PRO EVOLUTION SOCCER 2016 PC Review

In most sports games, instant replays are made to be skipped. In PES 2016, however, you’ll savour every crunching challenge, every kick, flick and fumble. Watching them back in super slow-mo is a genuinely disruptive compulsion, but then even the most minor moments in PES 2016 impress.

After years in flux, unsure whether to pursue a slick arcade experience or weigh it down with lengthy animations, PES Productions finally finds the answer: do both. There are three times as many animations here but they're sped up and cut down so the window of time in which you cede control is drastically reduced. As a result, matches consistently throw up surprises, but not at the expenses of reducing your feeling of involvement in the action.

After many hours of play I'm still seeing new moves, whether it’s Pogba improvising to volley an awkward hip-high ball or Lahm riding a challenge before seamlessly repositioning his feet and blasting it wide like a dummkopf. So numerous and natural are these bespoke motions, all used in the right time and the right context, they almost seem like the player's organic reactions rather than the computer picking from a bank of appropriate actions.

That said, it can feel almost too mechanical at times, particularly shooting. For some reason I hit the crossbar seven times in the same match—seven!—suggesting there’s a limited number of outcomes. While player collisions feel meaty, there’s no compelling feedback on shots. They just seem to travel stoically through space like spherical incarnations of the Silver Surfer.

PES doesn't enforce or promote a particular playstyle, though. You can play this like the PES games of old, kicking the computer down to easy and giving yourself a platform to express yourself with ridiculous runs, outrageous skill moves, and 70% possession, or you can notch the difficulty up and answer its fearsome but not unfair challenge. A stream of thrilling moments make the former consistently exciting, and incredible tactical depth makes the latter more rewarding.

Strategy offers extra dimension, and on higher difficulties a keen managerial mind is equally important as players’ physicality. During one tense encounter against FC Bayern I command Man United’s Rojo to mark danger man Lewandowski order formally rampaging midfielders Depay and Fellaini to stay back, and make my entire team keep a disciplined shape to contain the play. Instructions are simple to use and immediately noticeable.

Poor portsmanship

Where PES 2016 falls down, however, is this port’s surprisingly poor quality. It practically runs in slow motion (I actually had to whack the game speed on ‘fast’ just to bring it up to standard), and textures are hideous. Football boots look like blurred lumps of clay, logos across formally crisp kits are stretched and ugly, and the pitchside police basically waltzed in from a Playmobil set. Konami's other Fox Engine game, The Phantom Pain, performs excellently on PC, and even the last PES was solid, so why this looks and runs like a PS3/360 game is a mystery. It seems Konami can’t wait to ditch videogames and storm the pachinko market.

Still, in this curious mix of last-gen and new-gen, there is detail to be found. Sweat runs, kits muddy, players grimace during jostles, and there are some great contextual goal celebrations. At one point I run over to the advertising hoarding and my player jumps on it, arms pumping. License-wise the UEFA Champions League remains a coup, but the omission of most of the Bundesliga, and a lack of official Premier League teams aside from Manchester United, cheapens the experience. You can, however, import edited strips, logos and team files.

The lack of authenticity continues to hurt the Master League career mode. Select Chelsea, for instance, and you’ll manage a team called London FC who play out of a generic toilet bowl stadium. Diego Costa just doesn't look right in canary yellow. MyClub makes more sense by focusing on the fundamentals of squad building. Unlike in FIFA Ultimate Team, where players form chemistry with each other based on nationalities, here it’s how well they gel with the manager’s style, and while hunting for superstars can start to cost actual money, there are cheaper routes to building your dream team, whether utilising training or getting lucky with a scout. There’s a strong sense of ownership over your developing squad as you lead them into battle offline and on.

On consoles, PES 2016 successfully captures football’s complexities in the fastest, freshest and most responsive entry in years. On PC? It looks dated and runs slower. It’s still PES Productions’ best effort in some time, but the poor port is a bitter letdown.

WORLD OF WARSHIPS PC Review

World of Tanks is a global phenomenon, and its success has become a new genre of sorts: the World War 2 vehicle shooter. World of Warships, the newest entry in the series after 2013’s World of Warplanes, is finally out of drydock and officially launched. Its mix of ponderous warships and huge guns—the biggest guns ever fired in anger by mankind—is beautiful, polished, and a joy to play. Warships is the most thoughtful Wargaming game so far, but its economy continues Wargaming’s pattern of expensive, exploitative freemium prices.

Across the archipelagos of the South Pacific and the glacier fields of Alaska, the vessels of World of Warships duke it out. Unlike the dense urban landscapes in World of Tanks, there’s very little to hide behind. Unlike dogfighting aircraft in World of Warplanes, battleships are slow and vulnerable. Without the freedom to escape, turn, or hide, Warships places even greater emphasis on group tactics and positioning than its land and air-based siblings.

Full steam ahead

Ships are controlled from an overhead view, as though the captain was hovering twenty feet over the central tower. Wargaming continues to be a dab hand at making controls that turn a complicated war machine into an accessible, keyboard-friendly vehicle. The rudder and throttle controls are designed to be set and forgotten, as though a subordinate had an order yelled at them while the captain worried about other things.

Planning ahead is key for Warships. Especially in larger boats, bringing guns around to face an enemy takes a minute. Knowing that enemies will most likely come from the East, and planning accordingly, gives captains time to get pointed in the right direction with the explodey-parts facing the bad guys. This same slowness also makes flanking especially effective in Warships: sneaking around an island to come up behind a ship gives the crafty tactician a solid 30 seconds of free punches while the victim’s cannons rotate around to counter.

I had one particularly tense battle at the helm of the USS Montana, a truly monstrous battleship with guns as big around as my car tires. An enemy cruiser flanked our lead position and started making trouble, so I rotated my twelve barrels of kickass and started aiming down the gunner sights. In my narrow field of view, he sailed straight toward me. As the distance closed I measured his range on tiny hashmarks, leading the target from ten kilometers away. His profile was tiny and constantly shifting. Though it pained me, I kept taking single shots instead of unleashing my entire battery at once, trying to get my aim just right. Each time, my shot fell just short or just off to the side of his vulnerable hull.

Then, he made a mistake. To better engage me, he turned his fat broadside my way and stopped closing the distance. With a huge, wide target sitting at a set range, I took one more targeting shot. When it landed smack amidships, I enjoyed an evil smile and fired all four batteries at once. Twelve 16-inch shells, each weighing about three tons, arced across the sky and dropped on his head like the fist of an angry god, sinking his ship in one volley. If this had been Counter-Strike, I would have just landed a head-shot with the AWP. I got the same sense of satisfaction, even if it did take about five minutes to fully play out. 

There’s an art to angles in Warships, and it tickles the tiny, forgotten part of my brain that experiences math as a form of pleasure. (I’ve tried to subdue that part of my brain with booze, but alas, it remains.) With guns mounted all down the body of a ship, facing broadside to an enemy is the best way to unload on some poor sucker. Unfortunately, going broadside also shows the enemy team a huge target to shoot at. There’s a sweet spot at around 30 degrees that brings all guns onto a target while minimizing exposure. Instead of doing a barrel roll or hiding behind a bombed-out church, this mental geometry is how captains stay safe on the oceans. And because boats can't pivot instantaneously, it takes pleasant intuition to pull off.

I’ve mentioned it in passing already, but Warships looks incredibly good. Even as pretty as it is, it comes packed with graphics options that should tone down enough for less powerful rigs to run it. It includes support for multiple monitors and a variety of native resolutions. “Sky and Clouds Quality” and “Sea Rendering Quality” would sound like esoteric settings for minutia in any other game, but in Warships half of what the game renders is water or sky. On my GTX 970, I had no problem getting a solid 60 frames per second on the highest quality settings.

There’s a huge variety of gadgets and weapons to play with, from scout planes to emergency repair crews. Each of Warships’ four ship types (destroyer, cruiser, carrier, and battleship) drive differently. Some are slower, more powerful, or pack smoke screens and deadly torpedo spreads.

The most unique is the aircraft carrier, which carries no ship-to-ship guns at all. Carriers are commanded from an overhead view as the flight deck manager, ordering flights of torpedo boats to attack enemy battleships or sending fighters to intercept enemy bombers. Playing a carrier feels like a slow-moving RTS has been welded onto the side of a different game, and I don’t think the native view works very well. Looking down on the carrier with a zoomed-out camera leaves out all the information I need to make decisions, so my carrier experience was spent almost entirely inside the tactical map screen. To break up the monotony, I enjoyed watching from the attacking warplanes’ perspective, but it's mostly a passive experience. Even so, after a few hours of pounding distant cruisers with artillery, dispatching torpedo sneak attacks was refreshingly new.

Stock the larders

All four types of ship also come in multiple tiers representing the advances technology brought to these war machines. The carrier is a good example: the lowest tier is a converted coal tanker, the USS Langley, with a deck covered in canvas-winged bi-planes. Carriers evolve up through the USS Lexington to the USS Midway, a late-War behemoth.

There’s no denying that high-end vessels are crazy fun to play. As the Japanese giantYamato, I terrorized the local battlefield, parking myself in shallows with a clear line of sight and raining explosive hell down on half the server. As the Midway, I hid behind a volcanic island just meters from the fighting, sending fighters and bombers overland and back again, picking the enemy apart. The trouble is that most players will never see these late game ships. World of Warships is Wargaming’s most expensive, grind-heavy meta-economy yet.

These ships are expensive, and playing at the highest tier is going to devour time and money. In order to research and then buy all of the ships required to play as the Midway—and then the Midway herself—I’d need to spend about $177 total. Grinding the XP (which isn’t purchasable) that you need to unlock the Midway would likely earn a fair chunk of in-game currency, but not enough, so that's more grinding to do if you want to avoid paying. Meanwhile, you also need to use in-game currency to repair ships and reload guns.

The USS Langley’s quaint biplanes are slow and weak, but their torpedo attack isn’t messing around.

Researching all of the American carrier branch costs over 700,000 XP, which I estimate would take me between 1,500 and 3,000 games—a truly interminable grind. Earning XP and in-game currency would be faster with a Premium account, which can be had for $90 per year or $11 a month. Premium ships like the $38 USS Atlanta can be bought at any time without spending time on XP.

It’s laudable, I guess, that unskilled players with cash to spare can’t just outright purchase the best ships in the game (they can buy pretty good ones, but not the best). The ship tiers themselves function as a type of matchmaking filter as well, so people in the biggest ships are going to find themselves against the best players around. To be fair, you do get a lot of ships fairly quickly. Most players will have no problem unlocking the first four tiers of ships, which gives access to all four types of ship and a lot of options. But after that tier, prices go up exponentially. It's unfortunate that so much of this game’s wonderful art, the gleaming steel decks and rusting hull panels and black-bored guns, won’t be seen except by a narrow sliver of die-hard fans.

For the rest of us, playing Warships for free at the lowest tiers offer a great tactical puzzle and an unusual take on the online team deathmatch. Finally sinking a troublesome battleship with a well-placed volley or torpedoing a carrier from behind is incredibly rewarding. Gorgeous lighting and water effects gently reflect infernos of burning steel. It’s a game that I want to come back to again and again. The lowest tier ships are fun, and that’s good—most players will probably only see the first three or four levels. With so much amazing art and incredible history in the biggest ships, though, I just wish that more of us could see everything Warships has to offer without an aggressive, expensive grind.

FIFA 16 Pc Review

Reviewing FIFA 16 for PC is a tricky proposition. Sure, EA Canada has yet again laid out an all encompassing soccer smörgåsbord that boasts immaculate presentation and dizzying production values. Yet it's hard to fight off the feeling this season's effort feels more like a glorified DLC pack, rather than the full priced annual update you'd hope for.

No Touch Dribbling. Dynamic Crossing. Clinical Finishing. Confidence In Defending. Interception Intelligence. Good lord does EA love a capitalised buzz phrase. Unfortunately, most of this year's supposedly new on-pitch features translate into diddly squat when you're looking for tangible, easily felt improvements over FIFA 15.

Nearly everything that was right and wrong on the field last year remains in FIFA 16. That means slightly floaty shooting, fiddly tackling, lots of wing play and many an unspectacular tap-in dribbling over the line. Of course, it also means an incredibly solid passing game, with emphasis on satisfying buildup play and ferociously whipped in crosses. In other words, EA's chart-topping juggernaut still plays a cracking game of football... for the most part.

What little that has changed revolves around subtly tinkered with passing on the ground. Previously, the FIFA community would complain that zipping the ball about a packed midfield was like a giant game of human pinball being played out between 22 millionaires. Now, though, stroking the ball even 10 yards between midfielders can feel downright glacial, with passes demonstrably slower than they were last year.

It's not necessarily a bad thing—it certainly gives FIFA 16 a more realistic tempo—but given the fact many matches against the CPU are already unspectacular, low-scoring affairs, it leaves you with an experience that feels diligent, thoughtful, yet ultimately a little—whisper it—boring. 

FIFA 16 may occasionally give into the Dull Side of the Force, but at least it's progressive in other areas. At long last women are represented in a football game. Considering the impact last year's terrific Women's World Cup had on broadening the appeal of the sport, this is a welcomingly inclusive move on EA's part.

The 12 national women's sides offered might be a little stingy in number, but it’s a start and at least an effort has been made to ensure their matches feel different from the men's game. The action is slower and more deliberate. Slightly more languid turning circles mean dribbling in tight spaces is difficult, encouraging a more robust style of passing. I found the altered pace refreshing.

Whether playing as men or women, FIFA's life-swallowing online offering is stronger than ever. EA's streamlined matchmaking is so confident and reliable at this point, instantly hopping into lag-free multiplayer matches is something you instantly take for granted. And of course, FIFA Ultimate Team (the absurdly addictive card-collecting mode) is back and remains the crowning jewel. This time, the headline addition is FUT Draft; a set of one-off tournaments that reward you for putting together winning streaks. The bigger the run of victories, the better the prizes—I bagged three Premium Gold Packs for a three-match win streak, one of which gave me Messi and Aguero as loan players.

This being 2015, these juicy card prizes don't come for free. You have to cough up 15,000 FUT coins or 300 FIFA points to enter a Draft tournament—the latter costing roughly £1/$1 of real money per 100 points. While you can still play the rest of FUT for free and have a grand old time winning games as you build up the Chemistry rating of your team by tweaking your squad and formation, EA's love of micro-transactions is a reminder that FIFA 16 isn't exactly great value for money. At £50/$60 for the standard edition, the lack of significant on-field improvements grates.

Make no mistake: this is still an exhaustive package. There are enough licensed teams, leagues and spot-on player likenesses here to, well, launch your own brown-envelope-free rival governing body. And, unlike PES 16's pitiful PC showing, FIFA 16 is a cracking port that runs well on a variety of rigs—I played on a (admittedly monstrous) 980 TI, and the subsequent 4K/unfaltering 60fps action was totally sumptuous.

Technical triumph aside, there's no denying EA's soccer goliath is resting on its considerable laurels. Between FIFA 09-12, each new entry introduced bold new revisions—think 360-Degree Dribbling and Tactical Defending—which had a transformative effect on the actual football year after year. Yet since moving to the Ignite engine, the series has effectively stood still. Is FIFA 16 still the best football sim you can buy on PC? Absolutely. Has it also utterly stagnated over the last two years? You can bet Diego Costa's hollowed out soul it has.

ZOMBI

If you close your eyes and imagine what a PC port of a Ubisoft Wii U game from 2012 is like, I suspect you'll hit pretty close to the mark. Zombi looks a bit dated, the controls are a tad cumbersome, there are extremely limited video and sound options, and there are a number of bugs and broken features. It's a damn shame, too, because buried under the rubble of this lackluster port is a spooky, startling, challenging, and often highly enjoyable survival horror game.

Zombi takes place in an undead-infested London, and after stumbling into the safehouse of a man who calls himself Prepper you begin undertaking various missions for him, and later, perform tasks for other characters with their own agendas. You'll visit a number of locations during these linear missions, including a zombie-infested Buckingham Palace, and as you reach these areas they become open-world, meaning you can revisit them later. With only a small backpack to carry what you find, you'll constantly have to make tough choices about what scavenged weapons and supplies to take or leave behind as your progress through the story missions.

Zombified Londoners are no joke. While a lone zombie isn't much of a threat, putting it down is still hard work. Just as smashing a head open with a cricket bat in real life isn't easy (I imagine, anyway), so it is in Zombi, and I found myself mentally grunting as much as my character vocally grunted, as we smashed and smashed and smashed until that zombie head finally burst. When you're swarmed by several zeds it can be a harrowing, almost exhausting experience. If a zombie lands a swipe, kiss a big chunk of your health goodbye, and if they get their teeth on you, you're finished. It often takes several shots from pistols, rifles, and crossbows to put down a shambler, even with headshots, and ammo is precious and needs to saved for the most dire of circumstances. This results in a lot of cautious exploration, tons of tension, bouts of panic, and careful planning, all of which is essential for an effective survival horror.

Robbing zombie

I'm gonna need that backpack, zombified-me from a few minutes ago.

A wonderful aspect of Zombi is that when you die, you begin back at the safehouse playing as a different survivor, but the character who just died is still out in the world along with your collected weapons and supplies. Head there with your new character and you'll find your old body, shambling around zombified, and get to beat its brains in and take back your loot. (If you die before you can recover your gear, though, it's gone forever.) The different survivors you play don't speak but you do absorb a little of their personalities: some gasp in horror or panic as they split open heads, some roar with rage, and one—my favorite—occasionally erupts in nervous, horrified laughter while pummeling zombies into pulp. It's a nice little touch to make you feel as if you really are playing a different person every time you lose someone.

Final Fantasy 15 Will Get Simultaneous Worldwide Release

Final Fantasy XV was a hot topic during Gamescom last week, when director Hajime Tabata revealed a handful of new details, including the news that the game is on track to be released before 2017, implying that it will be released sometime in 2016.

When asked about the amount of work that's been accomplished over the last year--when it was first revealed that Tabata was taking over the project that was originally helmed by Kingdom Hearts III director, Tetsuya Nomura--Tabata revealed that Final Fantasy XV will be the first main Final Fantasy game to be released simultaneously across all regions.

"This may be something that we are little bit embarrassed to talk about, but really, this is the first time that we've done a packaged, standalone Final Fantasy game with a simultaneous global launch, so we didn't have the setup to deal with that, really. The first thing we had to do was rearrange our internal structure to create something that could do that. That was the first important work on the project."

The last "main" Final Fantasy game, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, was released in Japan on Nov. 21, 2013. It took three more months for the game to reach other regions, in February 2014.

A full transcription of our interview with Tabata will be live later this week, with more new info on the upcoming RPG that was announced over nine years ago, at E3 2006.

Lego Worlds review (Early Access) Review

NEED TO KNOW

What is it? An attempt to bring the iconic Danish blocks into a virtual 3D sandbox.
Influenced by Minecraft
Reviewed on Intel Core i5-2320 CPU, 8GB RAM, AMD Radeon HD6670
Alternatively Minecraft, Terraria, Starbound, Don’t Starve
Price £11.99 / $14.99
Release TBC 2016
Publisher Warner Bros.
Developer TT Games
Link Official site
Multiplayer None currently, but planned

Alpha and Early Access reviews offer our preliminary verdicts on in-development games. We may follow up this unscored review with a final, scored review in the future. Read our full review policy for details.

It had to happen eventually. The number of times that the words ‘Minecraft’ and ‘Lego’ have appeared in the same sentence over the last decade would likely rival salt and pepper in the global psyche as Most Immediately Obvious Pairing. But while this block-based sandbox takes the familiar Danish toy and rebuilds the seeded worlds of Mojang’s much aped forerunner, there’s much it does differently. There was no cobblestone farming necessary to get me going for a start. Within minutes of playing I’d built a western saloon, ridden a polar bear across a snow-capped mountain range and discovered a race of cavemen parading around on a beach waiting for me to pilfer their minifigure forms.

ADVERTISING

Despite being very clearly in its infancy—the full version is not expected to launch until at least 2016—Lego Worlds feels very capable when giving you excuses to get out and explore. There are constant surprises lying in wait, and each one you discover has its blueprints sucked up into the top left menu bars ready for your to rebuild anew at any time at the cost of the game’s familiar stud currency. You can still bash trees and bushes or knock apart your surroundings. There are even a few skeletons that come out at night to give you some hassle. But when it comes to getting out there and finding stuff, Lego Worlds feels much more immediate than Minecraft.

Take the game’s version of the humble bow. As you press and hold the action key to activate it you can then wave your mouse cursor over various destructible objects in the world, before releasing and seeing your minifigure avatar unleash a barrage of quick fire volleys. This is not about timing, or accuracy, but more about seeing those delicious studs erupt from stuff and then having them gravitate towards you before blinging satisfyingly into your wallet.

Likewise, you don't need to grind, nor to craft suitable saddles or whatnot to be able to leap aboard a horse. I clambered up on the first creature I found (a wolf puppy) and was zipping off to discover a new biome over the hills and far away. Pretty much everything with feet or wheels is ridable.

This push outwards, to get off your plastic rear end and explore, is ushered along by some joyous animation. Your minifigure hero, who’s also customisable with the bits and pieces you discover in the world, windmills constantly, like he simply cannot wait to be just three feet further ahead than he’s standing. The enthusiasm on display is infectious.

Sadly, the fact that you’re seeing this world from a third-person perspective is as conducive to crafting in a 3D space as having your eyes replaced with those of a dog. It’s wonky, imprecise and you’re as likely to break the thing you're building with inaccurate brick placement as you are to walk away satisfied with a job well done. Without a first person view and a helpful voxel grid to aid you, building is an exercise in extreme patience. That there are so many pre-built props for you to discover and break out as and when you feel like altering your surroundings is telling. The problem is, watching a little Lego fellow spew bricks out of a funny looking gun and into the form of a wooden cabin is nowhere near as fun nor as rewarding as laying down the brain blueprints yourself and having at it might have been.

Minecraft’s innate brilliance is in its simplicity. Anyone with half an interest can bash a tree in for the very first time and then hours later find themselves standing in the centre of a mountainside skull fort they’ve just constructed. The uniformity of the blocks is the key. With every conceivable shape and size of Lego block under the sun at hand here it’s a task to know where to start, or what you might end up with.

I have cherished memories of upending buckets of Lego bricks onto my living room carpet as a kid, then letting my brain take me in impossible directions as I’d put them all together in fantastical ways. Playing Lego Worlds feels like having that bucket tipped out, but only allowing me to interact with the resulting pile with a solitary finger.

It’s hard to recommend Lego Worlds right now as more than a curiosity for those with a predisposition for all things Danish, plastic and covered in studs. For anyone else it’ll likely pack a couple of hours of rampant exploration which peters out quickly due to the lack of meaningful stuff to do with the said bricks you accrue.

Verdict Exploration feels immediately rewarding, but fiddly building systems irk.

GALACTIC CIVILIZATIONS 3 Review

There’s often a fine line between revolution and evolution, and which side is ‘right’ varies dramatically from game to game. Sometimes we want the next best thing. Sometimes we want a thing we like, simply done better. That’s what GalCiv 3 offers—not so much picking up where the last game off as returning to its template with a stern expression, some better technology, and a few years of lessons well learned.

Stardock’s series is pretty much unique in the 4X genre—a space conquest game that sits alongside Master of Orion instead of simply in its shadow. It’s not just a game of rules and strategy, but of quirky charm—witty descriptions to take the harsh edge off the technologies, an attempt to make the aliens you encounter feel like they have personalities instead of simply being a rendered face on some stats, and enough wrapping to feel like there are could actually be people/aliens somewhere behind your comma-filled population figures.

The biggest two differences between this version and the last, aside from a graphical polish, is that GalCiv 3 now supports multiplayer and demands 64-bit. The former speaks for itself. After years when the characters themselves would occasionally mock the idea, you can now have multiple players fighting over a galaxy. The 64-bit side of things is more interesting, though for the future rather than now. Much like a Civilization game, GalCiv is intended to have a long life. For the moment, it allows for crazy things like having a map with a hundred empires on it (though good luck actually doing that, never mind playing the result). It does however mean that future expansions, and player mods, have far more room to breathe than they once did, which bodes well. From another company, it would be hard to take that on the nod. Stardock though has proven form in this regard, both in improving its good games, and fixing up the originally dreadful Elemental.

Back into space

Either way though, the core game is extremely well-made. It’s not simply a question of rules and options but the general feel that made the series what it is, the biggest being that (with a combination of tech and wrapping, much like Alpha Centauri) playing against the AI has the feel of being up against opponents rather than simply algorithms that happen to have a face on top. Where so many 4X games, particularly space ones, are almost willfully cold, there’s a warmth to GalCiv that’s key to the fun of casual to at least mid-tier play.

Like past games, it does have a few irritations that only really strike mid-way through, such as finding out what’s actually wrong with a planet that looks like it should be performing far better, and otherwise tracking down some numbers in a pinch. By the time you’ve gone from a few systems to a bursting empire, there’s enough of them splashing around to drown in. Individual sections are very well laid out, with the Tech Tree especially making it easy to see what leads to what and what the benefits are, but the lack of a good centralised in-game Civpedia type resource does make looking things up harder than it should be.

The biggest omission from the last game—for now—is that political side has been stripped down. No elections, no governments, no spying. They’re due to return in a later expansion. The sting of that is helped by a few new arrivals though, such as ideologies. Where past games had a Good/Evil system, the civilisations this time are judged as Malevolent, Pragmatic, and Beneficial, with moral decisions providing points in each that can be cashed in for special perks. These range from basics, like a free colony ship or a top-quality planet, to galaxy-affecting boosts like any race who attacks your homeworld being automatically declared war on by everyone but their outright allies, and every planet or starbase within your Influence range joining your empire. Nobody ever said you can’t be both Benevolent and bastardly sneaky at the same time! Other new additions include pirate bases that become more of a problem the longer they’re left alone, a shift to space based ship construction, and new environmental dangers to deal with while exploring the map.

GalCiv 3 is easily the best recent 4X of this scale.

GalCiv is far more focused on the strategy side of conquest than the tactics of individual ship encounters. You don’t get any direct control over your ships at all, though you can watch the very pretty laser-beams and explosions from assorted cinematic angles if you choose. Instead, ships are given classes based on their load-out. A basic hull might be a Guardian, but slap life-support on it and it becomes a Support. Its role determines what it does and who it goes after in combat. How it actually looks though is almost entirely up to you. The design panel includes a huge selection of aesthetic items that can be scaled, moved, stuck onto hardpoints and even given some basic animation, all ‘free’. Ships can also be shared, with Steam Workshop support coming.

Whether new to the series or returning though, GalCiv 3 is easily the best recent 4X of this scale— the whole galaxy as campaign and sandbox. It’s hardly the most dramatic upgrade a game has ever had, but it’s both a more than solid update in the here and now and a great base for expansions and mods for the next few years.

R.B.I. BASEBALL 2015 Review

Current sports games have a lot fancy features, many of which I simply don't need. Oh, you've recorded dozens of hours of announcer voiceovers? I'll turn them off almost immediately. You've meticulously mo-capped every player's unique movements when they step out of the box to futz with their batting gloves? I'm going to hammer whatever button skips it. I just want to play the game.

While I don't need all those bells and whistles, it's still nice to have, perhaps, one or two whistles? Maybe at least a single bell? R.B.I. Baseball 2015 is stripped down to what is essentially an arcade game, which is great if you want to dispense with the flash and just play ball. It's so basic, though, it completely lacks personality, and isn't much fun.

Controls are straightforward to the point of being a little disappointing. You can choose from a 'normal' pitch (whatever that is), a fast pitch, or the most erratic knuckleball you've ever seen. You can steer the pitch left or right mid-flight to approximate curves and screwgies, but there's no pitch selection menu to pick a circle change or split-finger fastball or anything like that. While batting you can swing high or low, which will result in a grounder or fly ball if you connect, or hunch over for an aimless bunt. It's a bit awkward on a keyboard (you can't use the mouse at all, even on the main menu), and you can't change the mapping, so it's best played with a controller.

Who sent the runner from third? Oh right, it was me.

As far as fielding and baserunning, there's no option to dive for a catch or to slide for a base, though the AI will sometimes do it. Sometimes. I've had fielders chasing down fly balls only to watch them drop at their feet because they didn't dive when they should have.

I appreciate the arcade-like simplicity, and the ability to speed through games without much (or any) ado. There's no time wasted with silly business like the catcher throwing the ball back to the pitcher (he simply doesn't), and after a strikeout the batter vanishes and is replaced by the next as if by arcane magic. Despite the fact you can race through an inning in a few minutes and an entire game in a half-hour, games still seem to drag because, frankly, R.B.I. Baseball 2015 just isn't much fun.

The game has zero personality. Player models are identical, with only differences in skin tone and the developer having selected 0 or 1 in the Beard Value column of some hidden database. You can adjust your lineup and move players around on your own team, but can't trade with other teams, though at least you can download up-to-date rosters to reflect the current season. If you're taking a team through a season, there's no option to simulate a particular game even though the rest of the league presumably has their own games simulated. You can't create your own player, either, and shepherd them through the big leagues, though I'm not sure what the point would be anyway if they looked exactly like everyone else.

All players are super skinny. Is this R.B.I. Baseball 1973?

What little animation there is isn't great. When players throw the ball it appears to hang in front of them for a moment before rocketing away, and while catching it sometimes appears behind them before snapping back into their glove. The most emotion I've seen a batter express is by putting his hands on his hips after a called strike, and even delivering a fastball into someone's ribs isn't fun to watch since they instantly teleport to their base and are replaced with a fresh doppelganger.

What's more, every single game I've played has been tarnished by one bug or another. An out being called despite an infielder never making a tag or stepping on a base. A batter stopping short of first base during a double play and allowing himself to be put out by a late throw. A fielder grabbing a ball in the outfield, then running face-first into the wall and sticking there, legs pumping in place, while the runners round the bases and score. I'm hit by AI pitches so regularly, sometimes several in the same inning, it's not a bad strategy to simply crowd the plate and get plunked until the runs start scoring.

I've tried on several occasions to find multiplayer opponents, but no one has ever picked up on the other end, so I can't judge how well the game plays online. As for single-player, I was left with the feeling it should have been called R.B.I. Baseball 2017 and put into Early Access for a couple years.

THE WITCHER 3: WILD HUNT Review

A powerful daughter figure needs saving from an entourage of black-draped specter horsemen. Dangerous supernatural powers are at risk of falling into their malevolent hands, and I’m meant to stop that catastrophe. There’s an overwhelming sense of urgency, but there I am, basically tying off sacks for peasants.

It happened like this: early in The Witcher 3 I was tasked with finding a witch. The witch lived in a nearby waterside cottage and was reported to have details on the whereabouts of aforementioned daughter figure. I was determined to speak to her immediately. My cause was urgent, after all. I’m Geralt of Rivia, scorned Witcher, master swordsman, and I have no time for nonsense.

On my way to the witch I stumbled upon a typically destitute Velen village. I didn’t care about the village at all, and I wasn’t drawn to its armories or tradesmen. But something—maybe the sun setting so amber on the horizon, or the children dashing frantically through the muddy streets—made me stop. I was curious.

It probably goes without saying, but if you’re in a hurry, never get off your horse enroute in an open world RPG. This is especially true for The Witcher 3. Several hours later, once I’d cleared out some monsters for a desperate peasant in her far-off stable, and made preliminary moves to slay a beast haunting the town, I forced myself to leave. Turns out the witch was only 50 metres North all along.

I didn’t really want to leave, though. It’s not that I liked the town, and it’s not that I savoured the fantasy of being a hero to its people. It’s certainly not because I wanted to tick off this town’s quests (there are so many quests, there’s no point being thorough). I was just curious about the villagers’ circumstances. I’d gotten to know the town, but I didn’t understand it. How did they get so poor and wretched? Am I complicit, thanks to my (reluctant) connection with the Nilfgaardians? Is it the climate? Or is it just the way they’ve always lived?

Straight up, this is the most remarkable thing about The Witcher 3. Its writing isn’t perfect—it still bears some of the familiar trappings of being a video game—but it almost always rewards curiosity, big time. The rewards for wondering are invariably bleak, but The Witcher 3 achieves something very few video games do: when I’m engaged in a peripheral mini-narrative I’m not necessarily thinking about its game aspects. I’m not thinking about the XP rewarded, or the money I’ll get, or the allegiances I’ll forge, or the buffs I’ll unlock. I’m not grinding. I just really want to know, and understand, what’s going on.

Geralt’s cause may seem urgent, but the worst way to play The Witcher 3 is quickly. In this game, distractions overwhelm you. For mine, the game’s distractions are where its most engaging stories are found.

Beyond the Villages

Geralt is the hero. He’s a gruff, powerful, chiselled, archetypal male video game protagonist. Early on, The Witcher 3 has him exploring the Northern Realms, recently taken over by the warmongering Nilfgaardian Empire, for women he’s either a) in love with or b) eager to protect. He kills monsters, beasts and bandits along the way. He’s recalcitrant in the face of royal authority. He lets his beard grow. He’s tough.

I didn’t like Geralt before I started playing The Witcher games. I’d see his face on marketing material and smirk: he was just another by-the-numbers video game power fantasy. It’s not that this fantasy is thoroughly objectionable to me, but it definitely seemed as if Geralt of Rivia was a boring video game tough guy. A cliche.

The truth is, he’s only the video game tough guy cliche you make him. Geralt has his complexities, but he inherits them from you. He’s a malleable character, and I feel more connected to him than I do the thoroughly customised RPG characters in Skyrim. His wit, his ingrained prejudices and allegiances, are just subtle enough that they don’t impinge on my ultimate control of who he is.

Before I get to the finer details, here are the cliffnotes: Geralt is tasked with finding the daughter of Emhyr var Emreis, Nilfgaard’s emperor. The Nilfgaardians have taken, by force, most of the regions you’ll visit in The Witcher 3. It’s not immediately obvious whether they’re a force for good or bad (especially if you’ve never played a Witcher game before), but one thing is certain: nothing is going well. The people in The Northern Realms are miserable. There’s the weak and the strong, and no grey area in between. Poverty is everywhere: alcoholism, boredom, listlessness. Nothing is going to be OK, but evidence suggests it was never OK to begin with, Nilfgaardians or not.

Matters are complicated by the fact that said Nilfgaardian leader’s daughter, Ciri, is someone dear to Geralt, and that a dark force–the Wild Hunt–is pursuing her. The official mission only lends a wider context to a more personal endeavour on Geralt’s part, as this was a woman he’d trained from a young age, and accepted as a daughter.

Ciri is a central character, and she's even playable in certain linear sequences.

In true sprawling RPG fashion, that’s not all that The WItcher 3 is about: finding Ciri isn’t the crux of the game’s narrative. Other power struggles come into play later on, and then some other stuff happens, and then… the whole world is at stake and you’re the one to save it. It’s a fantasy RPG, after all, and while the ending is typically grandiose and heartstopping, the main thread would feel a bit rote without its minor story arcs. You won’t care so much that the world is at stake unless you’ve made the effort to learn a bit about it via sidequests. And while newcomers won’t feel punished for skipping the first two games, they’ll miss the rewarding familiarity of old characters and references. To accommodate new players, dialogue options are sprinkled with opportunities to gain background information on plotlines involving historical events.

You’ll usually have a handful of main quests in your log, as well as potentially dozens of secondary ones, as well as Witcher contracts (fully fledged, investigation-led monster-slaying jaunts), and each is complemented with cutscenes. Certain secondary quests appear to affect the main narrative proper, and CD Projekt RED has done an admirable job blurring the lines between primary and secondary. Everything in The Witcher 3 feels big: the dungeons are huge and sprawling, the decisions immeasurably consequential, the moral responsibility through the roof.

Truth of the matter is that the best stories you’ll take away from The Witcher 3 are peripheral to the main narrative. This is for two reasons: while Geralt is a character that you can’t aesthetically customise to any satisfying degree (you can’t deck him out in mage gowns), you can really make him yours thanks to a nuanced and consequential dialogue system. The second reason is more obvious: the Northern Realms is among the most lifelike, sadly beautiful and strange fantasy worlds ever committed to code, and you’ll want to pick it apart. You play a dual role as Geralt: steely, masculine protagonist on the one hand, and foolhardy, ignorant tourist on the other.

The White Wolf

As a Witcher, Geralt is armed with two swords and five magic abilities called Signs in addition to bombs, crossbows and other, more spoilery strategies. Combat in The Witcher 3 is simple: slash away at your foes, apply effects and buffs where necessary, roll or block to evade, and sprinkle in sign abilities where needed. These signs include a fiery blast, a telekinetic stun, an offensive shield, a mind control ability, and a static magic trap.

While simple to learn, the combat system punishes mindless hacking and slashing against anything but low-level wolves and dogs. Geralt’s cumbersome gait, and your inability to break his animations, means close attention needs to be paid to most encounters. Like the Souls series, a defensive approach is important until you’ve sussed out the weaknesses of your opponent. Some will be resistant to your fire sign, so you may be better off equipping a protective shield, and so on. Overall, it’s satisfying to exercise caution and dexterity, especially at higher difficulty settings where you can’t just meditate to replenish Geralt’s health bar.

During my first playthrough I felt that levelling Geralt was excruciatingly slow, but it happens at a fast clip if you know what you’re doing, and skill points can be acquired throughout the world without grinding. There are four main categories to sink levels into, and three have five deeper categories of their own. The problem, early on in the game, is knowing what to prioritise—especially since trees need to be equipped in one of a series of growing slots. I specialised in swordplay and Igni in the early hours (fast attacks and Geralt’s fire ability), but it’s possible to go more defensive. For example, levelling your mind control ability will influence dialogue options against non-aggressive characters.

Despite being a Witcher, bandits still insist on roughing Geralt up. It doesn't end well for them.

The biggest bone of contention is going to be the alchemy and crafting systems, which are incredibly detailed in The Witcher 3. Geralt finds alchemy blueprints regularly, but happening across the ingredients required to create them is slow unless you know where to look (and you won’t). Thing is, there are hundreds of ingredients, and The Northern Realms are huge. Once you’ve found the ingredients you’ll never need to acquire them again, but when it comes to upgrading armor and weapons it’s important to have a game plan, and it’s unwise to concentrate on improving the lowly weapons you’ll find early game, which are colour coded according to their power.

While there’s nothing wrong with complex crafting systems, it’s not improved by The Witcher 3’s dense and sometimes tedious user interface. There’s evidence of console-centric design in the radial menus and keybinds (number buttons can switch between signs but won’t immediately cast them as in Witcher 2), but the inventory and character menus are clearly designed with PC in mind. That said, a few more categories would help: it’s only a matter of hours before your Usable Items and Ingredients tabs are swollen to the brim, with no rhyme or reason as to how items are sorted. Overall, the PC version still feels the best.

The PC advantage is obvious when it comes to combat, which benefits from a mouse and keyboard. Due to Geralt’s syrupy movements the ability to more rapidly adjust the camera with the mouse is a saving grace, especially when the game’s lock-on system leaves a lot to be desired. It definitely locks on, but when it comes to scrolling through enemies on the battlefield it’s less than ideal. It’ll usually take a left-to-right approach, rather than a back-to-front approach, which doesn’t work well when you’ve got more than three enemies baying for your blood, and one right up in your face.

Having personally played the game across two systems (a high-spec gaming laptop as well as a console build), I can confirm that fighting is much more enjoyable at 60 frames per second. It makes blocking and parrying a lot more readable against human characters, and a little bit of slowdown during evasive moves can prove an annoyance.

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Sunset in Oxenfurt

Lay of the Land

There are two main regions in The Witcher 3: the aforementioned Velen and The Skellige Isles. There are a few smaller areas, but it’s in these main regions that the bulk of The Witcher 3 plays out. They’re big, of course, but that’s not what matters. The Northern Realms are the most vibrant video game locations I’ve ever seen: less cartoony and more detailed than Dragon Age: Inquisition, and more naturalistic—less uncanny, less janky—than Skyrim. But that’s not hugely important either.

What’s important is that when all of the Witcher 3’s environmental elements work in concert—the weather you can forecast by looking at the sky, the foliage that rustles and bends in the breeze—it’s hard not to feel something. When the sun sets it appears to melt in a sea of apocalyptic orange, and you know what? It’s a beautiful, sad orange. The Northern Realms are engaging and lifelike, sure, but they convey melancholy unlike any other open world I’ve encountered.

That melancholy extends to the people and situations Geralt encounters too. Witchers are scorned for being mutants and sub-humans, and they’re reputed to not feel anything. The thing is that I, the player, couldn’t help being affected, and while many of the dialogue decisions I made appeared to be morally-inclined, it was sometimes hard to make decisions along those lines without feeling like I’d done something wrong. This is a dark fantasy. It’s dark and horrible and oppressive.

This can be alarming. There are some obscenely vicious characters in The Witcher 3 that you’re allowed to feel sympathy for. You might not, but the option is there, and that’s perilous territory for a video game. CD Projekt RED has approached this openness with as much sensitivity as possible, but in the end, it’s hard not to cringe in dismay when you’re given the option to sympathise with a domestically violent character.

There are other minor issues with CD Projekt RED’s world-building. There are few fetch quests as such, but there are several occasions where you’ll go to talk to one character, who will advise you to go talk to another character, who will advise you to go seek out four other characters, and so on. In a 100+ hour game these moments barely make a dent, but they’re a clumsy way to present story in a narrative-driven RPG. As incentive to explore the world they don’t work, because there’s ample reason to explore anyway.

Then there’s the investigation scenarios, where Geralt uses his Witcher sense to detect telltale signs in the environment. There’s little thought needed on the player’s part, as simply finding the objects will help Geralt deduce his next move. This works especially well in Geralt’s monster contract quests, but as part of grander narratives they could benefit from a little more depth. I’d have liked to be forced to use my brain a bit more.

Meanwhile, The Witcher 3 doesn’t bring much that’s bracingly new to the modern RPG. It’s a series of refinements: the questing and attention to detail is better than Skyrim, the pervasive sense of dread is thicker than Fallout 3 and the decisions more impactful than Mass Effect 2. It relies on familiar gameplay beats to tell a story, but shows no evidence of wanting to experiment on a grander scale. I was never surprised by the game’s systems as much as I was intrigued by its setting.

Beneath the Skin

Comparing notes with my PC Gamer colleagues, the game ran well on a variety of configurations. Using an Intel i5-2500k processor and an Nvidia GTX 980 at 2560x1440, we were able to run everything on Ultra, barring HairWorks and Foliage Visibility Range, which we ran at High. The game operated comfortably at around 50 fps in 1440p, though with HairWorks on and Foliage set to Ultra, it dipped to 25-35 fps. Meanwhile, using an i7-5960x and Nvidia Titan X, we had no problem maintaining a consistent 60 fps at 1080p. Framerates tended to be more stable compared to another recent heavyhitter, GTA 5.

Overall, on a two-year-old system 60 fps should be manageable with some settings adjustments, and while the game really sings at high-to-ultra settings in 1080p, the differences between those settings tend to be subtle. On a high-end laptop I only had framerate issues in specific locations around Velen, where unusually thick foliage and water effects culminated in drops to around the 45 fps mark. Compared to the PS4’s wavering 30 fps and frequent, pre-launch slow downs, it’s a huge improvement.

The Witcher 2 still has a reputation for pushing PC graphics to the limit, and while graphics in The Witcher 3 are undoubtedly impressive, it’s not the Crysis many expected it to be. The fidelity matters less here than the scale. As storms approach, and gales rustle and bend tree branches, and as the deers run for cover, it’s hard to dispute this is a gorgeous game. The lighting and weather effects are breathtaking. It’s difficult to resist stopping to stare into the distance.

That's me, staring into the distance again.

Still, on a granular scale it’s unlikely to endure as the graphical showpiece its predecessor was. You don’t have to look far to find low-quality textures. Foliage is thick and abundant, but leaves are flat 2D textures bisecting to create the illusion of 3D. Clothing still looks thick and lived-in, but not dramatically better than Witcher 2. Facial animations and non-mocapped character animations don’t push any new boundaries and occasionally look awkward or stiff. Skin pores and facial expressions are fine, but even mocapped faces lag behind the most impressive contemporary facial animation.

These aren’t criticisms so much as observations that The Witcher 3 isn’t the great leap forward some might have hoped. Designing open worlds like this doesn’t come without compromises. It’s disappointing that it doesn’t live up to the potential showcased in the first trailers, but we can only enjoy what’s in front of us for what it is.

It’s the storytelling and art direction that impresses more than the raw details, and these are the reasons The Witcher 3 consumed me. I felt more engaged with the Northern Realms than I ever did Skyrim, and even as the narrative advanced and tension mounted—and even when I felt I knew the lay of the land pretty well—I was still compelled to take it slowly and learn.

For a game boasting all of the political treachery and turmoil common in the genre, The Witcher 3 succeeds because it puts people first. More compelling than Geralt’s lofty, heroic journey are the stories about the humdrum, circumstantial horrors of the helpless as they watch their world crumble. I’m looking forward to returning to The Northern Realms and visiting all of its villages and ruins. That’s where the heart of The Witcher 3 lies: not in its hero, but in the complicated world it brings to life.