Category: Reviews

My First Gran Turismo is a free-to-play driving simulator that is essentially a demo for Gran Turismo 7. It is targeted specifically at a group of players who have never played racing games before, but have been curious about them. This demo is designed as a friendly introduction to Gran Turismo, which continues to be the best-selling franchise in the history of PlayStation consoles.

This review doesn’t really need to exist, because why watch a review of a demo when you can go download it for free right now?

But…I am making this video for a very niche audience, which includes people who already own the full version of Gran Turismo 7, but are curious to see if My First GT can act as a lightweight alternative to the bulky GT7. And the short answer is, no, not really. 

Developer Polyphony have been very careful not to include too much content in this demo so that once you are done, there’s little reason to come back. But, that doesn’t mean existing players of GT7 shouldn’t give this demo a try, because you can still finish it in a couple of hours or less, and walk away with 18 free cars that you can sell in GT7 for a neat amount of credits. Apart from that, it is not the GT7-lite experience that some people were expecting.

Secrets of the Spire is the second DLC for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and it is a lot of fun, as long as you enjoyed the base game. I said the same thing for my recent review of the new Star Wars Outlaws DLC, and it’s not a coincidence. Both DLCs were developed by the same Ubisoft subsidiary – Massive Entertainment. It’s no small feat that two teams within the same studio were able to release two high-quality DLCs in the span of a week.

Sadly, similar to Outlaws, Frontiers of Pandora also has been largely forgotten by the larger gaming community, due to its average launch reviews, so only a small portion of the people who bought the base game will actually discover this second DLC. And once again, Ubisoft’s marketing team is partially to blame. There was no trailer or details on what to expect from this DLC until after the DLC was launched. They did the same with the Star Wars DLC as well, so I’m not sure why they have adopted this strange strategy.

Anyway, Secrets of the Spire is a massive improvement over the first DLC, the Sky Breaker. It finally gives you a new gameplay mechanic in the form of a mounted crossbow, which you can use while flying your Ikran. The new map looks great, and while the story is once again a bit dull, the level design and general gameplay offer a good mix of missions that kept me going. Best of all, at nearly six hours for the main quests alone, this is a much longer DLC than the first one, and is quite memorable as well. 

Wild Card is the first DLC, or “story pack” for Star Wars Outlaws, and it has come out a little less than three months after the base game’s launch. As a reminder, the launch of the base game was criticized so much that it is rumored to have been part of the reason for the delay of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The key points of criticism were the forced stealth sections, and the general feeling of the world not being interesting enough. While the second part is now too late to change, Ubisoft have done their best to make the first part more tolerable.

Along with the release of Wild Card, a huge title update to the base game was also released, which makes all the stealth sections in the game totally optional. You can still use stealth if you want, but if you get caught, or if you ignore it, you can continue the mission with direct action. This applies to missions in the new story pack as well, and it’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for the level designers, who had to work with this restriction in mind.

Anyway, Wild Card is a brief, standalone Star Wars adventure. Is it going to be nominated for any game of the year lists like the Elden Ring DLC? Probably not. But if you’re among those who liked the positive aspects of Star Wars Outlaws, then Wild Card is a good excuse to get back into the game. 

Last year, I purchased Call of Duty Modern Warfare III at full price, mostly because I had just started this YouTube channel, and wanted to review a big-ticket game to get things started. Sadly, it turned out to be one of the worst video game purchases I had ever made. The campaign was terrible, the multiplayer mode launched with only a collection of remastered maps, and the zombies mode was a reskin of the free game mode DMZ.

This year, I was thankful to Microsoft for including Black Ops 6 in the game pass catalogue on day one, mostly because I thought even if it ended up being terrible, at least I was not spending any extra money. Surprisingly, Black Ops 6 turned out to be one of the best call of duty games I have played in recent times. The campaign was full of twists and turns, the multiplayer mode launched with more than a dozen all-new maps, and the zombie mode…well it did a U-Turn and went back to a round-based format, which is what a lot of fans wanted. So at least at launch, this is a really competent first person shooter that is actually worth paying full price.

Wayfinder has come out of early access and is now available on PC and PlayStation 5, with an Xbox Series release also expected to come out quite soon. The development story of this game has been nothing short of incredible, and it is a small miracle that the 1.0 release of this game is actually available now. Just 14 months ago, when the game suffered extreme server issues at the launch of its early access, and then a drastic fall in player numbers, it was hard to imagine that the game would survive. Watch the video for a full review of the game.

Quidditch is a tough sport to convert into a video game. That’s partially because it isn’t a real sport and is impossible to recreate accurately in real life, unless someone invents flying broomsticks, but also because if some of its rules are implemented, the game could become very boring to play. For instance, if catching the snitch really ends the match at any point, then a seeker could be lucky and skilled enough to end a match within seconds, which isn’t exactly fun. Also, 150 points being awarded for the snitch capture sounds interesting, because you have to constantly be aware of maintaining a good lead over your opposition, but in a video game, scoring 15 goals before capturing a snitch sounds like a chore, again leading to boring matches.

So I wasn’t surprised to see developer Unbroken Studios get a bit creative with the rules in order to make Harry Potter Quidditch Champions a fun game to play. And I would say they’ve succeeded – in the short time I spent playing the game, I did find it fun, and I wouldn’t mind going back to play a few matches every now and then. However, I did play only for around 3 hours, so I don’t know how soon I’ll get bored of the concept. More details in the video.

Immediately after finishing Star Wars Outlaws, I went to Ubisoft’s Youtube channel and tried to find out if there was a trailer or video that accurately depicted how it feels to play the game. I mostly found stylish trailers showing non-stop action, including gunfights, fistfights and space battles. But there was only one video that had the piece of footage I was looking for, and it was a gameplay walkthrough from June 2023. In this video, we can see our hero Kay Vess sneaking through an enemy base, and eventually she gets caught. Then a gunfight breaks out and the action begins. But this rarely happens in the actual game.

Most of the time, what happens when you get caught is that a random enemy will try to raise the alarm, and you need to try to stop them. Then another random enemy tries to do the same, and so on. And more often than not, the alarm does get trigged, and you get an instant fail screen. This sums up the core experience of playing through the story of Star Was Outlaws – a pretty decent game that is let down by its forced stealth mechanics that take away the fun most of the time.

If you’re not going to watch the video, here’s a summary: Star Wars Outlaws is a stealth-heavy third person action game that really doesn’t want you to use the action part for most of the time. When it does allow you to break free and explore the world at your own pace though, it does feel like an enjoyable game. The story is told quite well and actually makes you feel connected to the characters. At a runtime of between 15-20 hours for the main story, and a whole lot more for the side quests, this game is a decent package for anyone who is a Star Wars fan, or plays a lot of Ubisoft games.

Given all the games I was covering in July, I had no time to look at the first DLC for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, which released on July 16th, 2024. Although I have to say it was partially Ubisoft’s fault, because just like the base game, their marketing efforts for this DLC were a bit lacking. In fact, I could not find a launch trailer for the DLC on the official Ubisoft channel in July. They only put out one trailer in June, during the Ubisoft Forward event, and that was it. I also didn’t see the DLC mentioned in my regular news sources, which may suggest that a lot of media outlets either didn’t receive review codes, or they were not really interested to cover it. Either way, it’s safe to say that this DLC didn’t get a lot of attention at launch. And I guess this lack of a marketing push was intentional.

That’s because the sky breaker is a pretty safe and standard DLC for a standard Ubisoft AAA game, which doesn’t really offer many surprises, and is happy to give you more of the core experience of the base game. And that’s the short version of the review. If you liked the core experience of Frontiers of Pandora, this DLC simply offers more of it. There’s no new enemies, no new game-changing mechanics or any surprising story twists to talk about here. It’s quite short, running between 2-3 hours for the main story and around 2-3 hours more of side content. For some people, that’s exactly what they’re looking for from a DLC. For others, it might be a bit of a disappointment that Ubisoft didn’t use this DLC to try something fresh and unique like they sometimes do with their Far Cry DLCs. To find out more, let’s get deeper into the review. Minor spoilers ahead.

This week, I was originally planning to do a 15-minute rant about subscription price hikes, but that felt boring even as I was writing the script. Then, I kept seeing a lot of praise online for this new title on xbox game pass called Kunitsu-Gami Spirit of the goddess. Developed by Capcom, it is an Action Strategy game, and it can even be called a tower defense game, except instead of a tower, you are defending a Maiden. That’s what the game’s description calls her by the way.

As usual, here’s a summary if you’re not going to watch the video: Path of the Goddess is a must-play if you’re the sort of gamer who wishes we ought to see new ideas in the market. Well, here’s one of the industry giants experimenting with a new-ish idea, with a heavy dosage of Japanese culture and some really well-designed, action-packed levels. It’s a visual feast, and the strategy part of the game is kept simple enough to appeal to a wider audience. The game definitely struggles to maintain the pace towards the end, and involves a lot of backtracking in order to progress efficiently, but overall it is a quite excellent title that is one of the more interesting releases in 2024 so far.

If you’re not going to watch the entire video, here’s the summary: Flintlock The Siege of Dawn is the perfect 7 out of 10 game to play on Xbox game pass. The story is forgettable, and exists only to lead you from one boss fight to the next. The gameplay loop is a bit of an interesting mix between melee and ranged combat which you may or may not like. Everything else about the game is really average, but since it is quite short, you might consider investing some time in this if you don’t have anything else to play at the moment. Now on to the full review.

This was originally going to be an early impressions video for Flintlock the siege of dawn, similar to videos I’ve done for The First Descendant and Zenless Zone Zero earlier this month. I only made early impressions videos for those two previous games because I wasn’t too interested to finish them. But halfway through my playthrough of Flintlock, I realised that I was actually interested to finish the game, and that’s what I did. It helped that the game is quite short, and I was able to finish it in a little over 7 hours. And these days, if I’m able to finish a game, I consider it to be at least a decent game. That’s what Flintlock is – a really decent game, which has a few moments of fun, but is wrapped in such a mediocre package that the 7 out of 10 scores that it is getting seem justified. Before we get into the details, here’s a warning that this review will include some spoilers from the game, and while I don’t show any footage from the later stages of the game, I do talk a little about the final boss, without going into too many details.