Jamie Ditch

Phoenix Point is a great disappointment, not because it doesn't have good gameplay, but because so much of the game prevents you from reaching that gameplay. I'm not talking about the base building, which feels pretty irrelevant, I'm talking about the bugs and the slow loading. In my opinion, it's actually an achievement to take such a basic game, with such simple battle spaces and make it load this slowly. A 'disasterpiece' if you will. The game clearly lacked a sincere testing phase. You can almost hear the director saying 'Meh, that'll do. Ship it and see if any suckers pay for it'. It's a real shame because it could have been as great as the XCOM games were in their time. But no. If you want to play it, just know that there will be bugs and you will need to frequently restart or reinstall the game to progress. Another work of predatory publishers with little interest in their product. For shame.

Easily the worst call of duty ever made. It's a shame the quality of the first two levels of the campaign are simply a demo that descends in to the kind of crap you'd expect an AI to churn out. The rest of the levels are filled with zombie fighting nonsense that makes no sense with the story they've created. Another disappointment is the 'open world' level that acts like the poorest possible version of Metal Gear Solid V, two generations too late, and a fraction of the game play. Zombies is fun, but nothing you didn't experience a decade ago. Multiplayer is really poor sadly. Awful maps, some of the worst spawning of all time. I'd say that I spawn in front of an enemy or on their direct line of sight 50% of the time on average. This is what happens when you push a game in 12 months. It's not even half baked.

It's not that AAA games don't sell. It's simply that this is not a triple A game, and neither is it's half baked, boring DLC. Starfield Shattered Space feels like a game that was released in 2012, and the deepest criticisms should be focused on the leadership in the studio, who catastrophically failed to understand the USP and most popular parts of the game. And who then failed to expand or innovate in any way for the first DLC. It's not too little too late. Because they have failed to even bring the bar back to a starting position. No new spaceship parts. No additional base building. The sense of scale is worse than ever. How on earth did you mess this up So bad? I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed with the DLC after playing for just under 10 hours now. I think Bethesda deserves credit for moving back towards curated content. It's clear they tried to move back towards carefully curated character based stories, and a lot of the dialogue is expanded and more deep than the base game. But it's all so bland and irrelevant. I'd be stunned if they could prove they didn't use A.I to generate quest ideas and stories. It's so mundane. The horse has been flogged. I don't get how they've managed to miss the mark again with this and we need to clear up a few things: First of all, it looks like crap on Series X (unsure of other platforms). I'm not just talking about textures either. Outside of the main city, there are smaller settlements and workplaces all over which is nice. But these spaces make absolutely no sense. In the real world, people in 3rd world countries, living in absolute poverty, still live in better conditions than people in Starfield. It's deeply stupid, and frankly lazy. The awful game design extends beyond the visuals that are often too dark and moody to make out details, even in the middle of daytime, and into the way the terrain is designed. Bethesda decided to spread quests out across a wide map area. But they didn't give us a good way to navigate it. The REV 8 not only handles appallingly whilst navigating, but it also struggles to travel more than a few feet before getting stuck on DAZRA. It's horrible, and not remotely user friendly. So now you're travelling for 40 minutes on foot between quest giver and objective, whilst fighting the most mundane of enemies. The quests themselves are deeply boring and disinteresting for the most part. The intro to the city is interesting and I liked the lore dump in the cave. But beyond that I haven't encountered a single interesting moment. It would take a lot for me to buy a Bethesda game again, or consider game pass to play it. You don't make this mistake repeatedly, without doing it intentionally, or lacking the ability to do anything else. I almost feel bad writing this, because I have no doubt there are creators at Bethesda who are crying to their leadership for a change of direction. Whatever it is that made Bethesda special, it's long gone.

Forza has fantastic gameplay, but all that is ruined by serious design flaws. Firstly, if you want to play with a friend, you'll find yourself facing the same old infinite loading-screen bugs, present in Forza for at least a decade. It's frustrating and suggests the developer just frankly doesn't care. But even when you do load in, Forza will sometimes take so long to load that I've walked off and made a cuppa, and toast and still got back in time before we even got on to a race lobby. It's poor, really poor, and the annoyance is exacerbated by the lack of any symbol on screen to let you know the game is even loading. Instead it's just a black screen that looks like your system is switched off. The game also suffers from the pure greed with regards to the publisher. Some of the best vehicles in the game are locked behind a paywall, meaning that if you want to stay competitive you need to spend real money, pm a game that already requires you to earn on game credits to buy cars. It's frankly, absolutely disgusting and predatory. Shame they've murdered a classic franchise. Don't waste your money here.

Give me couch co-op you lazy devs. It could have been a great couch co-op experience. But apparently that was just too much effort.

I regret spending £60 on the game, £30 would have been too much. The campaign is pretty but one dimensional and the AI feels 20 years old. All it's predecessor's bugs remain, multiplayer mostly consists of corner jumping and feels entirely random. Half of players are running around with a scopeless sniper that somehow has more handling than a pistol or smg. Another complaint are the game breaking bugs for half of players. Anyone (like myself) who reached level 5 in their first game, faces a bug in which they can't access their custom classes outside of an active game, or default classes. Don't waste your money on this fast cash grab rubbish. If you want fast and smoothe gunplay maybe try Apex legends and spend your £60 on another video game, or even buy yourself a weeks shopping. You'll have more enjoyment putting away your groceries anyway.

Thanks to error Ribera-40002, the game is literally unplayable in multiplayer, and the store is also complete inaccessible. Those widespread error was first reported in March 2022, still hasn't received a fix. Don't even waste your time downloading. Classic Unisoft.

It's so bad, I feel out of pocket having never paid for it, as it's part of the Xbox Game Pass, on PC. Don't waste your time. It's the worst entry in 15 years and a big step backwards. Playing Battlefield V on the latest hardware, with the best internet you can pay for should be a pleasant experience. But poor server connections, lacking in both quantity and quality hamper any chance of fun. Dice attempt to squeeze the player for money by once again providing too few servers in all regions. It shouldn't require paying for a private server to connect to a server with less than 200 ping, but it frequently does. The game is plagued with server side problems that no modern game should be suffering from. The gameplay itself is cumbersome and the developers have learned nothing from the previous two entries. Gunplay is poor and there's always a sense of detachment from firing a weapon. Most guns feel as though they fire rubber bullets, enemies laughing off LMG's in particular, as if they're using blanks. Vehicles are incredibly disappointing, and you have to go back to the first year of the PS3 to find vehicles with as little functionality as they now have. It's pretty shocking and I'd argue lazy too.

I think it would only be honest to review this game as an almost separate game in many ways, to the single player Campaign. And the short answer to the question of whether you will like it comes down to a few simple things. It's for you if: * You was able to find tremendous fun between the main story sections of the single player Campaign. *You enjoyed hunting and seeking out different animals, plants etc. *You enjoyed treasure hunts. *You enjoyed the less demanding aspects of running a camp/business. *Bounties were fun for you. Because not only is all of that included in the online, but much of it is expanded upon in huge detail. It actually stunned me, just how much there is to do now. There's at least 5 major business/lifestyle choices each with an expansive and deep selection of stories, missions and collectibles. This game is much more than GTA:V is, I'm thoroughly impressed. The only real downside? I think the best way to look at it is that this is essentially a DLC. you're going to need to spend £20 to unlock some major content. But after that you'll earn enough gold bars and cash to unlock everything for free, then on. Infact it's quite easy to have too many gold bars, the in game premium currency. It's almost as if they were simply experimenting with Grand Theft Auto's Micro-transaction system. Also, it's worth mentioning that occasionally I meat a server bug or two. It's not too frequent, maybe every 20 hours of gameplay or so. Can't complain too hard. One of the most joyous discoveries for me, was a random invite I accepted to join a posse. I was soon invited to the other players hideout. A simple wooden shack. Little did I know that it had an elaborate 'Speak Easy' downstairs. Drinking dancing and laughing with the cinematic camera on, was one of the most surprisingly fun experiences I've had gaming, ever, in 25 years. So yeah, I think it's worth it. I actually enjoyed spending the £20, knowing I'd made an incredible bargain. 4/5 simply because they need to work a little bit on bugs and explaining how to start certain sections of the game.