South Park: The Stick Of Truth is my favourite game of 2014 so far. While that accolade would be given to The Last Of Us: Remastered had I not already played it, Obsidian's RPG is excellent. More importantly, it's genuinely funny.
Since the dawn of time games have sucked at trying to get people to laugh, usually relying on horrible, 'nerdy' jokes to try and elicit some sort of reaction from the player. Given that The Stick Of Truth was written by the South Park creators - Matt Stone and Trey Parker - this is never an issue. As many others have said, it's like one of their best TV episodes transferred across to a different medium.
It's certainly not the best RPG ever made, and some of the gameplay elements feel more like an afterthought, but that's not why you play this. You play this to smile and feel pretty damned entertained. And that's exactly what it will do.
6/10...
FEZ arrived as one of August's PlayStation Plus games, so I thought I'd give the game a go on PS4 having failed to get into the Xbox 360 version - then never returned to because I was worried I'd lose any progress due to a game-breaking bug. I got almost nowhere, because, like I've been discovering a lot recently, FEZ is another game that you can't play casually.
I tend to have a short window of about 45 minutes to play games at about 10pm. At that time I'm usually barely able to keep my eyes open, so any game that isn't FIFA or about loud bangs (which are usually muted due to a sleeping baby) becomes more about battling my eyelids than any virtual foes I might encounter. Other PS4 PS Plus newcomer, Road Not Taken, looks even less exhilarating. Where are the explosions on PS Plus?
With the stakes getting higher as the weeks go on, my chances of making it to the end of The Last of Us' multiplayer campaign are starting to look increasingly bleak.
As Bratterz and I explained earlier in the week, online multiplayer games are exceptionally tense, with the fiction surrounding them aggravating the suspense as real-life friends are killed or taken sick. It's surprisingly clever, too: Scavenging food and providing arms training for your camp may only provide a minor twist on typical multiplayer challenges, but it adds a human element to the usual online violence. The result is a multiplayer mode that isn't only fun, but never fails to forget its roots. An impressive feat for something that could otherwise be considered 'tacked on'.
Metrico, based on infographics and trigonometry and all that other stuff you wished didn't exist, may sound like the sort of game that maths teachers dream of, but it's actually pretty good. Check out my review.
I also played the new Call of Duty: Ghosts expansion pack, Nemesis, which I'm afraid to say is merely alright. Again, I've reviewed it. So check it out. Or not. Up to you, yeah?