Steve Burns, Deputy Editor – The Order 1886, PS4
Apart from playing PES (obviously) I've spent time with The Order this week. Sadly, its gameplay is doesn't come anywhere near matching its sumptuous graphics, and it's in danger of being a real disappointment. Which would be a shame, as those moustaches are something else.
Jim Trinca, Video Producer – Dragon Age: Inquisition, PS4
I’ve been playing Dragon Age: Inquisition almost exclusively for a fortnight, and I’m well past the very definite point in every BioWare game where it goes from 'alright' to brilliant in the space of a cutscene. In this, it comes in at around 15 hours, which is hard to defend. After all, I’m one of those people who sniggers when the argument is made that Final Fantasy XIII 'really improves after thirty hours!'.
I mean, third degree burns improve drastically after thirty hours.
That initial period in DA:I certainly wasn’t as bad as all that, but it did leave me cold. It was grindy, it was repetitive, and the plot moved along with the pace of a Peter Jackson long shot.
But it was necessary. Without going through those motions, the sheer impact of the event would have been muted, and all the fan-hitting excrement thereafter needs that initial, painfully slow injection of context to really work. As an experience, it’s extraordinarily well crafted, even if it does ask for a big investment to start off with.
Inquistion is an incredible game – it’s enormous, epic in the truest sense of the word, and I think I’m going to be playing it until April. It’s also made me much less worried about the future of BioWare, which seemed for a long time to be squandering its reputation on mediocre follow ups to past successes. DA:I bucks that trend spectacularly, and if Mass Effect 4 is anything like this, we can all rest assured that BioWare is back on top of its game.
I’m not going to play FF XIII, though. Ever. No.
Chris Bratt, Video Producer – Chaos Reborn, PC
I’ve experienced a weird sort of nostalgia whilst mucking around with Chaos Reborn this week, despite the original game being released in 1985 on some kind of archaic contraption called the ZX Spectrum. I don’t know what a ZX Spectrum is, but it sounds very old and very complicated.
Years after the release of that first game, Chaos: The Battle of Wizards (there’s a subtitle that hasn’t aged particularly well), I stumbled upon a pretty dodgy fan remake called Cyber Wars. Despite its flaws, I fell in love with the core mechanics underneath without ever realising they originated somewhere else.
And yet here we are, almost 30 years later. Following a successful Kickstarter push, Chaos has returned with ACTUAL 3D gameplay and I’m having so much fun with it. It’s an Early Access release and only contains the base multiplayer matchmaking at present, but that’s all I’ll ever likely want to play. Deciding whether to risk an actual summon, or fool your opponent with an illusion – it’s such a great foundation for a strategy game. That sentence might not have made any sense. Go and find out what it means!
Julian Gollop is the man. The strategy man.
Brett Phipps, Staff Writer – NES Remix, Wii U
In order to justify purchasing NES Remix 2 to myself, I decided that I had to finish the first game. It was only while doing this that I realised how little of it I had actually played: I hadn’t even unlocked The Legend of Zelda or Ice Climbers when I first stopped, so going back to the original was a bit of a treat.
NES Remix offers the sort of challenge that nostalgia makes you think the original games had. The Remix games are the perfect way to revisit the oldies, because they compensate for my distorted memories of playing as an uncoordinated kid, although I’m now just an uncoordinated adult.
