Top 5 Worst Games of 2014.

There have been a lot of good games in 2014 but it’s time to name and shame the games that exist in the landfill of rubbish in the gaming industry. Remember these are my opinions and if you don’t agree that is fine, but be mature about it and not like a juvenile delinquent.

 

5. Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes.

I can hear people polishing their guns and sharpening their pitch forks from a mile away, let me get one thing straight the game itself is not terrible there is nothing broken or glitched about it. It was the business practise behind it that Kojima and Konami were selling a demo at £40 in the UK for a physical copy that is unacceptable. I can hear people whining already “I got hundreds of hours out of it”. You can do that with any game if you want to drain the juices out of it and try justifying this game, but in my opinion this game should have been a free download and not a paid demo and yes it is a demo Kojima chopped the intro off Phantom Pain. This game is setting a dangerous trend in the industry and people are praising this.

 

 

4. Enemy Front.

After the flood of shooters set in the modern day trying to copy the success of Call of Duty Modern Warfare which got really boring fast and were just cookie cutter at best. When I heard of Enemy Front I thought well that’s a nice change for once because World War II shooters are almost non-existent these days, but oh dear this game was just horrible. The game is a buggy mess with dumb AI, muddy graphics that claim it runs on the Cryengine and bad voice acting that isn’t even laughable along with floaty and stiff controls that will make you cry. Avoid this game!

 

 

3. The Amazing Spider Man the Game.

Movie tie in games are notorious for being abysmal but in recent memories games that are based from film have shown us that they don’t have to be rushed or terrible such as Shadow of Mordor and Alien Isolation. This game is an ungodly mess and considering that the game was hyped up with the web swinging mechanic it was a big fail overall. The game was on 8th gen consoles and looked like something that was on the PS2 with its bizarre character model shapes and muddy graphics. The game’s controls are trying to mimicking Batman Arkham’s fantastic hand to hand fighting, but with its dumb AI it becomes a tedious button masher.

 

 

2. Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric.

What do you think when I say Sonic? Speed? Well not according to this game where you have Sonic doing a leisurely jog throughout his adventure. What happened Sega? You gave us Sonic Generations which was actually pretty good then you give us an absolute mess which includes glitches such as falling though the level randomly, being able to bypass whole sections of the game by clipping through walls and graphics that are bare bones and muddy coupled with unplayable frame rates when you hit speed segments.

 

 

1. Rambo the Video Game.

This game honestly confuses me who asked for this to be made? Is there another Rambo film in the making that I’m not aware of? Anyway this is an on rails shooter, yes you heard me right a game that was made for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC is an on rails shooter a genre that is no longer relevant on home consoles and are more at home in the arcade. This game takes bits from the first three Rambo films, but obviously they couldn’t get Stallone or any other of the actors to do their role again because every single piece of dialogue is ripped from the films to play out these vomit inducing cutscenes with its ugly character models and environments which I’ve seen better work on the 6th gen consoles.

Well those are the games that I think were the worst of 2014 let’s hope in 2015 we get more good titles rather than rubbish disguised as a game let me know if you have any others on Twitter by tweeting @Bristoliangamer with the hash tag #Worstgames2014.

Little Big Planet 3 Review - Something that is light hearted for once.

 

By Sam Coles:

After all the releases of the really serious games such as Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed it’s nice to sit down and play a game that doesn’t take itself seriously which is also charming, funny and light hearted.

 

 

Little Big Planet 3 opens with the familiar and soothing tones of Stephen Fry’s voice coupled with Hugh Laurie who plays the dim witted light bulb headed Newton which suits Hugh’s abilities to play a character who is well.... stupid. The story takes place in a world called Bunkum and you are first introduced to Newton as a friendly moron who wants to help, but he then gets taken control by the titans of Bunkum and wants to rule all creativity.

 

 

 

You as Sackboy or girl must awaken the three heroes’ of Bunkum you have Oddsock who is a dog like creature who can wall jump and scale walls, Toggle who speaks by his name he can toggle from small to big and Swoop who has flying abilities from gliding to well... flying.

 

The graphics and the presentation are what you would expect from a Little Big Planet game they’re absolutely beautiful with the varied levels and locales which can be from the swamps to Arctic. It’s not your standard side scrolling platformer this time it has added depth where you can travel into the background and yeah this isn’t anything new to the genre, but with the added depth of field effects it emphasises the distance with sack boy with the background and foreground.

 

 

The gameplay is more or less the same when it comes to the standard Little Big Planet tropes where you move through a level collecting orbs for points and stickers and outfits to customise your sack person. I still have a problem with the way Sackboy controls because he still feels really floaty and it can be especially annoying when you are doing very precise platforming. The other characters have tighter controls and it’s a shame that you don’t get to use them that much in the main single player campaign, the Oddsock segments are the best because it is fast and tight to control and you really feel the momentum of the character. The gameplay doesn’t completely suck me out of it; it’s just the fact that they still haven’t change the way Sackboy feels maybe did it on purpose who knows?

 

Yet again you can customise your home hub where you select levels with stickers that you’ve collected throughout your travels and also you can be as ostentatious as you like with your Sackperson looks or you can make him or her look like an idiot.

  

Music and sound design is top notch as always with some great music that suits the environments and sometimes keeps up with the speed of platforming. One of the best parts of the game is where you have a Marlon Brando cameo called Marlon Random because he is a method actor. Its set in a 1950’s setting with songs such as “Sandman” playing in the background.

 

The problems I’ve had with this game are glitches, the main glitch that I’ve encountered throughout my adventures are points in the levels where Sackboy would suddenly fall through the level geometry into an abyss, but this has been ironed out with a patch. I had horrendous frame rate problems at the start of the game it was jittering in the tutorial and it was unplayable in some bits in the high teens with FPS.

 

Besides those problems Little Big Planet 3 is a fun game if you’re looking something that is less serious and is light hearted this game would make a great gift for an adult or a child this Christmas.

Chivalry Medieval Warfare Xbox 360 Review - Brutally Satisfying Combat.

By Sam Coles:

 

The medieval carnage that first graced its presence on the PC back in 2012 finally makes it to consoles. No not the PS4 and Xbox One, but their older brothers the PS3 and the Xbox 360 and the question is does it hold up well on consoles? Yes and No.

 

Chivalry Medieval Warfare is an FPS game but instead of have guns and all the usual tropes of an FPS, you have swords, maces, battle axes, bows, crossbows and much more. This game is multiplayer only although there is a singleplayer mode, but it does the Quake III way of thinking when they say singleplayer which means it consists of matches with bots, so you might as well jump into to multiplayer, that is if you have an Xbox Live Gold membership.

 

 

 

The gameplay has a first person perspective although you can change it to third person, but I would recommend sticking to first person because it’s easier to hit things or shoot people if you are playing the role of an archer. Your characters that you control feel heavy and you may look at this in a negative light, but that is not the case because it feels as if you are swinging a claymore and cutting off that person’s head and you really feel the fatigue and the over encumbered characters with their weaponry and armour. 

 

You have four classes to choose from before you head out into battle and get you limbs dismembered from your portfolio, you have the Archer who can use bows and cross bows along with a dagger as his side arm, you have the man at arms who can use one handed swords, axes, maces and Warhammers coupled with a shield, there is the Vanguard who uses long reach two hand weapons such as claymores, axes, lances and two hand Warhammers and finally you have the knight who is similar to the Vanguard because he uses two handed weapons, but he is heavily armoured. 

 

The game modes you can take part in this game are Team Deathmatch which if you’ve played any multiplayer game you know what this is, Team Objective which have a selection of creative scenarios such as invading a village and burning it down along with killing all peasants you know the sort of thing you would expect in a medieval game. Free for all where it’s every man for themselves where you have to kill as many people as you can, duel where there are only two of you and have a select number of rounds with no respawns in each and capture the flag.

 

 

Graphically the game is nothing to ride home about but to be honest the game wasn’t exactly a graphical power house on the PC either; however they do the service that they are there for. Little things like textures popping do happen but not too frequently, but that only seems to happen at the start of matches because you are playing online and it’s loading players and textures at the same time. The blood and gore effects make the game extremely satisfying especially when you get a well-placed headshot on your enemy and you see their head explode or fly off it really makes the weapons feel like that they have some punch when you slash your blade through someone. The sound design is excellent with your enemy’s death whales or when you make your character scream as you’re charging into battle, you can really tell that the sound department had a lot of fun when designing the sound in this game everything from the death screams to the sounds of slashing and squishing when you lock blades or maces.

 

The few nit-picks that I have with this game is the lag and latency issues that are currently in the game that could be because it uses a peer to peer connection, but it doesn’t help when your enemies are warping around you when you are trying to kill them. Graphics have a problem loading sometimes, but again that could be factored with the game being an online game and it’s expected. Although the sound is top notch it does have a habit of coming in at a delay sometimes or it is non-existent and it will drop out altogether such as the slash effects or you character’s dialogue.

 

Chivalry Medieval Warfare is a fun game to play with friends if you still have your last gen system although there are some flaws at this point with the connection problems as well as there not being any form of host migration, but it is still a fun game when you get into a game without the problems. Let’s hope they patch it soon.