Simon Mason

So far, so baffling. I've spent a good few hours so far wandering (I use the word deliberately) around the Vatican, and I'm scratching my head quite a bit. 95% of the game is walking around. Slowly. So far there have been some very routine fetch quests, a bit of light photography, and an awful lot of cut scenes, all interspersed with walking backwards and forwards. There are an already growing number of equally routine video game fetch and level up quests waiting for me. I had a decent time hacking my way into the Vatican via the Castel San Angelo, bonking a few guards on the head. Nothing remotely challenging, reasonably smooth if a little on the clunky side, but fine. It's quite nice that so far I haven't killed anyone, although I've probably left several people with life changing brain injuries from being battered with a hammer, but hey ho. Climbing is perhaps a little better than the dire Uncharted model, but again a little clunky and plodding. The game looks absolutely lovely, no doubt. Your character is a fair facsimile of a younger Harrison Ford, and the voice impression by Troy Baker is remarkable. So far, all of the main character acting has been pleasingly good, so it does feel quite filmic. There are video game daft bits aplenty: I just did a rope slide from the roof into the Belvedere (crawling with Blackshirts) and nobody turned a hair. But if you walk past a captain, expect your disguise to be seen through instantly and every fascist for miles to jump on you. Which then reminds you that checkpoints are a occasionally a tad infrequent (and no manual saves). And doors that just two minutes earlier you walked through without hindrance are now frustratingly "locked for combat", so choose your escape route carefully. The puzzles I've encountered so far could have come out of Skyrim - literally no different. NPCs range from immobile to weird (one just walked right through me), and the number of fascists on patrol is really quite extraordinary. Little things like the three part action to unlock a door - select the key, X to use the key, stick to unlock - are ponderously animated and will grate massively after umpteen hours. Likewise the very clunky switch from first to third person every time you climb something - it's quite jarring and not very slick. And then - nothing much happens. Overall: well, it's all quite dull. If you fantasise about "being Indiana Jones", then I guess it ticks that box, but it could hardly be called exciting thus far. The plot is another "whatever" item, and I'm not quite seeing where the thrills are going to come from unless something changes quite radically in the next few hours. I will continue to plod around the Holy City and see what turns up. The endless five star reviews are a mystery thus far I am afraid.

Reviewed on XBox. This is still pretty much unusable most of the time. I did manage a flight the other day, but tried again tonight and, whilst the game did start after the usual interminable streaming load, actually starting a flight was impossible. Round and around the little disc goes, getting nowhere, and I'm left staring at an unresolved satellite map listening to weird droning engine noises with no actual progress. I'm imagining the conversations around the table when they were getting ready to launch this: "Hey, remember last time, nothing worked on day 1. What shall we do about it this time?". A long pause. "How about we do nothing at all?". Applause ... Eventually, I guess the wretched thing will work and it will probably be good, but I'd be pretty hissed off if I had paid for it instead of getting it via Gamepass. So far, with limited experience of stuff I can actually review, I have to say that the menus - clunky as hell last time - appear to be marginally worse if anything, and certainly nothing has been done to make them more usable or friendly. And how has something as basic as throttle and stick orientation for a Thrustermaster Hotas on a Series X been mapped backwards by default? How is that a thing?! Woeful, until they finally put sufficient investment into infrastructure to support the hefty investment in software. Baffling. EDIT: yay, I did a flight! But only after 20 minutes of control problems - moving around the departure/arrival menus was nearly impossible due to cursor and/or latency problems. Once I was on the runway I discovered I had to remap my Hotas One (again) so it didn't work backwards. After that, once I finally got airbourne via various controls that didn't work as mapped, I had a lovely view of NYC slowly popping into poor quality texture view. JFK was a piece of blank greyness that only glacially resolved into a low-fi representation of some sheds. The basic flying controls seem even more jittery and lumpen than on 2020. An utter and complete disaster, and I think deleting it would be wise. Maybe in 12 months time it might be credible.

Well, disappointing about covers it. It's hard to believe that SWO came from the same studio that delivered the surprisingly excellent Avatar. Graphics: a bit flat and last gen. Where Avatar was frequently breathtaking, SWO is oddly uninteresting, despite the requisite elements theoretically being in place. I never once was wowed by an amazing vista. Characters: Kay is likeable, but most of the others seem video game average, albeit with decent voice acting (Assassin's Creed wooden school of acting take note). It's hard to get excited about anyone. Combat: workmanlike, albeit you are mostly limited to a blaster and a few grenades. It's mostly stealth, which is a bit clodhopping even after the patch. Kill a trooper standing six feet away from his mate and nobody will notice, even if they walk over the body. Unless they do and you get mission insta-death of course. No shooting your way out of this one. Missions: okay to shocking. One very bad example: I had to go and sort out a droid run wild - cool! I traipsed across loads of map, got frustrated trying to climb up a rock (a common problem, certainly early on), finally found him, pressed a button to release him from his cage ... and he pottered off home. End of mission. Literally nothing else. What? The reputation system is interesting, and would keep you juggling sides, although I am not sure how much difference it really makes. Space combat and flying: just as dull as in every other space game. Flying in space is utterly tedious, and combat is an exercise in spinning around on a point trying to lock onto something also spinning around on a point. SWO isn't the worst I've played, but I've yet to find this gaming element even vaguely interesting. Do you really want to simulate space flight for more than thirty seconds? To it's credit, SWO doesn't try. Overall, it reminded me tonally of Starfield, strangely. It feels similar, and there is the same nagging sense of doing perfunctory things to extend game time, with none of them being that thrilling. I didn't once get a wow out of SWO, the best I managed was "not bad". Very, very disappointing. One last general grudge, not SWO particularly: film grain settings. Why spend gazzillions making a (hopefully) lovely looking game, then default it to a setting that makes it look massively worse? For the love of God, why? Stop it!

Perhaps this make sense if you are a tabletop D&D freak, but for a video gamer? Hmmm .... To me it is clearly and obviously just Divinity Original Sin 3. Yes, i know the mechanics are all very D&D5, but in practical playability terms there isn't much difference between this and DOS2. The considerable flaws of DOS2 are mostly not dealt with: terrible inventory management, absurd and often unfair difficulty spikes, clunky, ponderous combat (even allowing for it being turn based), a frustrating and willfully perverse lack of guidance, thousands of "different but the same" spells and scrolls to somehow manage, and so on. Graphically it's nice but nothing special, acting and dialogue are decent but hardly exceptional, the plot is just "whatever". The gushing reviews go on about all the meaningful choices you can make: but in practice, at the time you make decisions you are just guessing, and you would only know the difference if you played the game multiple times. You can only play BG3 by constantly, constantly save scumming it, and after you have spent another 20-30 minutes slogging your way through a battle that you thought you could manage but which then coshes you from behind (reinforcements from nowhere, nearly dead guy suddenly turns into a one-hit kill wonder, you start missing even with near max odds, etc), it gets old quite quickly. You need to enjoy repetition. I am at a point where I am struggling to see how to move the story forward. Clearly you can, and I am missing something, but I'm not sure it is worth the effort even if I can find a way through. When Ubisoft or Bethesda chuck this much guff and distraction into a game, you never hear the end of it ... My current view is that this is a good but massively overrated and overhyped game, with considerable gameplay issues, that is benefitting from media reviewer group-think