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.

TECHNOBABYLON Review

In this neon-drenched vision of the future, connecting to the internet whisks you away to a virtual world called the Trance. It’s where Latha, one of Technobabylon’s protagonists, is happiest.

In ‘meatspace’ she lives in a dilapidated government apartment, wearing printed overalls, eating grey nutrient slop from a food machine; in the Trance she looks like an extra from The Matrix and spends her days in a dazzling cyber-world made of shimmering holograms. I don’t blame her.

Regis, another playable character, couldn’t be more different. He’s an old school cop who doesn’t trust this fancy new technological world, which is governed by an all-seeing AI called Central. Central has a knack for predicting crimes before they happen, but Regis doubts its effectiveness.

His partner, Max, is a younger cop who Trances like Latha, but respects his old methods. Central, represented by a computerised female voice, is forever scolding Regis for taping over the lens of the camera in his office. Regis and Max are investigating a series of murders by a killer nicknamed the Mind Jacker. Much of the game is like a sci-fi police procedural—Deus Ex meets Police Quest—and sees you investigating crime scenes.

I won’t say how, because spoilers, but Regis and Max’s story soon crashes head-on with Latha’s, revealing a conspiracy. It’s cyberpunk: of course there’s a sinister conspiracy to uncover. The story is fantastic. It’s well-paced and written, with plenty of surprising twists.

The world design is pretty standard for a setting like this, with skyscrapers, flickering neon signs, people with mohawks, and lots of glowing screens. But, despite the low resolution that typifies all Wadjet Eye games, skilled use of lighting, shadow, and atmosphere make it a place you want to exist in.

The strong art makes up for its technical shortcomings, from Regis’s balcony overlooking the city—complete with genetically engineered tree—to the palatial home of a crime boss. If you like that whole Blade Runner aesthetic, this is a world worth visiting.

I have to give a special mention to the screen that appears when you transition between areas as Max or Regis. You see a car driving down a futuristic highway, neon-lit skyscrapers in the background, lights reflecting off its windows, as some really cool ambient synth music plays. It’s a shame the area selection screen has to pop up and obscure it. The music is, incidentally, really good throughout, with echoes of Michael McCann’s score for Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Puzzles are, this being an adventure game, a big part of Technobabylon, and they’re mostly good—with a few exceptions. The best are the ones that play to the setting, like the section where you have to get information out of a robot maid by sticking different personality chips in her—including one from a chirpy AI-powered food dispenser. I’d give more examples, but, again, spoilers.

The worst are the ones that fall back on traditional point-and-click puzzle absurdity, combining items in ludicrous ways and so on. But mostly they’re logical, challenging, and satisfying to solve.

Wadjet Eye have been publishing old-style adventure games for years now, and this is one of their best releases. Developer Technocrat has created a cyberpunk world that, while riffing on a dozen other examples of the genre, manages to have a personality of its own, populated by a cast of genuinely likeable characters.

Some of the puzzles leave a lot to be desired, including one involving a fishing rod and a magnet that feels out of place tonally with everything else, but there are some great ones too. If you want to be told a good story in an interesting world, Technobabylon is worth a look.

D4: DARK DREAMS DON'T DIE Review

You could call Dark Dreams Don’t Die a point and click adventure. I mean, you’re gonna be pointing at stuff. And you’ll click like a hero, using all three of the most popular mouse buttons. But point and click implies puzzles, and D4 trades only in mystery. D4 is better described as having all the subtlety and butch appeal of Alan Carr in an explosive ball gown, with all the interactivity of a toddler’s activity blanket. Does that description leave you none the wiser? Good. A bewildered, contented state of none-the-wiserliness is the best way to enjoy this espresso shot of eccentricity and cliché.

You play the role of David Young, a detective whose wife was murdered (cliché!), and now lives with what you’ll grow to suspect is a human manifestation of the family cat (eccentricity!). His wife’s last words were “look for D”, an ambiguous phrase that has led our hero, David, on an ongoing mission to meet and interrogate everyone whose name begins with D. Oh, he can also jump into the past by putting special objects on his head.

It’s a promising start. These special objects, “mementos”, are a great excuse to take the player anywhere. But first we have to deal with a prominent room-elephant. See, D4 was designed for use with Kinect. And for almost any other PC port, Kinect origins would be a death sentence. Kinect is less of a useful interface, and more of a way to turn menu screens into a sparring session with an invisible attacker. You can’t just port from Kinect like it’s no big thing.

It’s a sleepwalking world of semi-explained symbolism and visual comedy.

Don’t worry! D4 wasn’t a successful Kinect game. Even the limited interactions that you have with the world—grab, push, and look—were all better when controlled with a gamepad. Using a mouse may render the physical challenges trivial, but that’s an improvement. No-one needs a flailing exam.

This leaves you with little to do but enjoy the short ride. As you’d expect from Swery “Deadly Premonition” 65, it’s a sleepwalking world of semi-explained symbolism and visual comedy. And as a start-to-finish experience, it’s a mitigated success, and an utterly unique trip. Yes, the end comes with whiplash abruptness. Yes, some of the characters’ quirks turn into a test of patience. Yes, every aspect of the plot withers under unforgiving scrutiny. If you’re going to make me give qualifying yesses all day, maybe D4 isn’t for you. Here’s a test—if you can respond with a cheerful shrug to the next paragraph, get the game.

There aren’t many ways to lose. You’ve got stamina, depleted by pushing owls and drinking coffee. Low stamina means you’ll need to stop talking to eat some peanuts you found next to a suitcase, or buy some beans from the on-board cat with credits you earned by hovering your cursor over a mannequin’s hairstyle. I never came close to running out of stamina, which is a good thing. You want to enjoy this nonsense, not be undone by it.

Remember when I said D4 deals in mystery, not in puzzles? That may be overstating the complexity of the plot. You’ll guess the answers before Young manages it, and sleuthing is more Adam West’s Batman than Sherlock. The true mystery comes from the fact you’re stepping into an unashamedly strange world, which both revels in and subverts cliché. It’s unpredictable.

But this package cannot have been the intended scope of Season 1. It’s a splinter, leaving you with the itch of the incomplete. Who is Ronald, the cutlery-scraping wise giant who casually folds himself into a ventilation shaft while he’s talking to you? What is the nature of street drug Real Blood? Why is a man who openly resents me enthusiastically testing my aeronautical knowledge?

I’m perfectly happy not knowing the answers to these questions if that was the intention of the director. Nobody wants midichlorians killing the magic. But the cut-short nature of Season 1 means that any omission may or may not be deliberate, and that’s immensely frustrating. As far as endings go, it’s a comma, not an ellipsis. End a sentence with a comma, and it looks like you died at the keyboard before someone else walked in and clicked send.

Before I recommend D4 to you, you have to promise three things: don’t expect elegant “systems”. Be ready to enjoy camp over-acting. And don’t waste any time looking for new options in the main menu, when it ends with no ceremony. Expect to be entertained, but don’t expect satisfaction. Lower your demands, and enjoy jamming your tongue into Swery’s electric brain socket.

As for a score, that feels like I’m reviewing a tree, based on a fascinating, half-eaten leaf that blew into my face. I mean, great leaf, really. This leaf is to be encouraged. But as a failed experiment in episodic delivery, it must be punished, in the same way we’d all retrospectively give Half-Life’s Episode 2 42%, if we could, for the cruelty of that cliffhanger. Ah, what the hell. I’ve explained the problems in the words. I can be generous with the dumb number.

HATRED Review

I've done horrible and horrifying things to thousands of innocent virtual people in games, beginning with squishing friendlies in 1982's Choplifter, progressing to murdering farmers in their beds in Oblivion, and most recently by sending scores of pedestrians ragdolling through the air with my speeding car in Grand Theft Auto 5. At times I've enjoyed the violent acts I've committed against bystanders, at other times my own actions have troubled me, and there have been plenty of occasions where I've never given them a second thought. Killing bystanders in games, for whatever the reason—accidentally, purposefully, out of boredom or morbid curiosity—is nothing new to gaming.

Hatred, an isometric twin-stick shooter from Polish developer Destructive Creations, doesn't just include the killing of innocent bystanders, but features it as its primary activity. The unnamed character you control explains that he's sick of the world and the people in it, and would like to kill as many people as he can before dying violently himself. After gathering weapons he stalks through residential neighborhoods, busy town centers, a moving passenger train, an army base, and ultimately a nuclear power plant, gunning down everyone he sees to make his dark vision a reality.

How does it feel having killed a couple thousand of innocent people in Hatred? As I said, killing bystanders in a game can result in a number of different reactions and feelings. It can be a mild feeling of guilt, such as when I crowbar a friendly Barney to death in Half-Life because I want to take his ammo clip with me. It's often fun and humorous, like when visiting over-the-top destruction on entire city blocks in the Saints Row series. Killing innocents can be a means to an end or a solution to a problem, as in the Hitman games when I kill a janitor for his uniform, and it can provide a sense of grim satisfaction when I'm roleplaying a ruthless assassin in a Bethesda RPG. Sometimes the feeling is hard to define, a sort of sickening and fascinating revulsion with myself—why am I doing this?—such as when watching a character in The Sims slowly die from starvation while sitting in a puddle of his own filth because I've trapped him in a room for reasons I can't entirely explain.

In Hatred, I didn't feel any of that, and I suspect much of the reason why has to do with the quality of the game itself.

Shoot first, growl rhetorical questions later.

None more black

For a game that's mostly about running and shooting, there are a few problems with both. The shooting occasionally feels off: putting the crosshairs on a target usually means the bullets will hit them, but from time to time I found that aiming slightly next to them was required for a hit. Other times, at nearly point blank range, I'd fire repeatedly at someone and somehow hit absolutely nothing, even with a shotgun. Then again, sometimes I'd shoot on the run and easily take down multiple targets. The ultimate feeling is one of inconsistency, and the end result is a lot of wasted rounds shooting at someone who somehow doesn't get hit.

Having to keep an eye on the minimap to pinpoint threats, and many of those threats shooting at me from offscreen, meant I often lost track of my character, who would wind up stuck on the corners of buildings, doors, foliage, and other objects. The environment can be confusing: some hedges you can run straight through while other, smaller shrubs sometimes stop you short. Jumping over objects is possible, performed automatically while sprinting, though it's inconsistent as well: some obstacles don't allow you to vault them when they appear they should.

This clumsy navigation is exacerbated by Hatred's visuals. It's presented in mostly black and white—things like explosions and explosive items, taillights and security locks, and some set dressing like billboards and banners provide bright splashes of color. I think this is a neat idea, and I do really like the look of the world, but limiting the game to black and white requires a real mastery of design that's unfortunately absent here. Smoothly moving a small character clad in black on a black night through a black forest while spotting enemies (they're dark gray, at least) isn't an easy feat to manage.

A common activity: looking down and trying to figure out where the hell you are.

Your character is not some superman capable of absorbing massive amounts of damage. Slow, deliberate assaults against the police and later the army are required, as are frequent retreats. This is initially more interesting than charging mindlessly into combat, and I did find early fights with armed forces fun. Eventually, though, forced to progress inch-by-inch through the maps while frequently falling back to regroup or lose pursuers, the game becomes a slow and repetitive trudge, since progress is almost always based on killing a specific number of targets as opposed to reaching a destination. The only change as you progress is more enemies that take more shots to put down instead of any real evolution of gameplay, and the handful of different guns you can use don't add much variety. While there are a few optional objectives on each map, they're almost always the same: kill X amount of people in a certain location, and most levels end with similar standoffs against swarms of law enforcement. There's also driving, for which the controls are comically bad, though thankfully it's only briefly required in a couple of missions.

Poor execution

The only way to heal your wounds is by performing an 'execution', in which you stand near a wounded victim and press the Q key to finish them off. This results in an animation in which you stab the victim in the head, cut their throat, stomp their head into mush, or bonk them with the butt of your gun. While I appreciate that the developers went looking for a different way to heal besides collecting health kits or auto-healing while at rest, the execution system is pretty terrible in all respects. Since you're unable to deliberately wound people (in a third- or first-person shooter you might be able to target limbs, for example) it means that trying to restore health can result in long, dull stretches of running around, shooting stragglers, and simply hoping to wound someone rather than kill them outright. Ultimately, this turns out to be even more of a hassle than hunting for health kits and takes longer than auto-healing would. 

Tell me where the nearest unexploded gas station is... or else.

The executions themselves, both for the gore-factor and from an animation standpoint, are rather underwhelming, with fakey looking blood and unconvincing character movements, and within a few minutes of play you'll have seen most of the handful of animations. Whatever effect executions are supposed to have on the player (glee? revulsion?) will wear off long before you've even completed the first level.

It's not all bad news. The environments themselves are great: big, sprawling maps to romp through, nicely designed buildings, some great set dressing, and a convincing level of detail. The destructive environments are fantastic. Gunfire will leave walls crumbling and windows shattered, grenades can create new entrances or exits in most structures, big and satisfying explosions routinely light up the screen. A protracted confrontation in a building results in the structure becoming a gutted, flaming mess and leaves you feeling like a badass for stalking out of the smoldering ruins in one piece.

I enjoyed the second level, in which you must navigate through a sewer system while SWAT teams slip down ladders for periodic confrontations. I felt this, and a trip through a nuclear plant at the end, were a nice change because they were a bit more linear, giving me a real direction to travel, giving me chances to plan my approach and crouch behind cover when enemies advanced. I felt like I was fighting my way through something, as opposed to the vague, free-form assaults the open maps provide.

Not all citizens in Hatred are helpless targets. Some have guns of their own, others will pick up guns dropped in the street and fire back. This idea of the danger of armed bystanders culminates in a level where an optional objective is to kill everyone at a gun show, and I laughed when I ran in the door and saw a dozen people promptly grab weapons off tables and pump me full of lead. Ironically, I suppose, for a game built around massacring innocents, it's far more fun when they fight back and you're not simply offing pedestrians until you meet your quota. Seeing a woman in a grocery store pick up a gun, empty a clip at me, and shout "reloading!" as if she were part of a trained commando squad was funny, and any time a citizen did something other than slowly and ineptly flee my gunshots was a welcome change.

Brain dead

No matter who is holding a gun, however, Hatred's A.I. is underwhelming and at times entirely broken. On one map, after slaughtering a house full of people, I hit my murder quota and was told a SWAT team was arriving: I'd have to survive the raid and kill 20 cops to progress. I hunkered down in a bedroom on the second floor of the house and waited for them to swarm up the stairs, hoping to pick them off one at a time. As it turns out, only one cop was actually trained in the delicate art of using the stairs. The rest milled around on the first floor for long minutes while I waited, apparently able to see me through the floor but not actually able to shoot me through it. More and more cops poured into the lower level of the house until it was a teeming mob of idiots getting caught in their own crossfire. I eventually passed the mission due to 19 separate friendly-fire incidents because no one taught the police to climb stairs and not to aim through each other's bodies.

On another map I had to personally destroy the walls of a bank with grenades to allow the police to move through the building toward me, just so I could then kill them. Molotov cocktails, meanwhile, become useful when you realize the lake of fire they create doesn't register as a threat to police, who will voluntarily wade in and out of it until they've burned themselves to a crisp. I actually stopped playing at one point to check if Hatred was in Early Access instead of full release, because it genuinely feels like a beta.

You should really wear your hair back and let people see your pretty face!

While the idea of massacring innocents in a game will turn of plenty of people off and genuinely upset some, I found nothing about the experience daring, novel, or even particularly shocking. Maybe it's that the people are so poorly simulated, maybe it's that the execution animations are so unconvincing, maybe it's that the game just isn't very good. Last year, the developers said they created Hatred in response to the trend of political correctness in games, but if that was their true mission statement I'm afraid I don't see it reflected in the semi-finished product. Much more likely, this statement simply represented the marketing plan to promote their substandard shooter (and it's hard to argue that plan wasn't a successful one). Ultimately, in Hatred, killing innocent people is just a way to make the cops arrive, and I can do that—plus dozens of other, actually fun things—in a game like GTA 5.

There are a few things I enjoyed about Hatred, but its many and major flaws quickly turned it into a largely forgettable shooter that grew less and less interesting the longer I played. For those hoping for a game in which killing innocent people provides you with some sort of entertainment—be it humor, revulsion, guilt, a vicarious and morbid thrill—you can find it done better, in one way or another, in every other game I've mentioned in this review.