When it was first revealed at The Game Awards last December, No Rest for the Wicked quickly shot up to the top of my most anticipated games list.

Created by Moon Studios, the same developers who brought us the excellent Ori games, this attempt at a souls-inspired isometric action RPG seemed like an exciting evolution and challenge for the studio.

Given early impressions and the official trailers for the game, when it was released in early access on Steam for PC I thought I knew what to expect from the game. But the more I played, the more systems I encountered, I think I better understood what Moon Studios is attempting with the it.

The ambition on display is immense, yet I wasn’t able to shake an apprehension that it was not quite a cohesive package, at least not yet. And after a labour of six years on the title before just this initial release, what is the long-term future for the game and how might it change throughout the early access period?

After a short character creation, No Rest for the Wicked starts with you, a special warrior called a Cerim, arriving at the island of Sacra, which is experiencing a plague that needs to be halted and reversed. Amidst the death of its ruler, game of thrones-style politics and conflict between the heirs, nobles and the religious rulers plays out in gorgeous cutscenes.

Really, the whole of No Rest for the Wicked is absolutely stunning, and is what I imagine has drawn many people to the game in the first place. It uses a fully 3D environment that comes as close as anything has to looking like a moving, dark oil painting. The art style absolutely sings on an OLED panel with a strong emphasis on contrast between warm oranges of lit areas and the blackness of those in shadow. There’s a subtle, Animal Crossing style bending of the world, which helps the Isometric view feel more dynamic and alive.

The core of the game however is undoubtedly the combat.

The real-time action sword and shield combat is heavy and weighty, with a fair amount of inspiration from the Souls series. All enemies can take out serious chunks of your health so timely dodging, parrying and interrupting attacks is essential in making progress. So far, No Rest for the Wicked is not an easy game, and I died more times than I expected. You do have a pretty good variety of weapons in this early access release, including a magic staff, a massive two handed claymore, a hammer and a standard sword (I’m sure there are more that I missed). Weapons have their own skills that are activated through a limited focus metre, and there was a nice flow of battle in using normal attacks and blocks until I got to use my special moves for extra damage.

What has held back some of my fun with the combat is the unexpected influence of the game’s nascent survival mechanics. Taking unfortunate inspiration from the worst part of Demon’s Souls, you have to craft each and every health restoration item according to various recipes and ingredients you find in the environment. This makes attempting each new area or boss a frustrating experience, as you may need to run around searching for some mushroom patch that isn’t depleted before you can have another go at the part of the game you actually care about.

Item durability also plays a frustratingly large role, with your equipped items suffering rapid deterioration each time you die. To repair them, you can use a limited amount of repair kits or pay a blacksmith to repair them. Combined with having to craft health restoration items, it resulted in sometimes annoying long gaps between making actual progress and farming enemies to get back to the state you were before. The best games carefully balance difficulty with friction, but in its current state No Rest for the Wicked doesn’t seem to have found the right set of trade offs. Both Ori games smartly balanced sometimes tricky platforming against fast loading, quick restarts with an innovative save system that let you set checkpoints wherever you wanted. Perhaps Moon Studios could revisit these titles to see what worked and how, perhaps, they could influence their latest title.

In terms of performance – on PC this initial release can easily reach 30FPS but achieving a locked 60FPS is surprisingly difficult.

At least for now, there are few graphical options to play with, and the usual lifesavers features to claw back some performance such as DLSS super resolution temporal upscaling is listed as ‘coming soon’ (no word on Intel’s XeSS or AMD’s FSR2 or 3, unfortunately). The developer has noted more fine-grained options are coming, but for now you can try a few different basic general image quality settings and there is a basic resolution slider to turn down if performance is unstable.

And this is a game that truly benefits from higher frame rates. On my Steam Deck playing at 30FPS the whole experience felt sluggish and unresponsive. Only at 60FPS and above (where possible) using my gaming PC’s NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti GPU did the game feel responsive and fluid enough for me to feel confident when tackling the game’s dispiriting combat.

In this initial early access state, No Rest for the Wicked includes a decent chunk of gameplay. Included is the first chapter, a main town, some side quests and a replayable dungeon. There’s no clear roadmap from early access to a full release but developer Moon Studios has promised up to four-player co-op, PvP, new regions and even farming.

For what is still a small studio this is a wild scope of features on top of what is already there – the combat, home decoration, crafting and survival systems – and I worry that the ambition for the game is larger than what they can reasonably deliver to a decent quality level. Will it take another six years for the full release?

Will the early access release be able to maintain interest over that whole period? These are the risks of buying into the project at this point in time. It also makes me question if Moon Studios truly has a lid on what the game should be; scope creep is real and can be debilitating long-term if not addressed. I’d love to be proven wrong, but it is hard to shake some apprehension about what is trying to be achieved.

No Rest for the Wicked’s early access launch is out now on PC, and the full release is expected on Xbox Series consoles and Playstation 5.

The post No Rest for the Wicked (PC) Early Access Impressions appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Horizon: Forbidden West was the competent, graphically impressive sequel to 2017’s Horizon: Zero Dawn, which was one of the first PlayStation games released on PC in this new multiplatform era.

And now, two years after it was released on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, it is also on PC. And the port takes on the characteristics of the game itself. Competent, full-featured, relatively issue free, but ultimately unspectacular. We are now far beyond being excited at the mere prospect of a PlayStation game on Steam, and in the future porting house Nixxes and Sony may need to push their ambitions higher to regain the hype of the initial releases.

Horizon: Forbidden West continues the journey of Aloy as she seeks to discover the source of a blight threatening the land, coming up against new challenges and unexpected foes. The PC version has nothing new or specific to it in terms of the game’s narrative, but everything is here and fully featured. This means it includes the game’s Burning Shores expansion, which is a meaty addition to the main game that in my experience can be quite a bit harder (perhaps it was just my time away that made it feel trickier than it actually is).

As before, you can only access the DLC area after the very end of the main game, so unfortunately there is no concession to those who may have played through the original title on PS4 or PS5 and wanted to tackle the expansion on their PC. And again, there is no ability to transfer your Playstation save into the PC version, something I sorely missed after putting about 50 hours into it on Sony’s console. It seems like a missed opportunity, seeing as you can even link your Steam account to your PlayStation Network account. And while there is full DualSense support when using it wired, there is still no ability to get the full DualSense experience via wireless play, something Sony seems utterly uninterested in addressing.

I was happy to see though that there is a bevy of graphical options and settings to fiddle with, and there weren’t any strange exclusions of features. In terms of upscalers, there’s support for NVIDIA DLSS 3, including frame generation and DLAA, FSR2 and even Intel’s XeSS. There’s proper support for ultrawide displays, and in every other respect Horizon: Forbidden West can be configured like a true native PC port. Perhaps the only strangeness is that Nixxes continues to use a settings launcher to configure your experience prior to the game actually starting. Personally I appreciate this option but I know for some people it can be a minor annoyance.

But what about performance?

Given some of the issues with performance in recent releases of PlayStation exclusives such as The Last of Us: Part 1, I was a little trepidatious approaching Horizon: Forbidden West. Fortunately, while relatively heavy, I did not experience any strange PC performance issues in my time with Forbidden West on PC. Settings worked just as I expected them to, though I did not see as much of a boost as I was expecting with DLSS 3 Frame Generation at only around an extra 20FPS (this may be user error as I am still relatively new to using that option). Truthfully though, the game already looked excellent on PlayStation 5 and there aren’t any new options or settings that truly let your PC scale the visuals above the console version. So while it is solid, it is somewhat disappointing not to see any ray-tracing options or additions like Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion or Screen Space Directional Occlusion, both of which were added to God of War when it came over to PC.

For those who are interested in taking Forbidden West on the go with a Steam Deck, this won’t be a great experience. Even at the “Very Low” preset” and with FSR2 set to ‘Balanced’ I wasn’t able to maintain a consistent 30FPS, especially once you get into the main open world. This is a change from the first game, which just managed to run well enough to be one of the more popular titles on the Deck when it originally launched. It isn’t just the frame rate either, the frame times are unfortunately extremely inconsistent and there are big spikes relatively often.

Perhaps your tolerance for sub-30FPS gameplay is better than mine (to be fair, we did suffer through our fair share of PAL-related horrors back in the day – 17 FPS Ocarina of Time anyone?) but I imagine for most people Horizon: Forbidden West is simply too big for Steam Deck.

As game development costs spiral and the market size stagnates, publishers increasingly need to amortise the cost over more than one platform. Microsoft has been on both PC and Xbox day and date for years now, and with Sony we are finally in a somewhat regular cadence of PC releases a year or two after their console debut (Helldivers 2 – Sony published but independently developed excepted). It is just a shame that the two years between releases didn’t see Nixxes given the scope to actually expand the game’s visuals. It makes me wonder why we are left with such a long gap between drinks, seeing as there is very little reason for someone who has played the original to pick up this version – the audience is very different so releasing the PC version earlier is unlikely to cannibalise sales to any great degree. We are left with a competent, somewhat unexciting port that does exactly what it says on the tin.

If a PC release of Forbidden West is what you’ve been waiting for you can have no hesitation in picking it up but equally, there may be no reason to double dip, especially if you played it on PS5 with its impressive array of display and performance options.

The post Horizon: Forbidden West (PC) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

What a wild ride Helldivers 2 has been on.

When I first got the game to review, it came in as an interesting sequel to an underrated first entry (Helldivers 1 was secretly one of the best games for the beleaguered PS Vita).

But since then, Helldivers 2 has exploded in interest, success and internet virality to a point where the developers could not have even imagined. This Playstation-published but independently-developed title has seen unprecedented player numbers that put it up with some of the biggest games ever released.

The simultaneous release of the game on PC and Playstation also signals a new approach from Playstation, and perhaps, a new era and attitude towards how ever-more expensive to develop games are released. It certainly hasn’t hurt the game, and I have enjoyed being able to dive in on my platform of choice from day one.

But what is Helldivers 2?

In the most zoomed-out view it is not so different from the original entry into the now-franchise series. You, and preferably a squad of mates, land on an alien planet and are tasked with a variety of objectives that you must complete before successfully extracting within the set time limit. These objectives may be something as simple as defeating a number of the bug or robot enemies, to launching nukes at enemy infestations.

Maps, set on a variety of planets and times of day, are large, but not so big that you can get lost in them or separated for too long. There are enemy encampments, patrols, side missions and secrets to discover on each map, and the game slowly ramps up the intensity of each mission the longer you play, which, combined with the time limit, eventually encourages even the most distracted players to get on board with completing the mission objectives.

The true joy of the game is found in the combination of these missions, playing with a squad, and the wild interaction between these and what Helldivers 2 calls your ‘stratagems’. These are special abilities, set on a timer, that lets you call in support from a spaceship in orbit. This could be as simple as providing you with a powerful machine gun or mortar sentry, right up to enormous bombardments that can destroy entire enemy forts at once. Crucially, this also includes friendly reinforcements. See, players have relatively little health, and are subject to friendly fire. This results in hilarious interactions where you ‘unintentionally’ take out your friends with an aerial bombardment, or are desperately calling down backup while hordes of massive bugs pursue you across the map. Some of the fireworks on display at times is genuinely impressive, and truly gives the sense of the intensity of a battle, all set in the stylings and humour of Starship Troopers.

Successfully completing missions lets you access upgrades to new and improved weapons, stratagems, and available weaponry. There is a battle pass which is part of the cosmetic and weapon unlock experience, but this is cleverly split into a free one that contains pretty great stuff, and a premium one that feels less necessary but will be attractive to those dedicated to the full Helldivers experience. For once, the battle pass and monetisation system doesn’t feel abusive or predatory at all, and this should be a model that other games pursue.

The only time that I had a bad time with Helldivers 2 was when I was playing by myself. The solo experience is no fun at all, and all of the spontaneity, hilarity and unintended consequences are much more lonely and frustrating when not playing in a squad. Even in a matchmade squad your time with each mission is far better, so I encourage you to not spend too long playing without teammates if you can at all avoid it.

Another nitpick is the image quality when utilising the 60FPS mode on Playstation 5.

It is quite blurry, and the basic implementation of what looks like AMD’s FSR1 does little to tidy it up to any satisfactory degree. The developers have indicated that they are investigating a temporal upsampling technique (such as FSR2) but given they are using an ancient, deprecated game engine this is much more of an ask than if the game were using, say, Unreal Engine 5 so I don’t have high hopes. At least on PC it generally runs very well, so the base level of performance is quite good.

Helldivers 2 is uncomplicated fun. It provides genuinely hilarious emergent gameplay, all set within a framework that seems deliberately designed to remove some of the frustrations and speedbumps that other games sometimes deliberately put in your way. Missions are quick, snappy, and even if you don’t succeed it is not too strenuous to just go again. With a group of friends, Helldivers 2 provides some of the best hangout gameplay that you could ask for. This isn’t the sort of game that you need to keep on top of the meta for, or worry about new heroes coming in and massively changing the balance of the entire experience. And there are indications that even more is planned, with tanks and mech suits looking likely for inclusion shortly.

Whether on PC or PS5, Helldivers 2 is more than a competent follow up. The move to a third person perspective and the impressive but contained scale of each mission creates an environment in its experience that gamers have clearly taken to. I just hope the interest in the game isn’t short-lived. I certainly see myself returning to it again and again.

The post Helldivers 2 (PlayStation 5 / PC) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

If you have recently released the best entry in your franchise, filled out the roster with multiple spinoffs and are still (hopefully) working on the next entry, what do you do?

This is the situation publisher Atlus has found themselves in. They have filled the gap between Persona 5 Royal, released initially in 2019, with ports such as Persona 4 Golden, collaborations such as Persona 5 Strikers, and explorations into new genres like Persona 5 Tactics, released earlier this year. But their most recent project, Persona 3 Reload, is by far the most ambitious yet.

It is an entire remake of Persona 3, originally released for Playstation 2.

It brings it up to modern standards where it fits in right next to Persona 5, right down to its stylings and flair. In other ways it hues close to the original – there’s no mention of most of the new elements the ‘FES’ revamp brought to the table, and there’s no female lead as per Persona 3 Portable on Sony’s PSP handheld console. Instead, it is the best version of the original entry released yet.

While it may be a disappointing overall package to some, what Atlus have done to modernise and refresh the game brought me right back into why I love Persona games so much.

Despite the obviously missing elements of the Persona 3 universe, this new version is not a simple upscale and re-release of the Playstation 2 game. The changes to the game are vast, starting first with the graphics. Rebuilt entirely in Unreal Engine 4, Persona 3 Reload incorporates the design elements so brilliantly done in Persona 5, featuring the green and blue colour tones of the original.

While it isn’t entirely faithful, I think it looks great – modern and fresh while keeping intact the atmosphere and vibe of the original PlayStation 2 release. Running at what looks like 4K and a steady 60FPS on console, it feels bold and dynamic.

Unfortunately the dungeon crawling aspect of Persona 3, perhaps it’s weakest part, hasn’t seen the level of updates and polish that I would have hoped for. Unlike the bespoke dungeons of Persona 5, which were expertly handcrafted and had a real sense of progression and drama, Persona 3’s equivalent, Tartarus, is still mainly empty, boring floors of generic green. There’s not that much to differentiate your time in each section, though each bunch of levels has been given a slight theme which is a welcome change.

Fortunately the combat has seen some major upgrades, again inspired by Persona 5. You can now hand off your attack, all-out attacks have been introduced, you now control all party members (thank goodness), each party member now has a unique ‘ultimate ability’ (a la the limit break mechanic in Final Fantasy games) and there are other quality of life upgrades that moves the experience eerily close to the Persona 5 experience. Combat is still based on the same format of learning enemy weaknesses and using your abilities to combo them into submission, and the transfers from later games make this easier than ever.

I’m sure the 3D models for most of the enemies/Personas have been copied straight from Persona 5 to Shin Megami Tensei V to Soul Hacker 2 and now to Persona 3 Reload. While there’s nothing wrong with them, I did feel a bit of a sense of deja vu after so many releases featuring the same models.

There have been significant updates to the social side of things too, with new side stories with your party members – something that was curiously absent in the original. They’re not quite the same as normal social links, presumably because this would have required fundamentally rebalancing the entire social side of things, but they are a welcome addition that gives more foundation to the friendships you share with those in your dorm.

So fundamentally this is a fantastic way to play Persona 3. For the most part, it unquestionably eclipses the original release. But unfortunately it can’t truly be called ‘definitive’. Without ‘The Answer’ DLC from Persona 3 FES and the option to play as ‘feMC’ from Persona 3 Portable, there will still be contention about the ‘true’ or ‘complete’ way to experience what Persona 3 has to offer. It would have been great to see the PSP game included in the package for example, and at least there are rumours that The Answer DLC may be coming as future content.

And while it is great to see Persona 3 Reload release on so many platforms on Day 1, it is a bizarre omission to exclude the Nintendo Switch – where recent Persona re-releases have always felt extremely comfortable. I have mentioned only a few of the upgrades in this re-release, and it is obvious so much care and attention has been taken in replicating and intelligently upgrading many aspects that wouldn’t feel quite as contemporaneous if they were left untouched for a modern release. It is truly exciting that Persona 3 has this new lease on life, and I hope it continues to expand to reflect the entirety of the Persona 3 experience.

The post Persona 3 Reload (Xbox Series S|X) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

When your most recent release is the excellent Sonic Mania, renowned for revitalising 2D Sonic games as a whole, there’s a lot of pressure on what comes next.

This is the situation Christian Whitehead and his team have found themselves in. With rumours that they were unfortunately passed over for the ultimately serviceable but unexciting Sonic Superstars, instead they have thrown themselves into an entirely new title and style of platformer. The result? Penny’s Big Breakaway, a linear 3D platformer featuring with unique traversal that nevertheless maintains the spirit of Sonic throughout. I’m not sure though that it is entirely successful and perhaps unfairly I did expect more from the team, even for a debut title.

The game starts with the eponymous Penny majorly stuffing up an audition of yoyo skills in front of the King, which earns his ire and who then sets loose his army of cute but deadly penguins after our hapless hero. Penny then seeks to fix this mistake while trying to not be captured in the process. It is the type of nonsense story that’s perfect for a throwback platformer, and there’s a good sense of humour with a touch of the surreal.

This setup launches Penny to complete a series of linear 3D platform stages, spread over a number of different worlds. It’s a setup that mimics the Sonic acts structure, though with far fewer bosses. Stages are relatively long and complex, with a focus on maintaining momentum and speed, again much like Sonic. Knowing how stages are put together is rewarded, and together with the combo system, makes each level very replayable. Curiously, even though it is a game set in 3D space, you can’t control the camera at all, and have to trust in the developers to show you where you need to go. For the most part this works, however there were a few times in the build I played where I really would have liked to angle the camera slightly differently to help me with a jump.

Penny gets around with the help of her yoyo, which can attack enemy penguins, give you a small vertical boost, be swung from mid air, or even ridden like a unicycle. Interestingly, one aspect in which the game subverts Sonic players’ expectations is with the enemies. Instead of collecting rings which give you some measure of protection against hitting spikes, traps and enemies, here you have avoid the enemy penguins. If too many penguins latch onto you, they’ll take you away and you’ll have to try again. And while you can shake them off pretty easily, it encourages a style of play that I found engaging.

When combined with the need to maintain momentum and speed, avoiding enemy penguins becomes a delightful, frenetic challenge.

That’s not to say every level is a success. Some felt relatively boring, with a lack of ramping of ideas or difficulty. In some places I found how to proceed indecipherable, such as the part where you need to roll over the same lava that in other parts of the level kills you outright. I experienced my fair share of glitches and bugs too, though I do note this is not a final build and the game was updated multiple times during my time with it.

Visually, Penny’s Big Breakaway wears its inspiration on its sleeve. It has a unique style of a lost Sega Saturn or late 32X game, with bright colours, segmented bodies and grainy draw distance. I personally love this style of early 3D games, though I do wonder if it is attractive to those without the nostalgia of someone who grew up with those systems.

The biggest letdown for me with the game was the music. It just doesn’t hit right, with grating tones, repetitive tracks and uninteresting arrangements. The first world’s level music was so bad that I worried that I would have to play the rest of the game with the sound entirely muted. I hope for the final release they can have another crack at it. There were often okay melodies hidden in the musical arrangement, so there is hope for this yet.

3D platformers are having a welcome renaissance, with several strong titles coming out in recent years. And Penny’s Big Breakaway has one of the hardest tasks for itself, not only in trying to capture what made those titles great, but in attempting to convert the tricky momentum-based movement of a 2D Sonic game into 3D (albeit linear) space. It’s a task that Christian Whitehead and team are up for. And while I don’t think Penny’s Big Breakaway quite has everything in place just yet, I’m excited for the full release where some of these rough edges will hopefully have been sanded away.

Penny’s Big Breakaway is coming to pretty much everything in 2024.

The post Penny’s Big Breakaway (PC) Preview appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

2023 saw the return of the latest mainstream entry in the Final Fantasy series in 2023 with the action-RPG styled Final Fantasy XVI.

Telling a complete, compelling story it told the tale of Clive, Jill and Joshua as they strive to rid the world of magic, and by doing so set the downtrodden Bearers free.

But now Final Fantasy XVI is receiving story DLC in the form of Echoes of the Fallen, a new roughly 3 hour chapter set right at the end of the game. Unlike what felt like emergency downloadable content for the last full entry, Final Fantasy XV, this is not a patch up job nor an attempt to make the main narrative somewhat comprehensible. Instead, it is its own thing, fully separated from the main goings on in Valisthea.

As such, it is really only for those who have already invested the 40 odd hours necessary to complete XVI’s main story. To access the DLC at all, you’ll need to be right before the final mission, with a high level character and multiple upgraded Eikon abilities at your disposal. Unfortunately, unlike many recent DLCs, there’s no ability to start this mini-story separately with a pre-configured character. This will limit the number of people who will be able to start the DLC, at least initially, but, if you’ve run out of steam in the main campaign this extra content is not so different to bring you back to it anyway.

The DLC starts off with the revelation that so-called ‘dusk crystals’ are being traded at extravagant prices amongst the desperate populace. Upon investigation, Clive realises these are coming from a previously unknown mothercrystal, one that was created by the previous, technologically-advanced society, the Fallen.  With the help of some fairly poorly voice acted new characters, he conveniently finds this mothercrystal base quite quickly, and sets off to dismantle the entire operation.

So in reality, this DLC is one more ‘dungeon’, just like the other main missions that you have gone through a number of times in the story campaign. It is a shame that the structure adheres so closely to what has come before. Given that the DLC is only accessible at the end of the campaign, it starts to feel a bit rote by the end of it. Fight enemies, move forward, fight a mini-boss, move forward, fight another wave of goons, move forward, and pass muster at a big end battle.

While there is some good lore revealed during your travels, there is little urgency or personality that made me invested in getting to the end of the dungeon. Instead of a rival Dominant to face off against, all I had was a faceless voice speaking technical gibberish and a final boss that had little introduction and an even shorter send-off. Worse, there’s not even any real reward for your troubles, and like the rest of the game the experience, ability points and gil are doled out in disappointingly frugal amounts.

In the end, its more Final Fantasy XVI. If you liked the original game, then this will be a nice little reminder of what was enjoyable about the main experience. It does reveal more about the world and history of Valisthea, even if its impacts are not obvious nor enduring after the DLC’s self-contained story is over. I would have liked to see it impact the world more, and to have more of an impact on the rest of the game, especially in Clive’s abilities.

The post Final Fantasy XVI: Echoes of the Fallen (PlayStation 5) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

When I looked at the first Ghostrunner game I said that  “I can only hope Ghostrunner is the start of a whole new series of titles in the genre.”

Evidently Ghostrunner was enough of a success to make this hope a reality, with the release of Ghostrunner 2 to PC and current-gen consoles. Ghostrunner 2 retains everything that made the original game great, and attempts to expand this even further. But can this experience remain just as focussed while also making itself stand apart from its predecessor?

It is a challenge that every sequel faces, and not all of them pull it off successfully.

Ghostrunner 2 takes place in the aftermath of the first game, and while it does try to tell a story with weight and gravitas, it felt so self-serious that it veered into the unintentionally funny. But while it can feel overwritten, ultimately it sets you up on a number of missions across the same post-apocalyptic steel, cyberpunk environments of the Tower as the first game, and that’s all it needed to do.

As with the first game, the long, first-person platforming missions are the star of the show. The setup is the exact same. Do some parkour inspired platforming, come across arenas of varied enemies and engage in single-hit combat. It’s Hotline Miami but with ninja swords, and when the level design works and you feel in the flow of the game, it rules. This is where the first game shined and where this sequel does too.

The big new innovations of Ghostrunner 2 are what I call your force powers and the motorcycle. Taking cues from any number of cyberpunk media, you gain access to a TRON lightcycle-inspired which now constitutes an entirely different gameplay experience. On the bike you switch between linear race sequences mixed with semi-open world exploration. It’s a bold move to give over this amount of time to an entirely different style of gameplay from the first game, and your opinion on it might vary.

The ‘force powers’ as I call them are also interesting, giving you more options for approaching encounters. These include throwing power shurikens or using a force push style attack. Sometimes encounters are set up to make use of these specifically, which does take away some of the flexibility in approach that’s part of the design of some of the game’s best levels, but overall they were a welcome addition and satisfying to use when you pulled off a particularly clever move. They’re also used during the non-combat platforming sections where they occasionally felt a bit gimmicky to me.

There’s also a hub that you visit between missions where you can upgrade your abilities and make chit chat with a number of NPCs. It feels unnecessary, but does provide a nice change of pace from the frantic platforming of the main missions.

On Xbox there are three performance modes – quality, performance and high frame rate (if you have a TV that supports 120Hz). I chose the performance mode for my playthrough, which targets 60FPS, essential for this style of fast-paced game. Performance in this mode seemed solid, even in the heat of a room full of goons. While I appreciate the inclusion of a high frame rate mode, unfortunately the hit to image quality from trying to get to this level of performance, even on Xbox Series X, was far too great. The game’s visuals diminish to such an extent that it was legitimately difficult to spot distant enemies, a dealbreaker when a single hit from them can ruin a run. One annoyance I found was that I had to restart the game completely (including on Xbox, quitting the app from quick resume) to get the new mode to activate, despite the UI updating to say it was running in the new mode. I was also pleased to see a performance mode targeting 60FPS for the Xbox Series S, something that’s becoming a bit of a rarity these days.

I reviewed the first Ghostrunner on PC, where I felt at home using a keyboard and mouse to make the quick, precise movements necessary to navigate the game’s tight spaces. My biggest disappointment reviewing the sequel on Xbox is just how incomparable the experiences are. Using a controller was unfortunately significantly more difficult. Lining up shots from your shuriken, or getting the perfect angle on a jump was incredibly frustrating at times, given how quickly and precisely you need to move through the world. And while the first game did have keyboard and mouse support for the Xbox release, unfortunately it doesn’t seem that it is in the sequel.

As a point of comparison, I loaded up the excellent bespoke demo for Ghostrunner 2 on PC and immediately felt at home. I was far faster and far more accurate than before, which ultimately leads to less frustration as I make my way through the levels. This let me get into a focus state without feeling like the physical controls were in my way. Ghostrunner 2 is difficult enough without the controls being an additional layer of complexity. Over time I did get used to the controller, but it never quite felt at home.

Bigger, longer, with more to do, Ghostrunner 2 fulfils everything that a sequel sets out to do. It is no longer the focussed product that the first game was though, and whether that is something that will put you off or keep you interested is a personal preference. For me, the mix between gameplay types is just at the limit of what a Ghostrunner game should be. Any further deviation would, in my opinion, be going too far off track from what made the original games great. We only have to look at classic examples like Rogue Leader III or Starfox Assault to see the risks in expanding too far past your core mechanic.

Ghostrunner 2 is a gorgeous, fast-paced action platformer that at its best matches the heights of the first game. If you loved the original, this second entry is an easy sell. With a great soundtrack, solid performance, and new ways to approach combat, it would be hard, despite some minor quirks, to ask for much more.

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Rock climbing has always been one of my passions that for one reason or another, I haven’t had a lot of chances to actually do for a number of years.

So I was excited to try out Jusant by developer Dontnod, best known for their Life is Strange series. Part platformer, part visual novel, part puzzler, Jusant is a unique experience that not only intrigues but also knows how to leave just enough threads unwound to keep the experience from becoming stale.

Jusant follows the experience of your young nameless hero who appears out of the lifeless, monochrome desert to climb a now-abandoned tower of rock and stone. Where the land and tower once held water and life, now all that remains are the vestiges of a close-knit, vibrant, but dying community as they grapple with ever-decreasing natural resources. Your job is to climb this tower, moving from climbing hold to climbing hold ever upwards. There’s never an express reason given for you doing this, but, not to give too much away, as you do it becomes clear why it’s so important you finish your climb.

The tower is split into a number of biomes, each different not only in look and feel but also in environment-specific gameplay mechanics. The lower levels are simple enough, but soon you are learning how to use your new skills in chains and combinations that while never difficult, are increasingly challenging. From simple movements going from rock hold to rock hold, you move to swinging via ropes, and managing your stamina over marathon climbs. It all adds up to a great experience that is shaken up enough not to feel too repetitive. Plus, there are some other abilities unlocked that I’ll save for your own discovery.

A game about rock climbing could be incredibly frustrating if the penalty for falling were to be extreme. Fortunately, there are a number of tools Jusant gives you to keep you from getting too frustrated. You can create an anchor point practically anywhere, which acts as a sort of mini checkpoint in case you do fall. There are relay stations which reset your rope length and stamina, and the game is smart enough to give you enough stopping points along the way to reset and recharge before the next climb.

At these stops you’ll find the remnants of a civilisation whose lives centred around the tower. In letters, newspaper clippings, advertisements, and diary entries you’ll come to know the daily goings-on of some of these inhabitants. As you climb, the tone of these writings are increasingly more desperate. As the water disappears and lives are more deeply affected, people try to adapt or leave for the unknown in the surrounding desert in search of something that could save the tower, or just themselves.

The writing is powerful, and the gorgeous environments tell their own story of everyday life and despair. Otherwise, there’s no talking or dialogue at all, so it’ll be up to you to discover these entries if you want to know what is happening in the world. I would have liked to see a little more explicit motivation for the main character, who seems to be a passenger in their own journey but if you’re willing to dig there’s a powerful story to be told.

Jusant could have been tedious, with long stretches of repetitive movements and each mechanic used a few too many times to be interesting without getting bored or frustrated. But developers dontnod know when to move on to a new environment, mechanic, or setting to keep things mixed up, even if each idea could have been used in perhaps a couple more dramatic ways before it was discarded. It felt like there was a chance for a slightly more impactful denouement for each climbing challenge and mechanic. Instead the drama is reserved for a narrative payoff, which some might prefer anyway.

Playing Jusant made me consider our own world.

What happens to us when we are faced with a changing environment – do we have blind faith that it’ll all work out, do we reach out to the unknown as a last-ditch hope, do we adapt and curl up until we stop? Jusant’s  lone wanderer doesn’t have any specific answers to addressing environmental collapse. But they do show us we should be working at it, to play an active part, to climb, as it were, our own tower.

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Gaming laptops need as much help as they can.

They are pushed in every way to do as much as they can with as little as they can get away with. Whether that’s CPU performance, battery life, cooling weight or GPU power, gaming laptops can fall short when even one of these elements is compromised. You can have all the power in the world but a laptop operating above thermal limits won’t perform and will sound and feel horrible while doing it. A weak GPU may or a GPU not being fed enough power will mean a subpar performance experience.

Some of the latest technologies have been helpful in this regard. On the CPU side we have seen the introduction of e-cores into higher end CPUs, allowing low-power needs tasks to be moved to more efficient cores while reserving the higher-powered cores only for the most demanding tasks.

On the GPU side, NVIDIA’s tensor-core powered DLSS has been an excellent way to reduce GPU demand by rendering at a lower base resolution, thus boosting the possible performance for all GPUs, but is especially useful for laptops in power-limited scenarios. Of course, AMD’s FSR2 and other temporal upscaling solutions are also present, but the fact that DLSS operates on dedicated hardware can be a significant win for a laptop’s power management.

The next stage in NVIDIA’s bag of performance-enhancing tricks is frame generation, or what they call DLSS 3. This allows the GPU to intelligently interpolate frames, boosting the perceptible frame-rate significantly. While not a perfect solution, it again is a boon for laptop users looking to move into and above playable framerates while not overstressing components that would otherwise be using more energy and power and thus reducing battery life and increasing the need for complex heat management solutions.

So in this vein I was excited to test Acer’s Predator Helios 16. The version I tested boasted a Core i7-13700HX, 16GB of RAM and an RTX 4060 GPU, which provided an excellent test bed for how DLSS3 can benefit a laptop’s performance.

Starting from the outside first however, I was struck by two things. Firstly, I was excited to see a gaming laptop embrace the 16:10 aspect ratio, with the Acer Predator Helios 16 featuring a large 16” 2560×1600 display. Personally, I love this taller display ratio, which allows your game to fill more of your view, and makes for a much improved productivity experience. I am also glad that gaming laptops have finally made the move to greater than 1080p displays, which were starting to look a bit low-resolution in the 2020s.

Otherwise, the laptop has a relatively understated look, with a good selection of ports available on nearly all sides of the device. It’s not a small laptop by any means – nobody is going to mistake this as a MacBook Air – but it retains a decent semblance of portability while containing adequate cooling solutions for high-stress gaming. I was delighted to see two Thunderbolt 4 ports, which are an excellent addition for gaming laptops, letting you plug into an external eGPU and high speed storage solutions when at a desk. It also helps stretch the longevity of the device, letting the included RTX 4060 age gracefully given there is the option to utilise the inevitable next generation of GPUs when plugged in.

The laptop’s storage and RAM are also upgradeable, which while not necessary out of the box also help the laptop be more serviceable and repairable, while letting you adjust the machine to your computer-use needs as they change over time.

Now onto the software experience. Unfortunately, like most Windows laptops, the Acer Predator Helios 16 was practically submerged with additional programs and pre-installed software out of the box. I wasn’t a fan of the included applications, including the power profile management software, which seemed overdesigned for what it offered with a strong “gaming” vibe. Add to that Windows 11’s self-advertising and it can take a while to set up the laptop to your liking. Your mileage may vary here of course, so take this with a grain of salt.

Onto the gaming experience. With a Core i7-13700HX I never found myself CPU-limited in gaming in any typical gaming session. It is nearly overkill for the other components, but I loved having this power at my disposal, and again if you plug in the laptop to an eGPU, the CPU will run free of battery life or contention for power with the GPU.

As a desktop GPU, the NVIDIA RTX 4060 may be somewhat maligned compared to its 3060 predecessor, but with the addition of a new much more efficient processing node and the incorporation of DLSS 3, the benefits for portable devices is significant. 8GB of VRAM is currently sufficient for ~1440p gaming, and on the more compact screen of a laptop even if you have to drop down texture resolution a step or two it’s less likely to be as noticeable as on a larger display.

Overall, I was able to happily hit my framerate targets at native resolution using a combination of pure rasterization and ray tracing performance, DLSS upscaling and DLSS 3 frame generation. Otherwise, you can gain back a decent chunk of performance in some titles by dropping the resolution down to a more manageable 2560×1440 16:9 setting.

DLSS 3 is somewhat of a game changer for laptops, honestly. I found myself utilizing it in two ways. Firstly, once you get to a sufficiently high level of performance (such as 60FPS), you can switch on frame generation to add extra frames without significantly increasing the laptop’s workload. This means you can play at perceivably higher frame rates without the extra heat, noise and battery life hit that you would otherwise have. In other situations, I really did want to (or need to) push the laptop to its limits. In these circumstances, turning on frame generation extended the top end of performance above what would otherwise be possible.

Now DLSS 3 frame generation isn’t available in every title, but for those where it is available, it can be transformative. The hardware upscaling functions of NVIDIA GPUs (rather than relying on the power-hungry main shader cores) make a clear case for why the green team’s silicon could be considered essential for laptop use cases where you want to extend performance by any means necessary without having a commensurate drop in image quality.

While the system is overall quite snappy and performant, during heavy I/O workloads I did notice that the SSD speed did waver significantly. Perhaps this points to a junk chip, but it also could point to ineffective or insufficient cooling for what are rapidly becoming devices pumping out significant heat, especially considering the compact confines of a gaming laptop, competing with a powerful CPU and GPU. In each run of crystaldiskmark I got wildly different results, with some pointing to near top speed for PCIe 4.0 while others crashing down to PCIe 3.0 speeds. Perhaps a more efficient NVMe SSD could be used here, or maybe it’s just a function of where the device sits in relation to its nearby components.

And as with nearly all gaming laptops, at the top performance level the Acer Predator Helios 16 can get quite loud – good headphones will be essential if you’re playing meaty AAA 3D gaming titles.

Otherwise, the Acer Predator Helios 16 was a great addition to my gaming life for a few weeks. There wasn’t a title that I felt it was impossible to get good gaming performance out of, and the 16:10 ratio made general computer use more pleasant. The keyboard was fine, and while battery life wasn’t good, this is fairly par for the course with these sorts of devices.

So if you’re looking for a gaming laptop that has something slightly different, without being too wacky (and the price tag that comes along with “unique” designs), the Acer Predator Helios 16 is a solid choice. There’s portability, expandability, and a supporting raft of technologies to help you get to playable performance. I would love for gaming laptops to get better at low power to idle power use, but until that day comes you wouldn’t do wrong picking up a Helios 16 for yourself.

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Blasphemous II is about as much of a direct sequel as anyone can expect.

Developer The Game Kitchen was onto a good thing when Blasphemous released in 2019, featuring dreary, beautiful artwork inspired by the Santa Semana and gothic Catholicism and fast-paced, soulslike 2D hack and slash combat.

And they have not deviated much from what saw them success. Like the most traditional follow-up, nearly every aspect of this game has been expanded, refined and improved. But for those looking for something more, Blasphemous II might fall short.

Core to any 2D metroidvania-esque platformer, especially one as tough as Blasphemous II, is your weaponry. Up from the one sword from the first game, in Blasphemous II you now have access to three weapons – a heavy flail, a pair of lightweight rapiers, and a more balanced large knife.

You choose one to start the game with, and the others are discovered in areas of the game’s map, set in an environment where they will be most effective. Each weapon has their own specific benefits and drawbacks in combat, with unique skill upgrade paths that you slowly unlock over the game.

In addition, each weapon has unique capabilities to unlock traversal options. The flail can ring bells to instantiate temporary platforms, the knife can slice through certain parts of walls if used from a great height, and the rapiers can use a dash into mirrors to teleport across a room. This gives you a great sense of progress in drip-feeding you new ways to move, and there are many opportunities for backtracking to access previously-inaccessible upgrades and shortcuts. Once you make your way deeper into the game, in rooms requiring tricky platforming skills you’ll even be asked to use multiple weapons in one hit. This can take some getting used to, and you’ll need some quick reflexes to make it through.

Bosses too are best approached with a specific weapon, though there’s nothing stopping you from trying with any of them if you prefer their style. Unfortunately I did find that most of the skills became too complicated to use effectively in these high-stakes, fast-moving encounters, and it was often easier just to chip away at enemies with basic attacks and dodges.

Speaking of enemies, while there are a much greater overall variety of enemies over the course of the game, each area does have a relatively limited set of goons to get through. Those priests carrying candelabras (which themselves are very similar to enemies from the first game) were particularly annoying. And you’ll see the same mini bosses sprinkled throughout the game, which can grow tiring. I was also not a fan of the forced combat arenas, which felt like the developers trying to squeeze out a bit longer on playtimes without having to actually create any new content.

The feature I disliked the most though, was how Blasphemous II punished failure. See, you have two bars, one health and one roughly equating to mana. Each time you die, your mana bar gets decreased, and can only be restored after paying exorbitant amounts of rate in game cash to an NPC in a particular location.

This disincentives engaging with the more difficult fights of the game, and when you are stuck on a boss it’s simply frustrating to lose access to some of your skills and fighting capabilities. This is just another reason why the basic attack combos were my go to technique throughout the game.

The atmosphere and sense of mystique that pervades Blasphemous II, just as it did for Blasphemous, really is second to none. I was constantly amazed at the detailed pixel art that was astonishingly animated. It’s still as gruesome, captivating and twisted as it ever was.

And the platforming can be good too. But the overall package left me a bit disinterested. This was probably due to a feeling that I wasn’t able to engage deeply in the game’s various combat mechanics, or perhaps that it wasn’t worth my time learning to do so, so the thing that is the focus of Blasphemous II – hack and slash combat, felt rote after a few hours.

That said, this may be entirely me. There is certainly scope in the game itself to play with a more complex, perhaps effective combat style than what I ended up with. In which case, I dare say your time with the game will be far more engaging. If you loved the first game, for example, there will be plenty here that you’ll be excited about. And the world, setting and new traversal options are all there to explore. In many ways, it’s a meaty upgrade from the first game. And in the end, more Blasphemous is never a bad thing, even if the whole package didn’t quite make the impact on me I wish it did.

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