So I was a little cautious going into Farpoint.

While shooters are typically one of my favorite genres, and I do love me some VR, the marrying of the two has not really been successful thus far.

With a lot of experiences falling flat, or offering gimmicky stand still and shoot experiences, Farpoint is a really big breath of fresh alien air.

The set up is right out of most sci-fi novels, stranded on a alien world, you have to find a way home.

Now I will not spoil anything here, but the game has a fantastic and unpredictable narrative. Again, something I have not really come to expect in VR. Thus far the experiences have all been pretty holo. Thus is often the case with indie developer. While they have a great idea for gameplay, most of the really suck at any form of cohesive narrative.

And that is where Farpoint really shines here.

As you traverse this distant world, you are finding holographic breadcrumbs of the people you are searching for.

I really can’t say much more without spoiling things. So I will leave the plot up to you to discover.

But I can tell you, it is worth the price of admission. (Still better than the last 3 “Alien” movies)

I picked up the much sought after Aim controller bundle, which really is the second biggest highlight of the game.

They put some serious R&D into this controller. It works perfectly and feels amazing. The on screen characters hands are directly where you are holding the controller. And this really helps immerse you in the world.

You will have 5 different guns throughout the game, and they all feel really well designed and a lot of though was put into their use with the aim controller.

You will shoulder your sniper rifle and match up targets in the scope. Shoot a shotgun from the hip, and aim down the holographic site on your assault rifle. All feeling very different but all feel incredibly natural.

I found myself closing one eye to aim with the sniper rifle. This just happened subconsciously and I didn’t really notice for about half the game.

The graphics are pretty top notch for VR as well. Most games still have some anti-aisling issues, and there are here too, but in much diminished capacity. VR games still have a tendency to look a little last gen, or early PS4, but Farpoint does add a lot of polish that many others have not.

If I had anything negative to say it would sadly be about the length of the core game itself.

I finished up in just under 5 hours and that time just flew by.

That being said there is a challenge mode that is hard as nails to master, and a option to play the game in co-op with another PSVR player.

A nice inclusion in this sea of single player experiences.

My big hope at this point is that we see much more of the Aim controller. It is so well thought out I have to have faith this will not be the only real game to support it.

I know there is a couple other games rumored to include it, like Arizona Sunshine (a zombie killing game) and one other title that eludes me right now.

Also there is a small rumor starting to circulate that we may see No Mans Sky with VR and Aim support, that could be a real treat.

With E3 in just 2 weeks time I imagine we will see a lot more of VR and hopefully announcements for the Aim.

A solid 8/10 and a must have for shooter fans, this is the VR shooter you have been waiting for.

So I am in the midst of a VR play-a-thon, you will be getting some new reviews soon for RE7, The Assembly and Farpoint, but first, we have a cool little VR game called Statik by Tarsier Studios.

The premise is simple. Solve the puzzle on your hands, both of which are trapping in a box and can be manipulated as such by twisting and turning the DS4 controller.

Sounds simple?

Well here’s the catch, there are zero instructions on how to solve the puzzle, it is a completely out of the box thinking game (pun intended)

There is a small group of puzzles, only 8, and each is successively more difficult, and each one is completely unique, so do not think just because you aced puzzle 3 you will rock puzzle 4 as all you have learned is tossed out the window with each room.

The plot unfortunately is pretty thin, and all in all makes very little sense when all told.

The game pulls from other projects like Portal, but ultimately falls short on the charm of a game like portal.

The puzzles are the strong point at least and can honestly carry the game even if you play for story (like I do)

But also, I am a puzzle fanatic, not just games, but everything from physical puzzles, to word puzzles and even jigsaws, so something like this fits right up my alley in terms of challenge.

That being said, short of 1 puzzle I breezed through all of them with not to much difficulty at all. But your mileage will vary completely based on your cognitive processing for 3d puzzles. If this is your strong suit, don’t expect to get much more than a couple hours out of the game like I did.

Other than trophy farming you will have zero reason to play Statik a second time. There is a trophy for speed and once you know the solutions, you could easily blow this away in 30 mins or less.

All in all a fun game to blow an afternoon with, but sadly a lot of potential for a great narrative was squandered.

A solid 7/10, but only for those of you who love puzzles.

So after 90hrs of Mass Effect, and another 60+ hours in Destiny, I have decided to go into a VR mode for a while and blow through a few shorter games.

First on that List was Eagle Flight by UbiSoft.

Now UbiSoft has always marched to the beat of their own drum, be that good or bad, they are one of the few publishers out there who really feel comfortable with new IPs and have no problem taking chances on oddball titles from time to time.

On of those games is Eagle Flight.

It came out last year in the release window of the PSVR and Ubi took a real chance releasing a game like this for a completely untested and budding hardware platform.

But that bet paid off, with a decent sell through of about 130k, that is more than 10% of PSVR owners who have picked up the game. A heck of a lot better than most new IPs attach at.

The game itself is set in a fictional future Paris. There is no real timeline as to when things are set, or what caused the earth to be without humans, but there are some subtle hints for those digging.

I will get back to a theory I have about the world at then end of this review, it will be a minor spoil, so be warned.

The game itself is in my opinion one of the best uses of the PSVR to date. The tracking and movement system are phenomenal.You use you head as your only means of control, looking left and right you slowly turn in that direction, while tilting your head slightly left or right gives you a tight turn.

This system works unbelievably well and is incredibly intuitive. Within minutes of putting on the PSVR headset you will be soaring through broken buildings, across the water, through sewers and cave with pin point accuracy.

It feels very natural to use your head in this way, and your mind very easily accepts the control scheme.

The controller itself is used for small bursts of speed, to “eagle cry” which is used to shoot down other birds, a shield button and once the game is finished, the O button become a direction lock, so you can look around why flying over the city, making it much easier to find the collectibles in the game.

One downside I did find though, is that for the first time ever in VR I had a major VR hangover.

For about an hour after playing my head was swooning. If I tilted my head at all my brain kinda went a little sideways.

I think this has a lot to do with the turn scheme in the game. You mind is tricked into thinking when you tilt your head your vision is going to pan left and right, but when you come back to reality the mind does not know the difference, so it still presumes you are going to shift vision left and right.

So if you are sensitive to VR in any way, this game may not be for you. I have very very strong VR legs and literally nothing in VR bothers me, and really, it was not the playing that was the problem.

Fingers crossed this is but a hiccup and not something that is going to happen more often.

The world itself is very well crafted and has a bit of a cartoony look to it. There are no super high res textures, but everything looks just detailed enough to make you believe it.

The city is covered in years of growth, with bears, wolves, elephant and giraffes now roaming the streets.

** Spoilers coming (for Eagle Flight and Assassin’s Creed) **

It is my belief that this word and the Assassin’s Creed universe are one and the same.

We know at the end of AC3 that Desmond freed Juno onto the world, and that she is hell bent on destroying humanity.

Well I am pretty sure this is the fallout for future AC events.

In one area of the city you actually find a crashed Satellite. I scoured it the best I could for some sign of it being from Abstergo, but flying past I could not find any markings.

But with the constant talk about the Abstergo satellites that were to be launched, it is kind of a cheeky tie in.

No clue f this will play out in future AC games, but I would not be surprised if we find there are ties to the franchise in a sequel maybe.

** Spoilers Finished **

All in all Eagle Flight is one of the most enjoyable VR experiences I have had (outside of porn, hahaha) But in all seriousness, Ubi has really done an amazing job with this game, it is fun, very accessible to new comers, and offers a TON of replay-ability.

There are timed challenges for all missions, and you get a up to a 3 star rating for each mission, with over 125 stars to collect, each unlocking more difficult challenge modes.

There is 25 story missions that ultimately unlock all districts of the city.

On top of all that there is a ton of collectibles, each one has 15-35 feathers to find hidden all over the place, and fish to catch down by the water.

And as if that was not enough, there is a full on 3v3 multiplayer component, that plays out like a capture the flag type mode.

All in all one fantastic game package and a very welcome addition to VR.

A solid 8.5 / 10 and highly recommended to all PSVR owners (unless you are very VR sensitive)

So Feb 28th I picked up Horizon:Zero Dawn, and this review should in all fairness be about Horizon.

I had no intention of grabbing Zelda on release day, I was going to play through Horizon, then move on to Mass Effect in mid March.

Well with all the hype floating around for Zelda and the Switch, I got caught up. I have been a Zelda fan for over 30 years now. Played every game they made except for 2, Minish Cap and the original Gameboy version.

So it is no big surprise that the hype washed over me and I caved and bought Zelda, and put down the PS4 controller, blew the dust off my WiiU (fought the urge to get a Switch, more in a separate post) and ended up playing through close to 50 hours of Breath of the Wild.

Completed 60 shrines, the 4 dungeons, acquired 23 hearts, and never once upgraded stamina.

Now maybe I did myself a major disservice by playing Horizon first, because what it showed me is a very stark contrast of how poorly made Zelda is compared to Horizon.

Now I am not going to spend this review comparing the 2, that will be coming in a future post once I finish up Horizon, I am still about 15 hrs in and that is not close to finished.

But what  I expected out of Zelda, and what I got were two terribly different things, and frankly, I blame the media outlets that truly did not rate Zelda fairly.

We have all been starved for a large scale Zelda game for the better part of 20 years, since Ocarina of Time came out in 1998.

And I think that a lot of media outlets were blinded by the concept of Breath of the Wild, and overlooked many many flaws because of Zelda fanyboyism.

The vast majority of media gave it a 10/10. Which in my mind means perfect, would not change a single thing.

This means a good story, a great interface, amazing controls, a game that is fun, a game that is devoid of technical problems. All these things have to come together in perfect harmony to be a 10/10.

Zelda is just not that game.

It is a complete from the ground up new game. Gone are all the familiar things that has made Zelda great in the past. The next weapon or gadget waiting for you in the next dungeon, that is not here at all. Piles of dungeons with small keys and a boss key. Nope.

Hook shot? Nope, Functional boomerang? Nope. Gloves of strength? Nope. And no to everything else except for bombs and a bow. Both of which you acquire in the first 30 mins of starting the game.

You got to a few small tutorial shrines, gain your 4 abilities, and that is it, you now have every skill you need to go beat the game. And some folks have, the current speed run time is just under an hour.

What this has done though, is completely remove the sense of wonder that Zelda from days gone by had, that drive to find the next dungeon and see what cool tools you would get, all gone in the first hour.

All the shrines outside the initial few are optional, even the games paltry 4 “dungeons” are optional. Everything in this game is option, including enjoyment sadly.

Nintendo spent so much times finding out if they could make a Zelda to this scale, instead of asking if they should.

The world is vast, almost insurmountably so. You can literally climb almost every single surface in the game. See a peak in the distance, want to go see what is at the top, you can do it.

But here is the kicker, after climbing my 10th peak I came to find that there is nothing there. The world itself is terribly barren, for a game so large it would be impossible to fill. Sure you may find a pocket of enemies, but after your 20th moblin kill, it starts to get stale.

There is not a lot of variety here in terms of things you are going to kill, or see for that matter.

In order to get a game of this size to function mostly well on the WiiU and the Switch, major sacrifices had to be made. Primarily in the graphics department. I am just going to come out and say it, this game is UGLY, we are talking last gen ugly, marginally better than Skyward Sword.

That is tragic, because Nintendo sold us a pile of snake oil in 2011 when they showed us just how amazing the WiiU Zelda game could look:

Fast forward to E3 2014 and we get the first official unveiling of Breath of the Wild. It is cell shaded, but it looks amazing, crisp, alive, vast.

Then pictured right below, is what we got in the final product:

Bland, blurry, lifeless and boring. Sure it is big, but at what cost?

The pulled the wool over all our eyes, and all the fanboys tout it as being the best game ever created.

The textures in this game reek of 2010, they are muddy, they repeat on single objects, they just look awful up close.

I know graphics are not the measure of a game, but they help sell the realism and experience. If the view from the top of the mountain is breathtaking, I will climb it, instead it is just washed out haze and some peaks in the distance.

Pretty tragic to see what could have been and what is…

Next is the performance, I could have even cut Nintendo a bit of slack if the poor graphics were to bump up performance, but they are not, the game on WiiU has a pile of frame rate issue, Nintendo used a weird frame locking system to make for some fake stability.

If the frame rate drops below the 30fps mark at all, so even to 29 frame, it immediately sets it to 20 fps. So where a little hiccup may not have been to noticeable, suddenly the game is chugging horribly.

Again, could have maybe forgiven this if they Switch version was the tech target and ran smooth, but it suffers from the exact same issues when it is docked and performing at 900p (why no 1080p Ninty!!!! this is 2017 not 2010!!!!!)

So there is zero reason in my eyes to upgrade to the Switch if your motivation is Zelda. As they both perform just as badly, and look near identical.

Then we have the interface, in the beginning this game was WiiU only, and the entire game was build around the WiiU gamepad, the Shieka Slate in the game is pretty close to looking like a stone WiiU gamepad even.

The entire inventory system, the games map, and many other motion controlled systems were all going to tie into the gamepad.

Then we get the announcement for the Switch, and we come to find that all of this functionality was scrapped last year because the Switch has no touch pad to use, so they gutted the game we saw yet again, all in the name of trying to make sure that the last gen version of the game was not superior to the Switch version, because frankly, why would I be motivated to buy a Switch if the WiiU has the best Zelda version and not vice versa.

Lastly we have the combat system.

BoTW is a hard game, and I love hard games, I am an avid “Souls” fan and Nioh was my kinda of punishing fun.

So finding out Zelda was kind of a “Souls” lite got me pretty excited.

It is a hard game, but not completely by design, actually due to lack of design.

The combat is well thought out, holding the ZL button allows you to lock onto an enemy, a very important aspect of the game, as you can only block when locked, and there is also a very cool dodge mechanic, that when a perfectly timed dodge will allow you to use a flurry of attacks in slow motion to take a major chunk of hp off a boss or enemy.

The problem is though, that the lock is not well designed. Literally dozens of times I have died when the system in place failed.

I would be locked onto an enemy, and it would jump back too far, or out of line of site, this immediately breaks the lock, and the problem here is say you were pressing left at the time, to strafe around for a better place to attack.

Well now that the lock is off, you are running left, the camera auto swings behind you, and you have completely lost sight of the target.

You now have to re-position the camera, turn Link to face the enemy, then hit ZL again and hope they are close enough to re-establish a lock. Typically by now the enemy is already on top of you and has got in a hit or two.

Now if this was any other Zelda game, no biggie, i may lose 1-2 hearts, but again, BoTW is “Souls” lite, so a boss can kill in you in 1-2 hits sometimes if you do not have a pile of hearts accumulated.

This is a huge frustration, so many deaths happened beauce of this I lost count. So it is not a isolated incident.

And God forbid there is more than one enemy (like in a few of the final fights) where a mini boss will jump back, break lock, and when you hit ZL again, you get a low level minion, thus leaving you wide open for the boss attacks.

Now any of these things on their own would not be too terrible, but when added all up, it is a tragedy, to see what could have been such an amazing game reduced to simply average.

It is not a 10/10, not by a country mile.

Was it a fun game? Sure, for the most part. And all things considered, it was pretty much the best Zelda game ever made.

But when you look at it objectively, when you remove Link, Zelda and Ganon from the game, you have to ask, is this a game that anyone would play?

And the answer is no, or at the very least it would have been heavily panned by the media.

What you are left with is a game that looks like it should be on the PS3, with controls that feel like they belong in that era too. A vast world of nothingness. I guess bigger is not always better.

I think the defining moment for me was about 10 hours in, when I had scaled my last mountain to nothing, that I realized, I would much rather be playing Horizon right now.

That is pretty telling.

Likely a must have for Zelda fans, but a paltry sand box game at best. And if not for the nostalgia, this game would be a solid 5/10.

A meager 7/10 (what it seriously should have been rated by most)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So after coming down from the high that was Nioh, I decided to dive right back into some sword swinging action with For Honor.

I was looking for something short to play to kill some time before Horizon: Zero Dawn arrives next Tuesday.

What I ended up with sadly was a major disappointment and still 3 days left to kill.

I am a rather big fan of Ubisoft, there are very few titles of theirs that I don’t play, and I know a lot of gamers take issue with them and their annual AC releases, and other misses like Watchdogs 1 (which I think I am the only person who liked it)

So snagging For Honor was kind of a no brainer as I can typically find some merit in most of their stuff.

Sadly though there was little merit to find in For Honor.

Ubisoft has this weird ability to come up with an awesome concept, and then just drop the ball in the  execution. Then they come back in 5 years (ala Watchdogs 2) and knock it out of the park.

For Honor feels like one of those games.

While the concept is amazing, real sword dueling simulation, in a very new intuitive way. What you get though is buggy and laggy controls that make for a very frustrating experience.

The combat works in kind of a rock, paper, scissor fashion. Where you have 3 stances, weapon to the left, right and top, and based on where you hold your sword, you attack, or parry. Not too dissimilar to Nioh, just with much worse execution.

This is the real downfall of For Honor, the controls are meant to be fast, as opponents strike quickly with hits from all 3 angles, and block you accordingly, but what happens is that when an opponent gets on a roll, they are much faster than can be blocked. This does not mean their attacks are unblockable, but if you miss that first parry, you can be struck 4-5 times in a row, often ending in a pretty weak death if you have 75% hp or less.

One saving grace is at least the reloads are fast, but they can be frustrating in some levels. You have checkpoints and some of them can be a bit of a ways out from the boss fight you were just doing, so dying gets to be a bit tedious.

Now I tend to play all my games on the hardest setting available, which in this case is Realistic. Now while not insurmountably hard, the biggest pain with this setting is there are zero checkpoints, so if you die, you go all the way back to the start of the level.

This is pretty rough, I ended up taking the difficulty down to just hard after the 10th death on the 1st level boss, and having to redo the 15 min mission to get back to him again.

There also appears to be a huge disparity in difficulty levels.

I had some crashing issues on the last level, where I was 3/4 done and the game just crashes and sends you back to the PS4 menu, thus having to start the mission 100% over, checkpoints are not saved if you close the game.

So in getting tired of redoing things on hard, I dropped it to normal out of sheer frustration.

Well the difference here is normal proves little to no challenge at all. Where an enemy could hit you for 1/4 of your HP in hard, they now take of maybe 1/10 max. And the AI goes out the window, with most enemies just standing there waiting for you to hit them.

So if you want any semblance of challenge, definitely go Hard mode, the difficulty is a huge jump from Normal. I also recommend turning off the indicator on where an enemy is holding his sword and attacking from, this added a lot to the experience as well, forcing you to pay attention to their movements and hand position, just another way to make things a bit more fun and challenging.

The game itself looked absolutely stunning on the PS4 Pro, things are crisp and clear and there is a ton of detail in the environment.

Sound was decent, but the voice acting for some character seems phoned in, particularly the female Viking, it really sounded like her first time voice acting and really took away from the experience. It was almost comical how bad it was.

The story itself topped out at OK. Nothing to write home about, and it was pretty predictable all told. The main villain seemed a bit too cliche, acting as a female Ares, a goddess of War.

Story mode came in at 7h 32min to beat, which is pretty dang short.

I know the reasoning behind this was because they focused heavily on the multiplayer aspect, something of which I cannot comment as I avoided it 100%

I have read nothing but bad things about it, and decided to skip it entirely.

From server issues, to really lousy sportsmanship, to just plain crappy tactics, what could have been a truly outstanding multiplayer game, becomes a real lousy experience all around.

Speaking of server issues, something to note.

Do not put your console to sleep in the middle of a mission.

The single player game for some ungodly reason requires a connection to Ubisoft’s servers as well. So the moment it interrupted, you will be kicked out of your story chapter back to the main menu.

If you sleep the console, this happens automatically and you will have to start the chapter over from scratch. So try and quit once you finish a mission.

The chapters themselves are not terribly long, most are 10-15 mins each. There is a total of 18 chapters, 6 per faction, Knights, Vikings and Samurai. There are a couple though that push the 45 min to an hour mark, so just be wary you could be set back should you have to leave suddenly.

All in all a rather disappointing game, that we will hopefully see an amazing sequel to in the years to come.

But for now, I would suggest passing on For Honor, or the very least wait til it hits the bargain bin.

A thoroughly mediocre 6/10

 

 

So I picked up a title unexpectedly a couple weeks ago.

Nioh popped up on my radar briefly at the PSX show in December, the developer took the stage to talk about his title, and when asked how long it was, he casually said to do the story and some side quest, like 70+ hours, oh, and this is a “Dark Souls” like game in difficult, and plays a lot like Ninja Gaiden with a splash of Onimusha tossed in.

I was instantly sold, but due to length, I was going to pick it up later in the year.

Well reading a few stellar reviews on other site, I decided to jump in an man am I glad I did.

I just finished my play-through, which consisted of 100% of the side missions and 100% story and it clocked in a total of 68h 23m.

I didn’t manage to finish all the Dojo challenge missions, or more than 2 Twilight missions, so there is still a good 10+ hrs of content left.

On top of that, a NG+ mode unlocks post game, where the original story missions from the first 3 regions are now in uber hard mode, but have very big rewards too.

So needless to day, there is likely 80-100 hrs of content available day one, with the dev promising a new difficulty mode coming soon as well.

The game play is similar in spirit to Dark Souls or Bloodborne, you have to be good at this game to succeed, and you will die… A LOT. I am no slouch when it comes to hard mode, and I still manage to clock in over 200 deaths start to finish.

Something in the way of a surprise with Nioh is how fast paced it is, I love Dark Souls, but those games tend to be a lot slower and more calculated. Where Nioh is a very twitch based game, but requires a great amount of skill to proceed.

As the game progresses you will get better, not stronger. While armor and weapons increase your damage, the monsters you fight are on the same sliding scale, so things you fought as  mid level bosses in stage 1, will be run of the mill enemies by the end of the game.

As levels progress the challenge not only revolves around the enemies you fight, but the environment as well. Take a large Armita Fiend in an open area and you can usually dodge your way to success, but put him in a cramped hallway and the game changes completely.

This is the beauty of Nioh, it is ever changing and evolving from start to finish, with not a single of the games 20+ story missions having the same level. And every single level offering a very unique experience or location. From a flotilla like village with water graves and broken ships everywhere, to mansions in Kyoto or the bloodied battlefield with hundreds of soldiers fighting in the background.

Variety is something  I did not expect from Nioh but was thrilled to find it. There is no fetch quests, no doubling back to cheaply fill out a level, this game is large and very well designed.

The side quest offer smaller snips of the larger levels, and oft explore some areas you never saw in the main mission, That mansion you explored may have a back garden you could not reach, in a side mission you may begin in the house proper, but go out a door that was previously locked. So even most of the side mission feel substantial.

The leveling system is also akin to the “Souls” games, in the fact that you gain experience (Armita) by killing enemies or searching bodies and Soul Stones.

If you are bested in battle, your guardian spirit lays in wait for you to return and collect it and the souls you dropped, but die again, and you will lose all you have collected forever.

This adds a real challenge to every confrontation, you can cash in your souls at a shrine strewn about the levels, and touching one gives you a place to respawn, but the cost is that all enemies you have killed thus far will respawn as well.

So the game is a constant balance of should I spent my souls and level up, or chance making it to the next Shrine and maybe losing everything I have done thus far.

This really forces you to play the game like intended, cautiously and with skill, not just brute force, because that is the road to dying guaranteed.

The game itself is split into 6 main regions (and a couple bonus ones I will not go into) as well as random Twilight Missions.

The Twilight missions are like Nioh on steroids, levels have about 2x-3x the enemies of regular level, and the creatures here are HARD, double or more the HP and strength. You will die here, and die often.

There are 9 in total, and only 2 are ever available at one time, they reset to a different level every day at 11pm est I believe.

This makes getting them for the trophy a bit of a pain, as the appear and change randomly, you may have to wait days or even week to see all of them come up.

But in all fairness, you will be playing this game for likely weeks as it is, so they should all appear in that time frame.

Visuals and sound is top notch in Nioh as well, with lots of small details that really sell the environments, small fires burning, birds picking corpses clean, everything is meticulously designed.

Audio is top notch too, with lots of subtle sounds giving you an idea of where enemies are located and hiding.

There is also a heavy crafting component to the game in the way of a blacksmith shop. Where items, armor and weapons can all be crafted, merged to make better stats, de-synthed for materials, and created anew.

The loots system is not so dissimilar from Destiny or Diablo, with random loot drops from chests. monsters and the like.

All and all Nioh scratches a real itch that is missing, good Ninja / Samurai games, since the departure of Ninja Gaiden and Onimusha years ago, it is refreshing to see Nioh come along and completely fill that niche and take it to the next level.

Here’s to hoping it is the first in many sequels, because even after 68hrs I am looking forward to more!

A superb game, and a complete 10/10.

 

 

When the first Titan Fall dropped back in 2014 it had a luke warm reception. It was an XB1 exclusive which boded well for Microsoft, but not so good for console fans. It was a straight online multi-player only affair, and offered no real story mode to enjoy.

XB1 was not selling too well back then (and still is not compared to PS4) so it is no big shocker that EA decided the buckets of money they got to make it exclusive, were just not worth keeping up, how could you exclude a console with 54 million players.

So TF made the jump to PS4 this year and it is a real treat. Unlike it’s multi-player only predecessor, Titan Fall 2 has added a very well designed story mode. Going down as one of the most enjoyable FPS games I have played in a long time.

They have taken what many consider a bit of a stale gerne and catapult it into the future with some truly unique game play design and level set up.

There are 3 primary jaw dropping levels in the game.

First and foremost is a “Portal” like level that is continually morphing and changing as you ride a conveyor belt that is seemingly assembling a set of office buildings. All the while being coaxed onward by an AI. This comes to a head in a horde mode type village with all the assembled buildings.

Second is an absolutely stunning time travel level, now I am no big fan of time travel in games, as it usually leads to massive plot hole and is often just a gimmick. But time travel in Titan Fall 2 was in place for a reason, it served to move the plot forward, and had a real purpose.

It also allowed for some amazing level design. For instance, in one sequence you have to wall run down a hall in the present, but it is all on fire, so you begin running, hit L1 to instantly morph the environment to the past, run a bit farther, warp back to the future now that you have passed the flames, and keep on running.

It is hard to explain how cool this is on paper, but it works incredibly well. The switching is almost instant via a wrist based travel device, and it is so seamless it is stunning.

Enemy encounters in this area is very well thought out too, with you dropping into a room full of guards in the past, fire a few shots, then pop back to present, reposition and go back to the past. This gets real tricky when you have enemies in the same space, both past and present.

The last innovation came from one of the later levels, where you are jumping from airship to airship, running along exterior hulls, and fighting off waves of enemies. The scale of the battle here was immense but your presence felt valuable. Like you were turning the tide on the battle.

All throughout Titan Fall 2 you really feel powerful, you are just an average Joe, but you feel like superman given the fast pace and the design. Flipping weapons is quick, reloading feels right, and wall running becomes a thing of beauty once mastered.

All told the campaign took me about 8-10 hours to run on Master difficulty, not for the novice, at least not to start, as this difficulty is very punishing, where a mere 2 or 3 hits in quick succession will kill you.

The story at times can get a little side tracked, but all in all it was a very enjoyable narrative. Wrapping up nicely, and even offering a secret ending if you finish on Hard or Master.

I am not much of a fan of online multi-player, I used to be back in my 20’s and early 30’s, but now that I have limited time and rather enjoy playing through a story than mindless online combat, I tend to avoid the online game play.

But I did take TF2 for a few rounds of MP play on various maps.

First match I checked out I got slaughtered. Ended with about 12 deaths and had a big ole zero for kills, now I am no slouch when it comes to playing online, I finish all my games on the hardest difficulty for a reason, I like the challenge and normal and traditional hard modes are a cake walk.

So this was a bit of a shocker. Was the online community that good? The answer was no, once I got the hang of the levels a scant 3 or 4 levels later, I was coming it on #2 or #3 on the leader board, so a rocky start, but if you play the core story mode, you have all you need to go online and kick some ass.

Leveling up online is pretty fast, in the few hours I played I quickly rose to over level 10. Much like CoD, you unlock gear and skins, weapons and upgrades along the way. So in no time I had a much better layout and was feeling pretty at home online.

But like I said, I do prefer story mode in games, so I had to pull myself away and move on to other games. But there is no shortage of online content to keep you going for months. With 5 or 6 different game mode, from capturing and holding hard points, to traditional death match, to a straight up insane all Titan mode, there is plenty to keep you coming back for more.

All in all Titan Fall 2 was one of the best shooter I played in years, and most definitely the most fun I have had in a FPS in a long time.

Highly recommended, a solid 9 out of 10.