FAR CRY PRIMAL REVIEW

It’s hard to imagine any other modern first-person shooter series being able to make a 12,000 year trip back in time and arrive there with its identity still intact, but Far Cry Primal has made it work. The series’ now familiar one-man-versus-a-savage-frontier shtick has survived the transition admirably and Primal remains packed with many of the same great gameplay loops that have come to define the franchise, just with a primitive twist.

Primal’s prehistoric, low-tech version of the Far Cry experience feels surprisingly authentic thanks to the game’s completely bespoke language (the simple dialogue is conveyed entirely with subtitles), its large, convincing environment, and its great character design. It’s overflowing with brutal and satisfying close-quarters combat, and the new ability to tame wild beasts also adds a welcome additional layer of tactical choice to assaults on the enemy. It’s undermined, however, by a startlingly basic plot, some disappointingly uncharismatic villains, and often bland mission objectives. The result is a lengthy and competent game with plenty to discover and conquer, but one that unfortunately contains far fewer memorable moments than its forebears.

 Far Cry Primal’s 10,000 BCE Stone Age setting takes us back into human prehistory, casting us as a hunter called Takkar, who's part of a fractured tribe known as the Wenja. We also know he has a beard because, well, you can see it in his little icon on the in-game map screen. Unfortunately, that’s more or less all we ever learn about Takkar and, as such, he isn’t an especially engaging or interesting protagonist.

Of course, one of Far Cry’s real fortes is its ability (particularly in more recent instalments) to make up for its ho-hum leads with some truly scene-stealing antagonists, like Far Cry 4’s sadistic Pagan Min or, better still, Far Cry 3’s frighteningly unpredictable Vaas. Regrettably Primal falls flat here too; neither of Primal’s main villains are a patch on a character like Vaas. A considerable letdown for a series that’s carved out a reputation for fascinating and nuanced bad guys.

When Three Tribes Go to War

Takkar's goal is to help establish the Wenja as the dominant tribe in the game’s large world, Oros, which is a mixture of rolling plains, lush forests, and inhospitable ice. To achieve victory over two separate enemy tribes (the Udam and the Izila) Takkar must work alongside several allies to gain the abilities he needs to defeat the leader of each tribe. Unfortunately this elevator pitch is also the entire plot synopsis, because that’s pretty much all there is to Primal. Ubisoft has made a move away from Far Cry’s traditionally more linear storytelling but at a hefty cost.

It took me around 20 hours to get through Primal’s main campaign and just some of the available side quests, and the story does retain Far Cry’s now-signature supernatural flourishes, but it lacks any real twists, intrigue, rollicking set-pieces, drama, or depth. Primal simply hums along sedately until culminating in a pair of standard-issue boss fights.

Supporting characters feel largely absent beyond their handful of associated missions and have very little to do with Takkar outside of cutscenes. It’s a shame we don’t see much of them over the game’s duration because I quite like the secondary cast; from the one-eyed guy who expresses his brotherly respect via swift headbutts, to the one-armed bloke who I suspect peed on me just so he could choose my nickname. Even the clearly traumatised woman with the ear fetish grew on me. They’ll happily join your village and mooch living quarters built from your hard-earned booty, but don’t expect to see them out in the wild helping you when things get dire.

The detailed character design and costumes on these allies is uniformly excellent, though, and they’re covered in cracking facepaint and nasty scars and adorned with various furs, bones, and sticks. Their performances are good too in the context of Primal’s credible, ancient feel. Well, all except for the jarringly odd Evel Knievel caveman who appears to have strolled directly off the set of a secret sequel to Encino Man. I know he’s a nod to Far Cry regular Hurk, and I appreciate the comic relief, but the thick American accent may be jumping the sabre-toothed shark.

The detailed character design and costumes on these allies is uniformly excellent, though, and they’re covered in cracking facepaint and nasty scars and adorned with various furs, bones, and sticks. Their performances are good too in the context of Primal’s credible, ancient feel. Well, all except for the jarringly odd Evel Knievel caveman who appears to have strolled directly off the set of a secret sequel to Encino Man. I know he’s a nod to Far Cry regular Hurk, and I appreciate the comic relief, but the thick American accent may be jumping the sabre-toothed shark.

PlayStation Vita review

link mix

PS VITA - INTRODUCTION

The Sony PS Vita price has dropped to around the £200 mark on its UK launch as the company banks on a dedicated mobile gaming console. “It only does everything” used to be the slogan for Sony’s Playstation 3, but it’s a phrase that could apply just as well to PS Vita. It’s a Swiss army knife of mobile gaming hardware, with so much power and so many built-in gadgets and gizmos that it’s hard to imagine any type of game it couldn’t cover and it any type of gamer it couldn’t satisfy. Whereas the PSP simply aspired to being a PS 2 in your pocket, PlayStation Vita wants more. It has the screen, the dual analogue sticks and the graphics power that hardcore gamers demand, but also the touch functionality, cameras, tilt controls and quirky download games to reach those looking for something less traditional. It’s all games machines to all men.

PS VITA - DESIGN

The physical design is an evolution of Sony's PSP Slim and Lite, the front dominated by the whopping 5-inch screen, with the dual analog pads to either side, the D-Pad on the left and the face buttons on the right, in a layout that will immediately seem natural to anyone famiiar wth a dual-shock 3 controller. Of course, PS Vita has only two shoulder buttons, modelled in clear pespex to maintain the unit’s elegant lines, but - as we’ll see later - this is less of an issue than it might seem. The Vita feels light and comfortable in your hands, and while the position of the sticks takes a little getting used to, it’s a very easy handheld to use for long periods - much more so than the rather cramp-inducing 3DS. At 280g, it’s comfortably light as well.

PS VITA - CONTROLS

The physical controls work perfectly. We had some minor doubts about the accuracy of the right analogue stick while trying to aim in Uncharted: The Golden Abyss, but in other titles it doesn’t seem to be a problem, and the feel is just right; arguably one step closer than the 3DS analogue stick in giving you what you’re used to from a full-scale controller. For FPS games it’s going to make a massive difference. And while you might miss the L2 and R2 buttons in some games, it’s unlikely to be a huge problem, for the simple reason that PlayStation Vita has what you might almost call a surfeit of other controls.The most obvious is the capacitive front touchcreen, which is fast, responsive and multitouch aware. Uncharted and many of the PS Vita launch titles use it regularly, both to provide handy onscreen buttons or menu controls, and as a means for swiping or pinching gesture controls. Then there’s the rear touch panel. Prodding it without seeing what you’re doing feels a little unintuitive at first, but once you’ve used it to push ridges in the landscape to roll a pint-sized monster around in Little Deviants, the potential starts to become clear.

Then there’s the Playstation Vita's tilt controls. You can use them in the expected way, tilting to steer in Wipeout 2043 for example, but they become useful in other games as well, allowing changes of view in the Pool game Hustle Kings, or providing an excellent means of fine-tuning sniper shots in Uncharted. Most of all, they come into their own in the Augmented Reality shenanigans of Little Deviants or Reality Fighters, with the former having you rotate physically on the spot to blast alien invaders from the real world skies that surround you, while the latter uses them to control the view of the bout happening on your floor or coffee table.

PS VITA - AUGMENTED REALITY

And it’s augmented reality that makes the most sense of PS Vita’s dual cameras. With a 0.3 megapixel resolution they were never going to be much cop for photography, and low light performance is predictably poor. Yet Sony’s initial efforts at making AR gaming work are great, bite-sized chunks of silly fun. Reality Fighters, for example, allows you to digitise your face, map it onto a CGI body, and then whack ten tons of stuffing out of Vita-owning friends or CPU-controlled opponents in the real-world environment of your choice. The fighters sit quite convincingly within the landscape in front of the lens, and while it’s a novelty act, it’s certainly a good one. The same goes for Little Deviants, where the action in the shoot-em-up segments takes place in the space around you.

All is forgiven, however, when you see that PlayStation Vita screen. An OLED number with a 960 x 544 resolution, it’s a beauty; crisp, clear, with vibrant colours, deep blacks and brightness to spare. If it doesn’t have a true 720p resolution or quite the intense clarity of the iPhone 4’s Retina display, it still goes way beyond the sub-SD resolutions we’re used to in gaming handhelds, and - at the 5in screen size - it’s hard to tell that it’s not HD. It’s an exceptional screen for watching movies or playing games on, and about as good as you’re going to get without moving up the scale to a tablet device.

While you might have expected PlayStation Vita to embrace the XMB interface of the PSP and PS3 (not to mention numerous entertainment devices), Sony has gone for a new user interface. It’s based on the LiveArea a series of vertically scrolling screens with large smarties-shaped icons, which summon odd post-it note launchers that you literally peel off the screen to shut down. When more than one launcher is open, they stack in a 3D view across the screen for easy access. It’s all a little odd, but it fits PlayStation Vita’s touch-friendly approach perfectly, and makes it easy to switch from app to app when you need to.

Hitman Review

Hitman Review

code : MAKRAM

Agent 47 never takes this long. The 2016 version of Hitman plays like the longest assassination of the chrome-domed killer’s lengthy career, thanks to developer IO Interactive’s decision to issue the game via six chapters released roughly from spring to fall. But I’m certainly not complaining about the marketing, given that the final package showcases some of the most enthralling exploits of gaming’s most infamous murderer-for-hire. Sprawling levels, tremendous attention to detail with both graphics and sound design, and countless assassination options make this an engrossing experience that includes some of the best replay value ever seen in a game.

Having come into this season of Hitman only after it was complete, I can’t render a judgment about how the game was released in an episodic format. I’m glad that I got to play through it as a complete experience, and I can’t imagine having to wait weeks to go on my next assignment. But at the same time, I see the appeal of tackling each of the game’s six separate assignments (plus the opening training missions that flash back to the beginning of Agent 47’s career) one by one, given just how much gameplay is jammed into each of them. The individual missions here send you jetting all over the globe like a bald James Bond with a barcode on the back of his head. Everything is linked via brief cutscenes that focus on a figure from Agent 47’s past. But the levels are so big and so packed with details that they take on lives of their own, much like separate movies in a franchise.

The long-running international flavor of the Hitman series has been spiced up here with unique locations that take place in virtually every corner of the world. You prowl a Paris fashion show, sneak around a luxurious villa on the Italian coast, venture into mobs rioting in Moroccan souks, stalk a rock star at a five-star hotel in Thailand, assault the leaders of a militia on a compound in Colorado, and finally explore a private hospital atop a snowy mountain in Japan. Each level looks fantastic and is stuffed with all sorts of nooks and crannies to explore and hundreds of NPCs to interact with--many of whom come with dialogue and specific routines and behaviors that can be figured into your assassinations. The only drawback with the overall presentation is the quality of the NPC dialogue, which is nicely varied and well acted but virtually all spoken with a standard American accent that can kill your suspension of disbelief. Hearing Italian thugs and Cuban soldiers all speaking like average American Joes really takes you out of the moment, at least until you get accustomed to this oddity.

The attention to detail is otherwise superb, though. I typically took a good hour or two wandering around each level, listening in to conversations, and just generally getting the lay of the land before deciding on a course of action. The game offers dozens of ways to kill every target--and even more routes to take to get to them before you shoot them, garrotte them, drown them in toilets, blow them up, poison them, blast them out of an ejector seat in a jet plane, and so on. Every assignment also comes with loads of different people in loads of different professions, which provides even more routes to your victims via the outfits you can remove from their corpses for use as disguises. Want to stay in a secret-agent tux? Or even a snazzy summer suit? Sure thing. But you can also ditch the formal outfits for the garb of a security guard, a male supermodel, a scientist in a hazmat suit, a plague doctor, a chef, and many, many more.

Granted, all of the above makes Hitman more of a funhouse ride than a grim series of contract killings. While it’s fun to encounter switches that drop chandeliers, a hookah that can be poisoned, convenient wire-and-puddle combos that can be turned into electrocution traps, and murderous random accoutrements from bombs to scissors to swords to bricks to fire extinguishers to pretty much everything but the kitchen sink, everything goes well over the top. The game is more of a cartoon than any sort of authentic exploration of the world of contract assassinations--which is certainly a good thing, both for the way this lightens the mood (any game where you can blow up a guy who’s puking into a toilet isn’t one that takes itself too seriously, despite the body count) and also how it provides so much room for murderous creativity.

I don’t think I’ve ever played a game with so many options to reach its goals. The first time through a level is just the beginning. Replay value is spectacular, and maybe even unprecedented for a Hitman game, given the massive size and scope of the levels, the number of NPCs, the number of murderous gadgets and weapons littering every room and corridor, and also because of the added options that open up after an initial run-through. Completing mission challenges unlock frills like new weapons, disguises, and starting locations, which of course offer up new ways to get to and finish off your marks.

And then there is Escalation Mode, a new feature that adds requirements to existing levels. It basically creates new missions that involve you offing multiple new targets in specific ways. Difficulty goes up with each successful assassination assignment. Escalations start with things like murdering a few people in specific ways, say by explosives, and then move on to more complex goals like killing while wearing a specific disguise, finishing off all of your targets in a tight time limit, dumping all the bodies in one location, and so forth.

Elusive Targets is a timed mode that lets you go after special victims (who can’t be seen on the map) with just one chance at success before you lose the contract forever. IO releases these victims into the wild at set times and leaves them up for limited periods of time until they vanish, never to be heard from again. It’s a great added incentive to keep going back to the game, even long after the standard missions and their added challenges wear thin. And Contracts Mode (brought back from 2012’s Hitman: Absolution) allows you to mark random NPCs as targets and set kill requirements, creating missions that can be shared with other players.

https://www.facebook.com/makram.douzi.9

MINECRAFT REVIEW

At this point, Minecraft is such a well-known game that reviewing its content in 2017 seems redundant. (For that, you can check out our reviews of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions and of Minecraft: Pocket Edition.) But with its recent release on the Switch the question that needs answering is how Nintendo’s portable console handles building these fantastic blocky worlds, and the answer is: pretty well.

The Switch Edition of Minecraft takes the appealing portability of Minecraft Pocket Edition and adds the precise, comfortable controls of a console. The convenience of playing Minecraft on the go and easily jumping into online multiplayer with friends on their own Switch devices would make it hard to go back to other versions of if it weren’t missing an essential feature: voice chat. That makes playing with friends who aren’t in the room with you much less fun, since there’s no way to coordinate your efforts with the up to seven other players in a game. You can get that human interaction locally by playing two-player split-screen mode, but this works much better when the Switch is docked, because the screen is a little too small to play in handheld or kickstand mode with multiple people. It’s possible, you just might not be able to see very well.

Like the current PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions (1.5), the Switch’s Minecraft lacks some other features that are on the PC’s 1.9 version, like the reworked combat system. And, unfortunately, Minecraft doesn’t use the Switch’s touch screen for faster inventory management – or anything else – so it’s not quite the best of both the console and Pocket Edition worlds. It does include a bunch of exclusive Super Mario-themed skins, though.

Lastly, I didn’t experience any noticeable slowdowns either in docked or portable modes, though it’s worth noting that Minecraft runs in 720p even while docked. Not that the resolution of these intentionally blocky graphics matters much, of course.

QUALITY

There's an adage that, in life, you'll only get out of it what you're willing to put into it, and that's completely true with this creative adventure. You're literally dropped in the middle of nowhere with nothing more than your wits. Starting off, you'll pick up some wood from a tree, which you'll use to make a batch of sticks. Then you'll attach some more wood to those sticks and make a pickaxe. Using that pickaxe, you can mine some stone to help build a house. And so goes the cycle of the game. You'll spend your time exploring the world around you and harvesting what you can to help create what you need. Over time, you'll learn more about how to find and build more complex materials and tools, combining them to craft new, intricate creations. It's a heavy investment of time and research, and it's likely to cause even the most hard-core gamer some frustration from time to time, but the payoff can be fulfilling. The newest version, on the Nintendo Switch, includes a formidable tutorial that's likely to confuse as many new players as it helps, but by and large the best way to learn Minecraft is to just start playing Minecraft. If you are new to Minecraft, the Nintendo-specific touches help it feel less unfamiliar: The Switch edition bursts with an extra Super Mario texture pack, a set of Super Mario skins for your characters, and an entire Super Mario-themed world to explore with Mario themed music and huge statues of Mario himself.

Minecraft does its best to be all things to all people. If you're the type of person who wants a gaming experience with heroes fighting villains, the game's Survival and Adventure modes offer a classic adventure with players battling the forces of evil while trying to maintain their homesteads. Zombies, skeleton, creepers, endermen, and more come out in force when the sun goes down, forcing the players to craft strong defenses if they hope to see the next sunrise. For those gamers who are less about using an arsenal and more about using a toolbox, there's Creative mode; this is essentially the game's God mode, where you get full access to everything in the Minecraft wheelhouse without having to worry about such things as hostile mobs, hunger, or other things that might cut short your time in the world. Here, players can build to their hearts' content, crafting and testing extravagant projects before sharing them with the world. One thing to keep in mind, though, is the fact that, at any given moment, there are thousands of other people thinking up things to build as well. For every intricate, highly detailed re-creation of some building, game, or other such massive undertaking, there's going to be someone who has used the tools at their disposal to make something juvenile, obscene, or otherwise offensive. And unfortunately, there's no way to really know what you're getting into until you've joined another player's game. This is definitely one time parents should keep an eye on where their kids are visiting online. But once you know what you’re doing, you'll be hard-pressed to leave your computer without placing just one more 

Rainbow 6: Siege review

Available on Xbox One (tested), PS4 and PC

Only a week or so on from launch, Rainbow Six: Siege has become a game that people love or hate with a passion. The fans love it because it's tough, skill-focused, smart and distinctive; a thinking man or woman's shooter that doesn't take all its cues from Call of Duty. The haters hate it because it's neither the Rainbow Six that they remember nor the Rainbow Six they wanted to see. Well, team thumbs down have some very good points, but if you join team thumbs up you'll realise that while Siege might not be a faithful update, it’s a fantastic reinvention.

True, the lack of planning makes for a more action-oriented, less tactical Rainbow Six, though there's more of a tactical dimension to the minute-by-minute gameplay than this implies. You could also argue that there's as much Counter-Strike in Siege's DNA than Rainbow Six, and you'd arguably be right. The lack of any serious single-player content is disappointing, and the graphics can be underwhelming. There's a lot of generic, boxy architecture, flat-looking furniture and bland décor in the world of Siege, while the lighting is a little flat to boot.

Related: Rainbow Six Siege tips and tricks guide

Terrorist Hunt is fantastic, with a powerful ‘just one more go’ factor that’s only amplified by the desire to unlock more operatives and then more weapon mods and customisations for each operative – this all costs a lot of renown. The real meat of Siege, however, is the competitive multiplayer mode. This is a slightly tougher sell.

Multiplayer Siege can be hard to get to grips with. Even more than Terrorist Hunt it requires real teamwork, and without some kind of strategy in place the going’s tough. When Steve originally reviewed the game he would have been playing with other journalists and they would all, likely as not, have been wearing headsets. In post-launch games with regular players, this simply isn’t the case. As a result, synchronised assaults are few and far between, it’s not uncommon to see attack player after attack player blunder into a defence killzone, while team-kills are not as unusual as they really should be. Throw in the odd griefer or the wag who kills the hostage on the way to extraction, and Multiplayer isn’t always what it can be.

But when it comes together, blimey, it’s about as good as team-vs-team action gets. There’s a palpable tension as players hustle to improvise and ambush or a breach, along with plenty of breathless moments where there’s just one man standing against two or three foes. You could argue that the different objectives don’t actually make an awful lot of difference, or that certain weapons or operatives could do with balancing, but there’s something brutal and unpredictable about Siege Multiplayer that just works. Maybe it’s that no wall is really safe (even the toughest can be breached by specific characters) and that your enemies might even burst through the ceiling or blast through the floor, but there’s an energy here that leaves many rivals looking tame.

With time some of the silliest players will leave for other things, while the more committed fans will hone their teamwork and expertise. This will be for the good, but it’ll also make Siege an even more brutally challenging game than it already is. The trick is to stick with it. When you die, you die for a reason. Sometimes it’s because the other player has a better vantage, sometimes it’s because they’re just faster and more accurate. Sometimes you were just clumsy, thoughtless or stupid, blundering into the room with the objective in without a flashbang or smoke. You can spend too long focusing on the sights, or playing with your operative’s gadgets. Lose situational awareness and you’re often dead.

Related: PS4 vs Xbox One