2D Sonic games.

Firstly, on Xbox Series X, the loading times for this game are insane. It takes longer to load than any other game I've played so far on the system and has a total of three loading screens before you even get to any gameplay. One to load a screen that says "Press A to continue", one to load a screen that lets you choose a game mode, and finally one to actually load the game. Once you're in the game things aren't any better. The camera setup is awful, giving the whole game a fish-eye look which genuinely made me feel nauseous, and makes doing pretty much anything a chore. Gameplay wise, the frustrating controls of the first game have gone from being an entertaining feature, to an actual annoyance, with poorly placed items often being out of reach of your character, exacerbated by the horrific camera. The much wider scope of this game also hasn't done the gameplay any favours whatsoever. Whereas the original title was tight and focussed on doing a handful of things really well, the sequel feels the result of a brainstorming session where Bossa have decided to simply throw every idea they could think of at the game resulting in an ideas soup that really doesn't work. Key-cards, physics puzzles, level editors, full body motion, multiplayer, story mode, voice overs, none of it is necessary and none of it gels well with the game. Finally, the game is clearly built around multiplayer, but at the detriment of single player. Bob will bleed out very, very, quickly if not attended to immediately, dying within scant seconds as you fumble around to pick up a syringe. Clearly the idea is that you work together, having a team member ready at hand with the tools you need to keep poor Bob clinging on to life. However, no adjustments have been made to make this work in solo play. Surgeon Simulator 2, much like Bob himself, is in dire need of some attention.

This is such a game of two halves. The open-world stuff is really top-notch. It feels like a much more cartoony Assassins Creed. Beautiful graphics, really engaging combat, masses of loot, a very well done story and Fenyx is an incredibly likeable character. But then there are the vaults. Overly long. WAY too many. Incredibly dull. Often pad smashingly frustrating. Just awful. Absolutely awful. One vault had me move boxes that were chained together from A to B - bear in mind that is the VAST majority of these puzzle rooms is to simply move item A to point B. I counted how many times I had to do the same puzzle. Eighteen. It made me move a box eighteen times, throwing in a near-identical boss battle in after ever sixth time just to really up the boredom. Another vault tasked me with floating a ball over a gap. Because the puzzles are all physics-based and subject to the randomness it comes with, it took me nearly thirty attempts to get the ball over. It just kept on falling off the sides, or not travelling far enough. Horrible. Just, horrible. I think Immortals Fenyx Rising might be one of the first games I've given up on because it was just too tedious to complete.