I’ve been a fan of Formula One since I was seven, and since then I’ve woken up early for every race I could, yelled at the screen and armchair commentated through every championship since ’98, yet I never quite fell into the snare of the yearly F1 releases. One of my first experiences was with F1 World Grand Prix, a rendition of the 1997 championship that I still occasionally find myself playing with friends today, despite its simplistic and foggy graphics, monotonous sound and physics engine that’d freak out as soon as we decided to side-slam each other off the track. Despite never finding myself enjoying the more realistic racers – instead sticking to the more fantastic series like Burnout and Mario Kart – I spent far more of my childhood than I rightly remember shut away attempting to pervert the course of history and become the ’97 Champion myself. Even now I have fond memories of snatching the title by a single point with Eddie Irvine (who I chose for no reason other than that we had the same name) or lapping every other car during a ninety minute waterlogged session at Jerez as Mika Hakkinen.

Then sometime during secondary school I was going through the CDs in the room where I’d basically commandeered the computer as my own and discovered Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix Manager 2. I’d played Grand Prix 2 with my dad on occasion, eventually getting frustrated with the joystick and never managing to get to grips with the steering wheel controller he’d eventually bought to play it, but it was with the management sim that I found myself growing to it the most. It didn’t matter that it was based on the 1996 season (making it outdated by at least half a decade) and had an interface that was ugly by any standard, because it allowed me to take any team I wanted and take them to levels of success only eclipsed by Schumacher’s insane run of five world titles in a row. Even though I’d be unable to put it down once I started, there were a myriad of problems with it – or at least that’s how I remember it.

Having multiple save files and the knowledge to save after practically everything you did was the best way of progressing, especially as players were often encouraged to spend the early stages of their career stealing from their rivals. At your behest, members of your team could be sent to infiltrate the bases of rivals, copy their car set-ups for the approaching race and steal the designs for any superior car parts they had that you didn’t, though there was always the risk you could be caught and face sanctions for it – hence why the save and load commands were used so frequently. Then there was the fact I could somehow never get the hang of managing the actual races themselves, as though I was eventually able to set up the cars so that they’d qualify more effectively and be able to give other drivers a run for their money, my team would always end up crashing out of the race no matter what I did. Eventually I sought not to oversee any of the race weekend and my lack of presence was what spurred my team to take home multiple titles and somehow never crash again. With employees like that it’s no wonder I ended up with self-confidence issues.

After years of success, critical acclaim and the fact I somehow couldn’t get it to run on my then newly-acquired laptop, I said goodbye to the world of F1 management and slowly slunk back to the consoles, still avoiding serious racing titles where I could, apart from a brief dalliance with Grand Turismo 4 – a racing sim so serious and po-faced it makes Beefeaters look like they’re dying to burst into a K-Pop dance number. Every now and then I’d diverge from my racing palette of Mario Kart and Burnout to return to my N64 and F1 World Grand Prix, but as the years went on I slowly found the genre falling almost completely to the wayside, save for the repeated urge to swear at some blue shells. That is, until F1 2012.

First laying eyes on it at E3, I was drawn in as I was told all about the litany of changes they were making to everything they’d already established, and when I had it in my hands it handled exactly as I wanted it to. Soon I had to leave and return home, but my excitement never wavered as I eagerly awaited its release. Finally, it was out in stores, downloading on my PC and ready to be blitzed. I smiled as I went through the mandatory Young Driver’s Test, aiming to collect all the gold medals so I could begin my career in a better car, lined up on the grid in a Force India and prepared to give the rest of the grid what for.

Australia passed, as did Malaysia, and I prepared to qualify for the third race of the season, already making a name for myself as a rookie outperforming his midfield car. I was ready to take the session by storm when disaster struck. As it turns out, the save file Steam had in the cloud was different to the one on my PC itself, and so I idly chose to download the save from the cloud, figuring that there’s no reason anything uploaded to the internet could be wrong. Unfortunately, doing so corrupted my save file and I was left to either abandon my career or start from scratch. So again I loaded up F1 2012, took on the Young Driver’s Test and left it at that, resolving to start my season the next day, only to find that once again it hadn’t saved properly, forcing me to start from scratch yet again. Reasoning that there was no point trying to recoup the six hours I’d spent already, I resolved to take my spare time elsewhere and resist its charms.

A month later and the F1 season was hotting up, with its imminent finale responsible for crowning either Fernando Alonso or Sebastian Vettel as a third-time World Champion, and I found myself no longer able to resist. Once again, I logged onto Steam, opened up F1 2012 and navigated the Young Driver’s Test, intent on taking every gold I could, and after a struggle I found myself driving for the best team available, the former front-runners turned mid-fielders Williams F1. Striving for a greater challenge, I ramped the difficulty up to Professional and slowly made my way through the season once again.

Slowly but surely, it became one of my favourite racers, hours went by day after day as I’d labour over every practice session to make sure I had the optimum set-up, qualify again and again as I desperately tried to reach Q3, and I ended up doing every race so many times over I may as well have ran the full amount of laps for each race instead as I found myself occasionally running foul of the stewards’ decisions or flying off the track after a misuse of the DRS boost sent the back-end askew. Hours after hours of honing my craft, never once becoming bored of driving around the same circuit again and again, absorbing every corner, hitting every apex, feeling every single gear change.

Lap by lap, it stopped becoming a game, it became Zen. Everything slowly fell into place as I would find myself coming to every circuit and learning every twist and bend until the lap times fell. I arrived seconds behind the pace, now I’m qualifying in the top ten. I started off as a rookie, now I’m winning races, sitting on the podium, leading from pole, becoming the rainmeister, leading the championship, entertaining offers, settling scores against rivals, and seeing my name pop up time and again on the news coverage. Hours, days flew off the calendar as I set out to become the best. Soon, that title would grace my mantelpiece Soon, I would be Champion.

That’s not to say that my journey was a simple one. On the contrary, it was one fraught with repetition, frequent mistakes and defeat, but after fifty-eight hours of sitting inside a cockpit one starts to notice cracks appearing in the veneer. Rivals rocketing into the distance halfway through the first lap, never to be seen again. Setting the fastest lap of the race, only to see those ahead extend their lead on you by two seconds. Driver after driver losing their front wing after careening into your back-end during a DRS or braking zone. Your team only promoting you to equal status within the team despite scoring over a hundred points more than your heavily-sponsored Venezuelan team-mate by the mid-season mark.

The flaws were there, those wrinkles blemishing an otherwise beautiful face, but soon they became a part of why I loved playing so much. It may have become my personal garden of Zen, but those little problems were ways of keeping me grounded in reality, or tactics I could use to my advantage. They no longer became flaws, just quirks only I seemed to notice about my new love.

Soon the 2013 season began to get under way, and I wasn’t yet done. Despite having wrapped up the Driver’s Championship at an intense race in Korea and cementing the Constructor’s Championship at the inaugural American Grand Prix, 2012 needed to draw to a close as the new year dawned upon the pinnacle of motorsport. I’d bested the Season Challenge mode, I’d bossed the Champions mode, and now all that was left was to finish my first season of F1 2012. Brazil rolled up, and despite a rainy qualifying session I’d managed to fluke sixth on the grid. Throughout my season I’d discovered that all the other cars were massively slow off of the starting line, allowing me to use the KERS boost to leapfrog up to five or six cars by the end of the first sector, then letting any drivers ahead of me speed off into the distance while I saved fuel and held up the rest of rest of the pack, using the additional fuel I’d saved to blitz the later stages of the race when I needed to pit for new tyres. Before moving on to Red Bull, the Williams team and I worked through my strategy for the upcoming race one last time, and then-

Powercut.

I frantically waited for the power to come back on, I logged on to Steam, clicked the play button, and slumped in my chair when I discovered that the momentary lapse in power had corrupted my save file. Another fifty-two hours of my life invested in a game that had already stung me once, and I had as much to show for it as anyone starting it up for the first time. Once again, I’d managed to lose everything. My career went from Champion to DNF: Did Not Finish.

Yet here I am after another stellar F1 race, and all I can think about is throwing myself back into that world again. I don’t want to spend all that time mastering the Young Driver’s Test again, but part of me doesn’t care. I don’t want to start from scratch and make my way through the ranks again, but part of me doesn’t care. I don’t care about those flaws, those repeated accidents, the hours spent trying to achieve perfection, only for them to ring hollow. I don’t care about the fact I should blatantly have been the number one driver by the end of the season, or that I shouldn’t have been offered a place at another team as the number two driver despite winning the Championship. I don’t even care about the fact that for some reason it stopped opening up in full-screen for me and won’t go back no matter how many settings I tinker with so I’m stuck with the task-bar at the bottom of the screen whenever I play and it’s really quite annoying.

I want to come back to you and while away my days taking the racing world by storm. I want to bask in the glory of victory, to stand tall on the podium and feel the satisfaction of a job well done. I want to get the perfect set-up, hit the throttle and run the tyres down to the canvas as I attempt to keep Vettel at bay. I want to, but I can’t any more. My pile of shame is getting more egregious by the day, and as that old saying goes “lose my save once, shame on you, corrupt my save twice, shame on me”. It’s not me, it’s you. Well, it’s not you, it’s your inability to keep my save files consistent between the cloud and my computer and your inability to keep them safe.

Still, here I am, trying to forget you, doing everything I can to resist you, to avoid plugging the controller back into my PC, loading up several hours worth of podcasts and starting anew.

Oh, F1 2012, I just can’t DNF you.

Although I’ve dabbled in Fire Emblem before, I’ve never really been a hardcore fan of the series. I had Shadow Dragon on Old Faithful, but only really played it when I was overloaded on Pokémon. Somewhere along the lines I finished it, but in a lot of ways it passed me by; I enjoyed the strategy elements, and I liked the way that there was some interaction between characters, but it never really had much impact on me.  Awakening only really caught my eye because of a personal drought; I was looking for something to play on my handheld, and it looked like something that would keep me occupied on long journeys. It turned out to be so much more.

Fire Emblem is a long running series of turn based strategy titles set in a fantasy universe. It’s published by Nintendo, and though the first few iterations of the series were exclusive to Japan they’ve been published in the west for about a decade. It’s best known for its characters Marth, Roy and Ike appearing in Super Smash Bros Melee, which is hardly an accurate representation of the series or how they play.

In fact, they’re a far more considered and intense experience, with a heavy focus on making the players think. I’ve played few titles that are more tactical, or more punishing, than Awakening, despite its familiar feel. The actual mechanics are nothing particularly unique, with most encounters feeling much like any other turn-based strategy. You move units around the map, fighting enemies called the Risen. Usually the enemies far outnumber your men, but if you are smart with positioning and tactics you should usually walk away without any casualties, especially since you are told before entering battle how much damage you will do, the chances of your attack hitting and even whether you should bother hoping for a critical hit.

However, things begin to feel less typical the moment your units begin to enter combat. Fire Emblem operates on a rock-paper-scissor system, with three distinct types of weaponry that interact with each other. The basis of the system is that swords are strong against axes, which are strong against lances, which are in turn strong against swords. Units can also use ranged weapons in the form of bows and magic which, although outside of the system, have their own strengths and weaknesses.  This creates an extra layer of tactics that bears thinking about and constant supervision, as each character is only able to wield certain weapons. On top of that, should you make a mistake and advance too far, or get into a fight with the wrong character or weapon there is a harsh punishment doled out: permadeath.

Admittedly this is not the only turn based strategy to play the permadeath card – XCOM instantly comes to mind as a recent example – but few have the same impact as Awakening. Over the course of the campaign it’s easy to become attached to the characters that you control – especially when they begin developing relationships – so the loss of any of them can be devastating. Some of my most intense moments in gaming have been had over the last few weeks as I urged my little companions onwards. Once or twice I genuinely choked up as I watched one of the units that I had shepherded all the way through the campaign slowly fall to their death (there is a dramatic slow-mo for the occasion).  I was so devastated by the loss of these characters because, to me, they weren’t simply units. I was invested in the characters, and had not only guided them through the many battles that they faced, but also shaped their very lives. By allowing the player to glimpse and mold the lives of the characters that they control, a remarkably emotional bond is formed.

This dialogue, interaction and relationship building between an interesting cast of characters is Awakening’s strongest feature, providing one of the most engrossing and fascinating narratives I’ve experienced, in a game or otherwise. It all revolves around two core characters; Chrom, the main protagonist of the story, and the player character, who can be named whatever you desire. In my case he was Natsu, a tall man with a scarred face and pink anime hair. There are customisation options that fall somewhere between limited and plentiful – there are a fair few, but not quite as many as I’d ideally like.

Along with Chrom this player character can work and establish a relationship with any other character, and there are a fair few to meet. Relationships are built by fighting battles together, either by using a pair-up feature that essentially combines two units into one for the duration of the battle, or by simply attacking an enemy unit while standing next a friendly one. As relationships between characters grow, so does their ability to fight together, providing bonuses to a myriad of attributes when they take on enemies as a team. If they have a particularly high relationship (they’re ranked from C to S) there’s even the possibility the support combatant – the person who is not attacking or being attacked – might defend their partner from an attack or even join in and land an extra blow on the enemy.

Every time a relationship between two characters improves a notch the player is treated to a little scene that shows their relationship building, often providing some back-story as well. As relationships between your squad improves, so does your understanding of their motivations and personal stories, making them feel more and more like real people as the game goes on, which only makes it worse when one of them dies.

There is plenty of opportunity for them to die as disastrous scenario after disastrous scenario is thrown at you. The story accommodates this well enough, beginning with the discovery of the player character unconscious and amnesiatic – that’s totally a word – in a field by Chrom whilst on patrol. With no memories apart from his or her name, the player character is essentially adopted by Chrom as if they were a stray cat. From that point on they are a part of the Shepherds, Chrom’s crack squad of elite knights who protect the realm – or Halidom as they call it – of Ylisse.  As the small squad who discovered the player character is returning to the capital of Ylisse they are waylaid by a dark enemy called the Risen, who are a completely evil force who seem to want nothing more than to kill, well, everything. They fight off the Risen with the assistance of mysterious swordsman who claims to be Marth, the hero of legend, who disappears after the fight.  Ylisse is also under attack by the neighbouring kingdom of Plegia, who have long held a grudge against Ylisse. Marth and the Shepherds rush to the defence of Ylisse, the climax of which starts the story in earnest.

It’s remarkably difficult to avoid spoilers on this bit, but I’m going to my best, because this next bit is a vital mechanic in Awakening. In order to prevent a future where a vital character has died and the world has been taken over by a dark overlord, several youngsters somehow make their way back in time. They are the children of the current Shepherds, who are trying to help their parents escape their future.  In all honesty this is perhaps my least favourite part of the story, as it does open up the door for some paradoxes along the way, but thankfully it redeemed itself late in the story with some very clever tying up of ends. I admit that I was sceptical at the start (I’m not the biggest fan of time travel) but it managed to convince me otherwise, especially as it makes it possible for the story and the clever relationship mechanic to intertwine.

When a relationship between two characters reaches the highest rank they will get married, and when they do they invariably have a child or two. At a certain point in the story those children can be recruited to join the fight, as long as you complete the feud that they are encountered in, and they are convinced by Chrom to switch sides.  Presuming you do, and they survive a few battles, you’ll get the opportunity to upgrade each of your characters, and even have the opportunity to change their class if need be, but only once your character reaches a certain level.

As characters defeat enemies their levels improve, up to a maximum of twenty (some other characters have higher caps) and alongside that there is a completely separate system that dictates the weapons skill of the character, which in turn dictates what weapons they can use. Changing class can change the weapons that a character can use, but not the level of skill they have with it. This can be a real salve, especially if (like me) you lose your only archer character within the first few missions. In order to change class you require ‘seals’ that cost a fair chunk of the money you can scrape together, much like the weapons you are almost constantly buying.

Each item of weaponry you equip your squad with is only good for a set number of uses, which can vary anywhere between three and forty-five. The general rule of thumb is that the more damage the weapon lays out, the more wear and tear it takes and so it has fewer uses. Weapons can be repaired by giving up weapons of the same type in order to combine their uses, or simply replaced by paying a visit to the blacksmith. Better yet, if you find a weapon that you really love (or if you can’t find anything that suits) you can upgrade and improve that weapon to your specification. You can even name it.

Some of the characteristics are limited to the weapon that you used as source material, most obviously the design. This is seldom too much of an issue, as most of the weaponry (along with the rest of the game) looks great. Everything has been given something of an anime twist, with swords rather oversized and armour similarly extravagant. During battles and cutscenes the characters appear in full 3D glory (which is actually a little iffy – why doesn’t anyone have feet!?) but during conversations they are represented by beautiful 2D drawings that really put the 3D work in its place.

Despite the lack of feet and being a bit outclassed by the 2D work, the character models are actually pretty good, and watching them flow through their battle animations is a real joy and delight. Watching them toddle about in cut-scenes is endearing as well, so the divide between the 3D and 2D stuff is pretty much a non-issue. In reality it’s actually a nice change from previous Fire Emblem titles where everything was done in the same 2D style as the conversations, which might account for the slight variance in quality. That said, when the 3D slider is up the quality difference grows even smaller – Awakening looks phenomenal in 3D. Characters pop, everything is distinct and clear and it truly is a joy to watch.

Even with the graphics quality varying on occasion, Fire Emblem Awakening is truly a standout title. In the continued absence of 3D Pokémon – though there’s not long to wait – this is one of the best, if not the best, role-playing experiences the 3DS has to offer. Gameplay is solid, requiring plenty of tactical nuance, and the permadeath mechanic will tug on your heartstrings throughout. The story can be a bit iffy at times, but it does more than enough to keep you progressing without forcing you to rush through, and as it clocks in at somewhere between 15 and 30 hours depending on how you play, there is certainly plenty to do. I can’t recommend it enough.

This change in opinion can only be the result of one of two options in my mind. Either music has got better over time (which I think my previous comments towards Bieber and One Direction indicates it hasn’t) or I’ve listened to so much music over the years that it was inevitable that I’d eventually find some I like. This is the most plausible reason, especially when you notice that a lot of the music I enjoy comes from films and, more importantly, videogames.

I tend to find that videogame soundtracks are underrated as a music form. Perhaps this is less true in recent years with game developers including copies of the soundtrack along with the game and with the ease of using iTunes to upload and download entire albums of music, but I’m going back to a time before iTunes. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’m going back to before I started using iTunes, which admittedly could be anywhere up until a few months ago, but even so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s before people I knew were using it at all, let alone for videogame soundtracks.  As such, the only real way to listen to a soundtrack was to play the game, something I did extensively.  As a result video game soundtracks have formed a huge part of my childhood, which only now that I can truly understand nostalgia do I fully appreciate. The iconic chip-tunes of Pokémon are forever ingrained into my mind, the tunes to games like Army Men 3D and Worms hold special places in my heart and even the music mode of the Pingu game I used to play on my Windows ’98 is lodged somewhere up in my brain.

That in mind there are some games that did it better than others (just because I remember Pingu doesn’t mean that I want to, or that I like it… much). So which do I think did it best? Well three stick out in particular, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and the Mass Effect series (I know the last one’s cheating, but I’m writing this so meh). Each of these games had genuinely great soundtrack, music that added to the atmosphere, complimented the game’s theme and stay in both my heart and my head.

So let’s talk about Oblivion. This was one of the first games I got for my Xbox 360, and for two years it would almost rule my life. It was the first game I had played that I could truly call big. Everything about it, the story, the setting, the looks and the music were, and still are, epic in scale. True it isn’t as impressive as it was in its heyday, but a nostalgic mind can still find a lot of charm in this game; it had ambitions and while didn’t did reach them all it tried bloody hard (as Bethesda always does).  As befitting a big game, the developers went with a large orchestral score for the majority of the soundtrack. In a similar way to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, this type of music works excellently with the worlds of high fantasy, where practically everything that happens is treated as a significant event. That’s not to say that this is a bad thing, it just wouldn’t really work in a different setting, such as an FPS.

I personally divide the music of Oblivion into two groups: ‘grand’ and ‘elegant’. Though both make use of a range of orchestral instruments like violins, drums and flutes they achieve quite different effects. The ‘grand’ music typically takes place during a fight or when the player is meant to be inspired by what’s taking place.  The game’s best example of this type of music is in the menu screen. Obviously this is the first thing a player sees when booting up the game and through the use of just a piece of music Bethesda have managed to turn this into an event. The song, ‘Rise of the Septims’, is possibly the game’s most iconic piece of music. A low and rumbling intro works to build an element of tension before the game’s title appears on screen in full to the accompaniment of a fanfare. This is fantastic, I’m still in the menu and I’m already hyped up to play the game, just point me at the enemy and let’s get to hacking off heads.

The other songs of this vain are equally good if perhaps a little less memorable, all save for the song ‘Death Knell’. The most commonly used piece of ‘fight’ music ‘Death Knell’ always foretold the presence of a hostile enemy and to this day I can’t help but hum it when something’s chasing me regardless of what I’m playing.  The ‘elegant’ music fills the voids when you’re not fighting. Softer and gentler, its mellow tones follow you through the cities and scenery of Oblivion. In my youth these songs were kind of nothing to me, but looking back now it’s clear that they stuck with me more than I’d thought. After purchasing the soundtrack on iTunes the other week and listening through it I remembered just how soothing songs like ‘Through the Valleys’ and ‘Harvest Dawn’ really were and how much they added to the character and atmosphere of the game.

All in all the Oblivion soundtrack is not only a set of excellent pieces of music, but also a set of memorable pieces of music. Assuming you’ve played the game it’s very likely that they’ve stuck with you whether you know it or not, and are only a listen away from recalling the enjoyment these songs bought and how much fun you had while they were playing.  As time passed both Oblivion and I were oblivious to the fact that its life was slowly drawing to an end, and that it would be Bethesda’s latest video game instalment Fallout 3 which would hammer the nails into its metaphorical coffin.  Fallout 3 bore many similarities to Oblivion: it had large open landscapes, a world altering plot and, of course, a big soundtrack. Unlike in Oblivion though the soundtrack to Fallout 3 wasn’t ambient, the game actively encouraged you to choose what you listened to.

Within the game there are a number of radio stations which can be accessed by the player via their Pip-Boy (which, for those of you who haven’t played the game, is a device that’s a cross between an iPod an iPad that’s been welded to your wrist… let’s face it, it’s only a matter of time before Apple decides it’s a good idea) and each one plays a set number of tracks.  Now, I’ll admit that this isn’t an original idea. Games like GTA having been using the radio gimmick to work in popular (and I use the term relatively loosely) music for years. However, Fallout 3 is set apart from the pack by a few things.

Bethesda’s choice in music was different from anything else at the time. The Fallout games are set in a post-apocalyptic world with a retro-futuristic edge, meaning it uses older ideas of what the future will be like. For instance, many of the robots in the game look like they’ve come straight out of a 1950’s Si-Fi movie. As such they’ve gone with an old-fashioned soundtrack, using so called ‘big band’ music from the 1930s, 40s and 50s.  This works exceedingly well with the universe of the game. A lot of the technology in the games is either lifted from the same decades that the music is taken from, e.g. old-fashioned looking radios and TVs or from the Sci-Fi of the time. The environments further compliment this; much of the architecture has been borrowed from the same time periods, such as suburban homes with white-picket fences and odd shaped coffee tables. This shows that effort has been put into the music to ensure it develops the world they’re creating – an effort that pays off.

Not only has thought been put into the music choice, but also into how it has been implemented, and that of course brings me on to Three Dog. The charismatic DJ of the Galaxy News Radio, he rapidly becomes something of an audio-only companion to the player. To the credit of the writers he has some genuinely funny lines, along with a host of memorable catchphrases like ‘Because one dog ain’t enough, and two is too low, it’s me, Three Dog!’ Three Dog typically introduces each song (after all that is the job of a DJ), reads the news and provides the comic relief.

Combined, Three Dog and his songs not only make GNR the best radio station, they also make it one of the game’s more standout features (something Fallout: New Vegas couldn’t emulate). So I suppose I should list some of the songs. Most people who’ve paid attention the game will know from the trailers that ‘I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire’ by the Ink Spots makes a heavy appearance in the game. Used in the trailer, intro and played commonly this is not just a great song in general, but it also has a certain irony to the situation (like playing ‘Disco Inferno’ to a burning man).

A couple of the other songs that really standout for me are ‘Butcher Pete (Part 1)’ by Roy Brown, whose lyrics about a serial killer are both surprisingly jolly and surprisingly catchy, and ‘Fox Boogie’ by Gerhard Trede with its fast pace and jazzy swing. The character and charm of these songs really does help to break up the monotony of travelling over vast open spaces, not to mention that their heavy reliance on lyrics makes up for the long stretches of time where there is nobody to talk to. The other songs are all really good and definitely worth a listen though, I just wasn’t prepared to list them all (look online for the GNR playlist if you fancy trying out some old-timey soundtracks, see? – (that’s my attempt at speaking 1940’s style)).

As with Oblivion, Fallout 3 was inevitably shelved as something else eventually rose to take its place. I’ll admit that I wasn’t its biggest fan at first, but that would soon change to the point where I now have what many people would call and unhealthy obsession towards the Mass Effect franchise. So, with that said, I’ll try and just keep to talking about its soundtrack.  BioWare, like Bethesda, made a stellar job of choosing a fitting soundtrack. Set in a Si-Fi-esque future where mankind has ventured out into the stars and found a host of alien races, the Mass Effect soundtrack uses a range of strange synthetic tones to create music that is both mesmerising and perfectly at home in an technologically advanced universe.

These songs vary between fast paced and edgy for the game’s more intense moments, and slower and more calculated for when the player is meant to be engrossed by what they are seeing. To me there is little comparison across the three games; they all have and equally good selection of tracks in their playlist, as such I’ll pick out the one song that stands out with me from each one.

My selection from Mass Effect is easy: the song entitled ‘The Wards’ is, in my mind, exactly what the soundtrack to a game set in space should be like. The first half of the track is quiet, slow and a mix between awe-inspiring and eerie, capturing the isolation and essence of what I imagine it feels like to travel through a giant, airless black void. The second half picks up with some menacing tones and even stranger synth sounds, suggesting an element of the unknown and of danger.  As well as being played in the game, ‘The Wards’ is also played in the main menu where the tune starts up over an image of earth from orbit and a sky full of stars. I love this bit; it might only be the menu screen but it has weight and power, much like Oblivion has using ‘Rise of the Septims’. Yes, this does make me sound like a very sad man, but consider that if they are putting this much effort into the menu, how much are they putting into the game? Answer: tonnes.

The two songs I’m choosing from Mass Effect 2and 3 I’ll talk about together: ‘Suicide Mission’ from Mass Effect 2 and ‘Leaving Earth’ from Mass Effect 3 are both played over two immense powerhouse scenes from the two games. Similar in style they both capture the tension and seriousness of the situations as they unfold, complementing the events onscreen in their tone and pace.  ‘Suicide Mission’ is played during a mission of the same name set towards the end of the game. As you can probably tell by the title, things are pretty bleak and the song does well to emulate the feelings at the time. In comparison, ‘Leaving Earth’ is played close to the start of the game, during a scene that runs between action packed and heart-stopping to incredibly sad and almost heart-breaking.

I don’t want to say more for risk of ruining anything for those who haven’t played the game, as I feel it is something everyone should do and I don’t wish to put people off by spoiling things. Needless to say every song they use is implemented to great effect alongside the scenes over which they play. Somehow BioWare have crafted three perfect soundtracks to three games that to me get as close to perfection as anyone ever has.

Words struggle to express the sheer amount of love I have for these songs and these games, not to mention the huge amounts of joy I get out of them. I might have poured years of my life into them, but I’d do it all over again and I’ll continue to listen to, play and thoroughly enjoy them until my family and friends gather around me for the inevitable intervention.

The action starts after a major earthquake strikes, and, suspecting foul play, the village elder sends you out to develop your skills as a hunter so that one day you’ll be strong enough to take down whatever behemoth he suspects is behind it. Beyond this, there’s no real plot to speak of; you’ll set out on quests, hunt monsters, be rewarded, stock up on supplies and then head out all over again. So, once you’ve designed your character from a variety of stock faces, hairstyles and voices – the latter of which surprised me when I discovered that there’s no spoken dialogue, just grunts and yowls of pain – you’ll be sent off to explore the nearby Moga Woods in your early steps to become the village saviour.

It’s at this point that the journey to becoming a master hunter turns divisive. From the beginning you’re given the bare minimum of guidance, with only a short explanation of the controls and mechanics at hand in a dialogue box before you set out into the world. For those who don’t like having their hands held, this may come as a welcome change, but for those new to the series will be left wanting for instructions on how to play most effectively and may take a while to acclimatise. It wasn’t until my second attempt at the opening levels that everything started to click in and fall into place, and it helps to memorise or write down the controls early on, or you may be left struggling.

As a port to the Wii U you’d expect the Gamepad to play a role in proceedings, and rather than force a load of unnecessary features into the mix for the sake of the fledgling console, the device is used as much as the player wants it to be. Opting to place all of the regular HUD features like health and items on the touch screen instead of the main screen allows the player a refreshingly clear playing screen, and the placement of these can be manipulated on the touch screen to suit the player. On top of the new control method (though players can use the pro controller if they’re particularly adverse to the gamepad) there’s also the fact the graphics have been revised to make the transition into HD, but it doesn’t make the action any prettier to look at. Allowances should be made as it was originally made for the Wii, but even then it doesn’t reach the prettiest levels the underpowered system could manage, so you can be forgiven for thinking it looks a bit Playstation 2 at points (with some of the faces a bit Playstation 1 if you wanted to be particularly mean). Beauty definitely isn’t everything, and while you’ll find it does have a great sense of scale and some of the monsters are uniquely designed, it certainly shows its age more than a little.

While the opening leaves a lot to be desired in easing you in to the basic mechanics, it does excel is in the way it allows you to grow accustomed to the myriad of weapons that the player can use in their quest, from the standard sword and shield to giant lances, gun-blades and even a musical hunting horn. The weaker monsters make for easy fodder to try out each weapon and discover the ones that best suit your style, and you’re not even fixed to the path that you start on, as every weapon is available from the start and can be upgraded as new materials are gathered from plants, bugs and the monsters you lay waste to.

For example, I found myself starting off with the already equipped great sword, a weapon so massive that it makes Cloud Strife’s legendarily oversized Buster Sword look like a cocktail sausage in comparison. While the great sword was immensely powerful in the early stages, it soon lost favour as it took too long to swing and would often barely miss enemies thanks to the lack of a targeting system. Soon, experimentation abounded until I found a more suitable set-up with the duel blades, trading powerful blows that’d take seconds to initiate for swift attacks that afforded plenty of agility. Each weapon has its own idiosyncrasies and, indeed, a lot of the initial learning curve comes from learning their quirks and how they alter the way you approach battle.

You’ll need to figure this all out sooner or later once the initial missions have been completed as soon you’ll have to report to the Guild Sweetheart, who’ll start giving you ranked quests that affect your status with both the Guild and the villagers around you. As your status grows, you’ll soon be expected to take on more dangerous quests, though thankfully you don’t have to complete every one in each difficulty boundary before you’re able to move on to the next ranking. You’ll be afforded some variety with these quests, but eventually you’ll realise they can be categorised as “Explore this area”, “Collect X amount of Y” or “Fight this monster”. The latter two throw up a single variant each, with the collection quests sometimes making you carry giant objects that break and disappear as soon as you draw a weapon or get hit, and the actual hunting quests occasionally asking you to simply capture the monster instead of killing it, but even then there’s a very scant amount of variation to the tasks you’ll be performing.

If you find yourself in need of a break from questing, there’s still plenty to do around the village to help it recover from the recent earthquakes; villagers will give the Elder’s son requests that you can choose to fulfil by expending your resource points and some of the items you pick up on your journeys. Resource points can be collected in one of two ways, either by converting some of your items into points, or by heading off into the woods and hunting the monsters that inhabit it. Any monsters you kill in the woods when you’re not questing will give you resource points, with minor foes only relinquishing one or two, while the boss monsters that begin to roam the area will provide you with triple-digit figures.

If you’re lacking some of the items you need to achieve these requests you can always pay a visit to the farmer or the fisherman, both of whom will get to work while you’re out questing – the former allowing you to multiply whatever resources you give them while the latter will send ships out to look for more. Every so often a trader will come in, allowing you to get rid of your non-craftable items in exchange for far more useful ones – mostly tools to assist players to capture additional bugs, ores or fish when they’re out in the field. There’s the impression of a bustling ecosystem present, but for the most part they’re not mandatory and so unless you’re in dire need of something in particular their usefulness can vary.

When making your way through the ranks you’ll eventually come across Cha-Cha, a member of the Shakalaka who’ll soon become your sidekick throughout your solo questing. At first, he’s quite weak and will back out of battles fairly quickly, but as he levels up so too will his valour, allowing him to stay in the fight longer before fleeing to recover his health. Cha-Cha will also perform a series of dances – though these are randomly chosen if you don’t pick them yourself – that will provide you with various buffs throughout your many skirmishes, meaning he’s more than just an oft-talking nuisance in the corner of your screen for the most part.

Starting with an acorn head, the Shakalaka can be built new masks that will alter his behaviour, fighting style and special abilities. For example, the grill mask will change him from an aggressive type to a more supporting role on top of allowing you to cook twice the amount of raw meat you collect from monsters, while the fluffy mask will allow him to track larger monsters but will encourage him to flee from battle more often. Knowing what mask is best isn’t the be-all and end-all of combat, but it helps to understand the behaviours each one will bestow so that you’re not relying on him to act in a certain way when the pressure’s on.

Outside of all the little distractions like maintaining the village, fishing and mining, you’ll be spending most of your time being the titular Monster Hunter, as most of the quests require you to either kill or capture the various monsters that populate the world. However, when it came to battling the biggest nasties was when I often found myself having the least fun. Despite having so many different varieties of weapons, combat often feels quite janky and irritating, and even when you’re using weapons that don’t require swings it feels quite cheap and occasionally unfair. Without a way to target individual enemies, players have to rely on hoping the analogue stick is at the precise angle, with some of the larger weapons requiring more precision than you’d initially figure, and even the quicker weapons can leave you flailing if you’re not careful.

Once you’ve overcome that obstacle you then have to deal with the natural deterioration of your weapons, and despite some of them being horrendously dangerous pieces of metal they often seem to crumble quicker than a double-dunked biscuit in a mug of tea. As the battle continues the weapon will only become more blunt, and this reduces the damage and also the amount of body parts you can attack on the more dangerous foes, forcing you to run away, sharpen your blade and replenish your health. The issue that comes from this is that it often feels like petty micromanagement and seriously breaks up the flow of battle when you stop every couple of minutes through factors that feel outside of your control.

This is compounded by the fact that all of the bosses can flee the battles themselves at a moment’s notice, and once they decide to turn tail there’s nothing you can do to stop them from leaving and re-emerging on another part of the map. You can trace their movements using paint-balls that reveal their location on the map, but these will often wear off midway during the mission and by the time you’ve noticed they’ve buggered off again, so if you’re not having to pause to fix yourself up then you’re running around playing a game of chase that needlessly prolongs the action, especially when some of the particularly cruel battles can take up to forty minutes of needlessly mashing the X button until the creature in front of you dies. Granted, weapons have alternative attacks, but for the most part these focus more on area assaults rather than one enemy, so if you want to do the most damage then you need to keep hammering X until your thumb goes numb.

While forty minutes is occasionally a worst-case scenario, there’s the possibility that you’ll be felled midway through the quest, and while you can continue up to three times per mission you’ll often want to just restart the save and try again – as failure reduces the prize money and puts you at a greater disadvantage if you emerge victorious – so some bosses can take what feels like forever to vanquish. Making this harder is that a lot of the monsters are full of cheap attacks that seem to hit you whether you want them to or not, and I lost found of the amount of times I’d rolled out of the way only to still get hit or an enemy improbably knocking me down with a charge despite me attacking their legs – not their head – less than a second earlier.

Later monsters can also spam moves that leave the hunter dazed – forcing you to frantically tap all of the buttons until all the stars swimming around their head disappear – as well as hit the player several times from differing attacks before they’ve even recovered from the first. Then, using an item to heal yourself leaves you completely exposed unless you leave that area of the map completely, as the animation cycle for any form of healing or weapon-sharpening activity improbably takes far longer than it does for the hulking behemoth du jour to knock you for six yet again. Your only saving grace is often the presence of the aforementioned Shakalaka, who saved me because the enemy decided to attack him instead – giving me vital time to recover – far more than he did through any of his spells or dances. Finally, because the map is segmented there’s also the surprisingly likely case that the hunter will be hit so hard they’ll fall through a loading screen and land in another location on the map.

All this is before we even get to capturing; after you kill a boss, you’ll often be tasked with going through the entire battle again – albeit in a different location – and bringing the monster in alive. The major issue with this is that not only are all of the regular problems still present, but because enemies have no health-meter figuring out the optimum moment to bring them back alive tends to descend into guesswork. Before each mission the Guild will provide you with a multitude of tools to help ease the process, but if you don’t have the materials to make your own traps and tranquillisers then there’s only one shot to take the beast down, so if they fall into the trap and the tranquillisers don’t work – or even worse, miss – then there’s no recourse but to either restart the quest from scratch or kill it and risk a penalty.

A monster limping away can prove to be the biggest sign that it can be captured, but even then there’s an undetermined amount of button-mashing to do between a limping foe and one that can be captured, and getting the balance right without leaving it strong enough to resist capture or accidentally killing it will prove to be unnecessarily difficult. The thing is, one you get into a groove you’re comfortable with the combat can actually be really satisfying and the ever-ticking clock stops becoming an omnipresent threat, but the action stops and starts so much, especially in the later stages, that finding that sweet spot gets that little bit harder.

It’s great to have a title that doesn’t mollycoddle the player and hand everything to them on a plate, but all too often Monster Hunter doesn’t leave enough on there to keep newcomers nourished or cared for enough to encourage them to continue. It just seems like such an odd attitude to take on considering that they’ve gone to such effort to add extra quests, greater multiplayer support and even ported it to the 3DS as well and allowed players to transfer their save between both the portable and Wii U versions. With all the effort they’ve gone to add more, they’ve added very few concessions for those who’ve never played a title in the series before and haven’t made efforts to fix the myriad of off design decisions. There’s a roundabout way of dealing with a lot of the issues present, but these can take a while to discover and even longer to make viable, yet it doesn’t excuse the fact that the problems exist in the first place and it seems like no opportunities were taken to fix them.

In its greatest moments it’s fully understandable why it’s such a popular series in Japan, but there seem to be just as many points where it starts to show its age, and it doesn’t do so gracefully. With every positive you can level at Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate there seems to be a negative to balance it out, and while it’s far from a fantastic title it’s no closer to the scrap-heap either. For every player who falls in love with its complexity, depth and challenge there’ll be just as many who are immediately turned off by the cheap boss battles, baffling design choices and obtuse nature.

As someone who has almost a twenty-year relationship with Mythos Games’ turn-based sci-fi classic, UFO: Enemy Unknown, anyone who ever asked the inevitable question of “If you could take any game and remake it with modern tech, what would it be?” would be met with the same response – “UFO: Enemy Unknown”. There was always a very important caveat, however – the gameplay must remain the same, and only the graphics should be changed to bring them in line with today’s standards.

This isn’t my dominant ‘graphicum whoreas’ gene taking over my mouth and forcing me down the road of one who can’t handle anything that’s even remotely pixelated, because that isn’t the case and I adore the look and feel of the original 16bit characters and landscapes.  It’s simply a case of wanting to play the game on a modern system, without major upscaling, but still enjoy the same level of immersion and gameplay offered by the original 1994 release.  As tends to be the case with remakes, whether we’re talking movies or games, they overstep the boundaries of simple modernisation and veer into the un-nerving territory of the ‘reimagining’ where they assume carte blanche over all aspects… to the point where there is barely any resemblance to the source material.

As far as UFO: Enemy Unknown is concerned (or X-COM: UFO Defense to our American cousins), every developer who has tried to re-capture that certain magic you get from Julian Gollop’s original has failed in one way or another.  While it’s true that the zero-budget fan remakes have perhaps come closer to achieving the goal of a faithful modernisation, the lack of resources – both in manpower and cashflow – has meant that many of these projects have ceased before reaching completion, leaving only the larger titles such as ALTAR Interactive’s trilogy (UFO Aftermath, Aftershock and Afterlight) to see the light of day.

When it was announced in 2010 that 2K Games (specifically, 2K Marin) were working on a new project, simply titled ‘XCOM’, tongues started wagging and attention switched from Goldhawk Interactive’s then-year-long development of ‘Xenonauts‘ to this big-budget release in the hope that it would succeed where all others had failed – to modernise UFO: Enemy Unknown without bastardising it.  As it turned out, the 2K project was for a first-person-shooter and the only tie to the original was its use of ‘XCOM’, albeit in a ridiculously-loose sense – a devastating blow which tore through the fan community quicker than a Chryssalid through a squad of rookies.  Once again, all eyes turned to Xenonauts and a highly-successful Kickstarter campaign proved once again that there was an audience begging for a true remake.

Then, from out of nowhere on January 5th 2012, 2K announced that it wasn’t just the ill-fated shooter they’d been working on, and that Firaxis Games (the masters of strategy) had been developing their own version of the classic since 2008, claiming that they were being “careful to keep XCOM: Enemy Unknown true to the elements that made X-COM such a revered game”.  With Game Informer staggering their release of information throughout February 2012, the ins and out of this potential salvation slowly filtered through and it looked as though fans would finally get their wish – a faithful remake where original gameplay mechanics were retained and only the graphics were being updated.  Even with Lead Designer, Jake Solomon, mentioning that some of the micro-management would be streamlined to make it more accessible, the general consensus here at GLHQ was that XCOM: Enemy Unknown could be what the XCOM community had been waiting for.

As luck would have it, my first appointment at last year’s E3 was with 2K.  As an avid Borderlands fan, I was excited at the prospect of finally getting some hands-on time with the sequel, but it was the first of the two 2K appointments that had me counting down the hours… as I would be spending thirty minutes in the company of Jake Solomon and some of the Firaxis team as they showcased in-depth gameplay of the game they’d been working on in secret for four years.  As sceptical as I was, everything that they showed was exactly as I’d expected it would be – turn-based tactical manoeuvres, reliance on research and development, with a strong difficulty curve depending on which race you were going up against.  It ticked all the boxes but, as titles such as Aliens: Colonial Marines  have shown us, there’s a huge difference between watching a carefully-choreographed tech demo and getting hands-on time… and so the jury was still out, at least from a personal standpoint.

I say ‘from a personal standpoint’ because all signs pointed towards a game that would satisfy the majority of UFO fans – it had everything that I expected to see but, until you’re able to lift up the bonnet and inspect all moving parts, you can’t say for sure whether you’re about to invest in a solid workhorse or a lemon.  As a writer, I was more than comfortable to stand by what I’d seen and give it my seal of approval as a faithful remake but as a long-standing die-hard fan with my own ideas on what would make it perfect, I had to wait and see.

Last year’s Gamescom allowed me to finally sit down to a near-finished product and, with the choice of either the single-player campaign or a multi-player skirmish, I opted for campaign mode as that’s where I expected to spend most, it not all, my time.  It didn’t disappoint, even though I was unfortunate enough to end up with a console version rather than one of the few PCs they had available, and the outside vanished as I made my way through the early missions, blissfully unaware that I’d gone over the thirty-minute threshold until a friendly tap on the shoulder from Ben at 2K reminded me that I should be making my way to the Borderlands 2 appointment.

All that having been said, however… despite owning it since launch day, it was only last week that I finally tore off the shrink wrap and installed XCOM: Enemy Unknown.  I went with a simultaneous installation on the gaming rig and laptop, making good use of Steam’s cloud save so I could have the freedom to play wherever I wanted.  Even after installing it, I waited another day before plucking up the courage to sit down and immerse myself because, ever the sceptic, I expected to be let down once again.  I’d followed the development since that first surprise announcement, watched the various videos and live streams, and even had my own hands-on time with it… but I’d been burned by ‘XCOM clones’ before and wasn’t about to let them kill my enthusiasm once more.

By the time I was perhaps fifteen minutes into the single-player campaign, all my fears had allayed and I was left wondering why I had been so hesitant to take those first steps into Firaxis’ remake.  Jake Solomon himself had said that he had always been a fan of the original and wanted to make sure that the end result was everything that it could possibly be, and it was… and more, to be perfectly honest.  Sure, it was a shame to discover that the ‘ultimate craft’ had been removed, so the Avenger would never be a part of this new experience, and that they had taken out some of the micro-management in terms of not having to buy in more ammo after a mission (or running out of ammo while your team was out on the battlefield), but I don’t feel that the gameplay suffered as a result.

Having only one base was something that I had been dreading since first finding out that this would be case but, again, the ability to place satellites over multiple continents where your craft would invariably still reach the active UFO or crash site meant that it was never a negative.  In fact, it could be argued that it was more of a positive as you only had to utilise the much-needed resources with a single base rather than having to juggle finances between several locations.  This did hinder the rate at which you could perform research or manufacturing, but that delay only added to the longevity of the game – instabuilds may be great if you’re planning on a speed-run but when you want to savour it then those extra weeks, albeit with sub-par equipment, make it more of a challenge.

The greatest challenge, however, was with having  a team with a maximum of six units.  This was incredulous at first, as I distinctly remember taking teams of twenty-four units to ‘very large craft’ landing sites where they’d be picked off one-by-one thanks to those pesky Chrysallids or Ethereals with Blaster Launchers, to the point where I’d have to complete a mission with only four or five soldiers.  And then it struck me… if I could manage it before when it was a necessity, then of course I could manage it when it was an in-built restriction with the gameplay mechanics.  From then on, every single move was more considered than before; the tactical element elevated to another level where, instead of analysing the current positions of units and enemies, I’d be thinking ‘okay, what if it turns out that a Muton is hiding around that corner?’ and the military strategist in me took over.

Ultimately, as much as it pains (and simultaneously delights) me to admit… Firaxis’ take on UFO: Enemy Unknown surpassed my expectations on every level.  The perks were a great addition to gameplay, meaning that you had to carefully consider your team before embarking on a mission rather than picking the highest-ranking soldiers and kitting them out with heavy plasmas and flying suits.  Furthermore, not having to waste turns towards the end of missions to unload clips so that whatever ammo was left would be carried over to the base made an incredible difference, as it was perhaps the one thing that always annoyed me with the original – if there’s still twenty rounds left in the clip when that final turn ends and the team returns to base, then those twenty rounds should still be available to the next team, yet they weren’t.  Whether that was a glitch in the original or a deliberate move on Gollop’s part, I have no idea but it was annoying.

After a surprisingly-brief twenty-nine hours, my time with XCOM: Enemy Unknown came to an end and, although the random nature of the 1994 release with its procedurally-generated missions and terraforming was gone and has been replaced with a somewhat linear storyline, I now have a choice whenever I buy a new laptop or rig: do I install UFO: Enemy Unknown and play through with those familiar little sprites, with the hope of taking Sergei Voronin all the way to Commander of X-COM or go with the shiny new version where I don’t have to empty clips before finishing a mission and live with the fact that I can only take a six-man team with me? That I even have this choice now is a true testament to how damn-near perfect Firaxis’ remake turned out, as Stu himself said at the time.

Either way, sometimes if you wish hard and long enough, wishes do come true… and have no sting in the tail.  I’m sure Aesop would disagree, but I doubt he’d know the best way to take down a Reaper.

From the get-go you can play as either The Hero of Albion, Hammer, Reaver or Garth, each of whom has their own individual style. Garth and Reaver are ranged fighters while Hammer and Hero are melée focused. There are more puppets to be unlocked as the game goes on, each with their own slightly unique feel.

That said, most of the puppets play in a similar fashion, which is undoubtedly as a result of the controls. These are fairly standard for a brawler, consisting of a fast and light attack, a slower and heavier attack and a roll that serves as a dodge although, in reality, you’ll likely spend most of the game mashing away at the light attack button and occasionally rolling out of danger, a system that gets boring very quickly, especially considering the number of enemies that are thrown at you.

As you battle your way through Albion you’ll face a host of foes, including Hobbes, Hollow Men and Balverines. More often than not they swarm you, with a horde of enemies looking to take down your little team of Heroes, but your enemies don’t get stronger as the game continues; instead it just throws more enemies at you, so by the time you reach the last few levels it’s tough to pick out where your characters are in the colourful mess.

Some recognisable parts of the franchise are present, with Fable’s well known morality system being parodied in the form of good and evil chests that appear once per level. Choose good and a randomly selected member of the party enjoys a perk, such as a cloud that follows them around and rains coins. Choose evil and they could be stuck with a lightning cloud that zaps them at brief intervals, at least until he tags one of the others and passes it off to them.

Little things like that, as well as the way that the game gives out scores, makes it a surprisingly-competitive co-op experience. Each enemy that you kill drops gold, though not necessarily to the person who killed it. The person who has collected the most gold at the end of the level is the winner and enjoys a place on a pedestal above the others, while the one who collected the least is ushered out to the sound of a sad trumpet. This means that even though you’re working together to reach the end of the level, you’re also in constant competition to get the most coins, giving the game a frenzied and exciting feel during combat, despite a slightly-floaty feel to the movement.

When you hit the end of each level you are offered a choice between two paths – another amusing hat-tip towards the morality system – which will lead you either to a big boss battle or a mini-game that pits the players against each other in fun tasks, such as kicking explosive chickens at each other or racing minecarts.

After you’ve bashed your way through each level you’re presented with the opportunity to upgrade your puppet. This is done through another mini-game, which is very similar to Monopoly where you earn a number of dice rolls, depending on how many coins you’ve gathered. Each puppet then makes their way around the game board, buying upgrades as they go. As with Monopoly, however, it takes ages to buy everything, and by the time you do you’re a little bored of it.

The levels you play through are based on Albion locations, mostly drawn from Fable 3; each fantastically recognisable, adding a new dimension to places that players will already be very familiar with. The game world is bright and colourful, as are the characters and opponents that populate it, although sometimes it can almost be too much, especially when there are a lot of enemies on the screen and you’re struggling to pick out your character from the mass of colours.  Not only that, but each is given yet another tweak when you eventually unlock Dark Albion. The bright graphics darken and become almost luscious, with more than one creative twist on the levels that have already been played through – Hobbes riding wolves or wearing dog hats, and Hollow Men in Christmas gear are just some of the surprises that crop up.

Throughout the game there are dozens of features that show not only how much Lionhead love the Fable franchise, but also the fun that they are willing to have with it. The game is almost a playful parody of the main series, poking fun at things like the morality system and familiar enemies. Take Snollow Men for example, Hollow men who burst from the snowmen that are scattered across Mistpeak and who keep the Snowman’s head. There are also miniature versions of most of the main enemies that you can kick around, which was a great touch.

The game does have some irritating flaws, not least the slow and wishy-washy movement of the characters. It’s quite often difficult to aim precisely when playing as the ranged characters, and my characters would regularly be found flinging fireballs in random directions, completely ignoring the hordes of enemies or the big boss that I’m facing. The balance of the boss fights are another issue, as I all-too-often found myself pumping fireballs into the bosses for five minutes or more – longer than I spent actually getting to them!

Perhaps the most annoying thing though, was that you couldn’t die. When you ran out of health, you simply fell over, reappearing as a transparent ghost, who can fight and kill as normal. The only thing the ghosts can’t do is pick up coins, which is irritating but in no way a real problem. In fact, I found it more convenient to be dead than alive at some points, especially when I was playing with AI and had thousands and thousands of coins anyway. There are also some annoying graphical issues, with the few items that have to move or change often disappearing completely and then reappearing in their new state.

Overall, the world sometimes feels a bit lifeless as the towns and cities – lovingly recreated as they are – feel a bit empty without all the NPCs that made Albion so alive and vibrant. The puppets are also silent, leaving them feeling a bit flat, and the jaunty music quickly starts to grate. Thankfully, on that front at least, the game isn’t particularly long, which meant that my poor ears and my exhausted thumbs didn’t give up completely after all that button mashing. More than anything though, Fable Heroes is just a bit of fun, and this is reflected in the 800 MSP price tag so, in that capacity, it succeeds.

To be completely honest, however, the story is pretty weak; Tempo discovers a magic weapon once wielded by the historical HarmoKnights but, despite the fact he seems to be in training to become a HarmoKnight himself, his master is an ass and insists that he is not ready, instead sending Tempo and his rabbit companion, Tappy, on a quest to Symphony City in order to find another to wield it.  To get to the city, Tempo has to fight his way through the disrupted inhabitants of Melodia using (you guessed it!) that selfsame staff. When Tempo does eventually arrive at the city, shenanigans occur and he is left in possession of the staff, having to save the day. I bet no-one saw that one coming from a mile away.

The story is pretty terrible, but the real problem is that the characters are crap; none of them are likeable, most of them get on your nerves and Tappy should be taken to a dark room and made to endure a marathon of slasher films. Maybe that will drive that ever-present optimistic gleam from his eyes.  It might be a bit harsh on poor Tappy, but occasionally the overbearing cuteness can get on your nerves – it’s all perfectly sweet to start with but, given enough juvenile interludes, even the most kawaii of characters can drive you to distraction.

Thankfully, the world of Melodia is relentlessly bright and colourful, so even the most annoying of characters look downright fantastic. In fact, even the Noizoids are a rather vivid shade of purple and while they are clearly out of place in Melodia, they are still very easy on the eyes.  That said, for the most part, HarmoKnight left me confused as to who its audience was meant to be. I got the feeling it was aimed at eight year olds, but that suggests that the gameplay is easy. It’s not; it’s hard as balls, or at least it gets to be.

The whole idea of HarmoKnight is that the actions of Tempo sync up to the music that permeates all of Harmonia, and, as its name suggests, everything is meant to be somewhat harmonious, so the closer your moves are to the music, the better you do, which generally means either collecting the purple music notes that suggest the best path for Tempo or taking out enemies – mostly the creatures of Harmonia that have been driven mad by the Noizoids.

The gameplay itself is very simple, with each level scrolling automatically as Tempo runs along. There are only two actions that Tempo can take – a jump or an attack. By listening closely to the tune that plays as the level scrolls, and timing your moves to what soon becomes a clear beat, traversing worlds quickly gains a hugely satisfying rhythm, especially when you do well enough to get a ‘Great’ rating. There are a couple of tricks that can help you do just that, such as the ability to hit the musical-looking plants which have been conveniently placed in the background or charging up an attack to get double the notes from killing an enemy, all of which add a nice layer of depth and make it a little easier to end up with a better rating on every level.

Netting a decent score on a level will also get you a Royal Note – powerful notes that help you proceed through worlds by getting rid of obstacles in your way, provided you have enough of them. Collecting Royal Notes is not all that difficult, which is pleasant enough for the most part, but occasionally they’ll be handed out when things haven’t gone all that well and you probably don’t deserve it. As nice as it is to be able to continue through the story, it does mean that the only reason to play through levels that you haven’t done all that well on again is pride, and pride only goes so far.

The one benefit of getting a Great rating on a level is the ability to do it again, but this time with feeling, by which I mean doing it faster, something that is much harder than you would think. Despite the fact that you’ve got the hang of it at standard speed, it’s a completely different kettle of fish when things are happening faster.  Even on the normal speed, progressing through levels and worlds is an immensely satisfying experience, and once you’re past the first few levels you’re generally treated to a boss battle or two where Tempo fights off some impressive foes. The format of boss battles is a little different to normal stages as, rather than following notes along the screen, you are instead shown the actions you are expected to perform and then have to pull them off with exactly the right timing. This can get quite tricky, as timings are subtly played with and can seem perfectly simple at first glance yet end up being the death of you time and time again.

Get through a couple of them though, and you’ll be able to proceed to the next world, each containing their own specific musical styles – a great touch as it means that no two worlds ever feel particularly similar. The Metal Mountains are remarkably different to, say, Showtime Island, and that means that it never feels like you’re repeating yourself. The size of  each world is cleverly done as well; you always feel like you’ve had a good chance to get the feel of each style of music, but before it gets monotonous you’re whisked off to the next style.

In the spirit of making sure that you never get bored, there are a couple of characters who occasionally take over from Tempo – Lyra and Tyko. These two have slightly different styles of play, but both also utilise the two simple jump and attack actions. The execution is slightly different however, as Lyra attacks enemies with bows, while Tyko has a more powerful attack and the ability to attack things above his head without jumping.

Best of all though, you’re given bonus levels with some of those stupidly-catchy Pokémon tunes. These tend to run you through everything you’ve learned in the previous few worlds, and act as a sort of refresher course preparing you for what’s coming next. It’s a nice system of reminders, and also serves as a bit of fan-service to loyal Game Freak supporters, and one I certainly appreciated.

When it was all over, I found that I had developed an appreciation for HarmoKnight; there really is a lot to love about it, and although it may not have the best story, the gameplay more than makes up for it. Better yet, it looks absolutely fantastic and the (all-important) music is both catchy and easy on the ears. After a few attempts to get the hang of rhythm there is an incredible one-more-go aspect that will quickly eat up the hours. Best of all though, it’s a whole lot of fun.

And yet… and yet. Something doesn’t quite sit right; there is a fly in the ointment, if you will. Having given myself some time to reflect on the game, on everything that happened, on that ending (don’t worry, no spoilers here), I feel that there is a blot on the score sheet. As stated earlier, BioShock Infinite is a great experience… but I’m not convinced that it’s a great game.

The first hour or two had me rapt; Columbia is beautiful – there’s no other word for it. The way that the light spills lazily over the landscape, softening the surroundings to an almost-heavenly vision, the slight over-saturation of the colours giving the world something of a dream-like quality… it’s stunning, and this immediate prettiness drew me in like nothing before. Technically speaking, the engine is nothing to write home about (frankly, the faces of the NPCs downright scare me), but the art direction carries this to another level.

“But Ian”, I can’t hear you say, “We know all this! You said there’s a fly in the ointment, but you’re waxing lyrical!” Well yes, but I’m building up to it. I am painting a picture!  Hush now, and all will become clear.

You see, this easing in to the game encouraged me to invest in the world; it made me want to know what happens next. The first fight came and went (‘melée executions – cool!’), and I was introduced to Elizabeth, this most enchanting young girl, naïve yet fiercely intelligent at the same time. I immediately wanted to know more. I wanted to know her story.

This is where I introduce the bugbear. The game kept getting in the way. I realise this may sound a bit silly, but think about it. To me, the strength of Infinite is in its building of the relationship between Elizabeth and Booker, the backdrop that Columbia provides, the background of the proletariat rising up against the establishes classes, and the overt discussion of religion’s place in society. Those were the things that drove me on, yet I nearly didn’t get to experience them all, almost giving up on the game half way through.

I may now start to overuse the word ‘disconnect’, because this was the overriding thought I had after a few hours of Infinite. I’d spend a little time wandering around Columbia, interacting with Elizabeth, observing life going on around me… and then, suddenly, everything changed.

Now, instead of the convincing world of Columbia, I was in an arena-shaped area… all the NPCs had suddenly vanished. Enemies were running at me from all angles. ‘Ahh’, I thought, ‘this must be the game part.’ Realising this brought a jarring disconnect between the world I’d become so invested in, and the parts that had to be included to justify it as a game. The transition between game and narrative was stark, shaking me out of my immersion in the world, back to thinking, ‘right, hit Q, switch vigor, fire at that guy, take cover, reload, RELOAD!’

This disconnect (told you) happened again and again, to the point where I became bored with the game. Story, interaction, arena, shooting, recover, arena, shooting. I could go in to some specific criticism (Handymen!), but it would be unfair, because I did thoroughly enjoy Infinite… just not the game part.

It felt to me as if the shooty-gun-explosiony bits were designed by a completely separate team to the talky-narrative-emotiony bits – in fact, it felt like it had been outsourced to the Quake team. “Hey, Team Quake! We’re really busy crafting one of the finest game experiences of the decade and are too busy to make any actual gameplay. Could you knock together some generic shooty bits that we can stick in between our talky bits to justify this actually being a game? Thanks!”

Don’t get me wrong… the gunplay was fairly enjoyable in and of itself, but it was nothing that hadn’t been seen before. If it hadn’t been married to the rest of Infinite, it wouldn’t have come close to being acclaimed. Think about it… of all the pieces you’ve read about the BioShock Infinite, how much has actually been written about the game part?

The problem here, though, is that without the jarringly-out-of-place shooty bits, the terrifically-realised narrative wouldn’t live. This isn’t a narrative that would have seen the light of day in a film, and certainly wouldn’t have had the same impact. For Infinite to work, you need to be alongside Elizabeth; you need to be in the world, to be experiencing it first hand. Perhaps Infinite shows that gaming has finally reached its awkward growing pains phase where it’s maturing, trying to present compelling experiences, yet still shackled by customer expectation of what ‘a game’ is.

Is there a solution to this? Probably. Do I know what it is? Not on your nelly. What I do know is that there has to be an evolution. For all that made Infinite excellent – and I am incredibly glad that I stuck with it to the end – it also felt like watching Citizen Kane, while pausing every ten minutes to play a round of Angry Birds. Until narrative and gameplay can be successfully merged together, this disconnect between interaction and narrative will remain.

“I can’t believe you haven’t played this game?! It’s my all time favourite!”
“How can you call yourself a gamer when you haven’t played that?!”
“Oh my God, where were you when that was released?”

These are just some of the questions that are raised when gaming tumbles into my everyday conversations. Having missed many of the big name releases over the past six years thanks to focusing on my studies or due to general lack of funds, I am often faced with an embarrassing scenario where someone starts discussing the ending of a game I have yet to play. Of course, I can’t cover my ears and start shouting “SPOILERS LALALALALALA!” because there really does have to be a statute of limitations on that.

It is embarrassing, I must admit. It kind of feels like I’m stuck in the un-cool club. I was always picked last at PE, so I’m kind of used to it, but it especially bugs me when I’m told that this that and every other game is the best in creation – but what is even more frustrating is when people tell me that I would have loved it. How could they possibly know that when I haven’t even tiptoed into playing that particular series? Am I really so predictable that – just by looking at me – someone can tell exactly what kind of game I’m going to like? So I decided to take a stand; why should I take other people’s opinions as gospel? How do they know that I would have loved to have played it, when I can’t even be sure of it myself?

It’s been difficult to get hold of some of the titles; sometimes I get lucky and get gifted a copy, or stumble across a great combination in the GAME multi-buy second-hand but still raping-you-on-price section. Other times I borrow a well loved copy from my boyfriend; but every time the key motivation for me to pick up these titles after all this time is the harping on of someone else.

I started my saga nearly a year ago now with a copy of Assassin’s Creed that I had owned since release (an account of my tumultuous relationship with this title can be seen in my article Should I Stay or Should I Go?), and since then I have managed to complete several big name titles, though whether they hit the mark that their recommender was so certain they would is another issue entirely.

Assassin’s Creed
Okay – so I’ve had this one since release and, after one particularly impulsive gallop on a horse, I gave up on it pretty quickly. I was eventually coaxed back into playing it nearly five years after its initial release and I realised that my speed to claim it too difficult was a hasty one. I felt a fair amount of regret at my own ineptitude, and a small amount of shame that I had let my pride get in the way of a title that truly took my breath away.

As the story progressed, I was hooked. The combat left a lot to be desired, and nowadays the graphics are outdated as hell, but I didn’t hesitate to move straight on to Assassin’s Creed 2 the second the credits had finished rolling. Unfortunately, I seem to have stalled on Brotherhood; finishing 2 saw me sat opened jawed in shock (and slight confusion), but my inspiration to further Ezio’s story line has faded, and again I’m tempted to just write off the rest of his saga and that of any Assassins to follow him. Until I’ve finished Brotherhood though, perhaps this tangent is a little unfinished?

Dragon Age
I remember on the release of Dragon Age it was all that people could talk about. My Facebook and Twitter feeds were full of it, and all I could think was “why can’t I play this?”. I picked it up briefly when playing my then-boyfriend’s copy, but after a short few hours, I turned it off and never really had a desire to go back. So when again, quite recently, it came up in discussion as one of those “must have played” games – I stuck it on the list.

I paid a little closer attention to it this time around – talking to more of the bystanders and trying to understand as much about what was happening in the greater world around my character as possible, but again it started to fall flat very quickly. I found Alistair bloody annoying – and even more so when he dumped me later in the story! (I offered you my heart, you regal bastard. Was I just too elf for you? Was that it?!) As well as this, I generally just preferred the company of my dog Spot to the others in my party that I was compelled to travel the battle-scarred country with.

The dialogue bored me, the story didn’t pull me in and as I neared the end I was begging for it to be over.  This really did actually sadden me. As a fan of Fantasy, how could something like Dragon Age have fallen so flat with me? I felt almost guilty that I hadn’t derived the same sense of pleasure from it that others had felt, and was almost certain it was because I hadn’t played it right. Alas, having disliked it so much – I won’t be playing through under a different race to find out.

Given this shaky start, I was a bit reluctant to go on exploring past releases further. Yes, I’d enjoyed Assassin’s Creed, but given the hype around the most recent releases that I have no desire to play, I couldn’t help to feel a little reluctant to continue. That is, until I started my next well known title…

Taking place between the Star Trek reboot and its sequel, Star Trek: Into Darkness, the game sees the crew of the Enterprise helping fend off an invasion of an evil reptilian race known as the Gorn (best known for being in that crap fight scene with Shatner everyone bangs on about), who plan on destroying the universe. It’s a paint-by-numbers story that could’ve been written in an afternoon, and doesn’t contain any big twists or turns that will shock or amaze – it’s really just an excuse to bop around the galaxy shooting people.  You’re given the choice to play as Kirk or Spock, which is made to sound like a big choice because Spock is “logical” whereas Kirk is “intelligent”, but the only difference is that Kirk’s phaser is semi-automatic while Spock’s fires in bursts. There are points where the characters split-up, but there’s only actually about three instances of this where you can’t reach one another, so you rarely need to worry about having to revive or be revived. The characters play exactly the same, so it’s really just a case of personal preference over Spock or Kirk.

This title may initially look like something of a Gears of War rip-off, but, rather bizarrely, it’s actually more of a rip-off of the Uncharted series. There’s the typical cover-based shooting mechanic, where you push a button and snap to a chest high wall, then pop out to shoot enemies in the face. You can pick up bigger weapons than your basic phaser, which all have fancy names like “Ravager” and “Mauler” but are basically just your classic collections of machine guns and shotguns, with a couple of sniper rifles occasionally thrown in, and the “Arc Driver” which fires a continuous stream of electricity, eventually dematerialising whichever enemy you’re pointing it at. And yet, I found myself using the phaser more than any other weapon, mainly because the phaser has infinite ammo – it can overheat, but if you’re conservative enough then that’s never much of a problem.

The phaser can also be upgraded, while no other weapon can. The upgrade system, however, is possibly the worst of its kind to ever grace a video game with its presence. To upgrade your weapons, you need to earn XP, which can only be earned by engaging in the boring hacking mini-games that litter every level, or scanning the environment for collectibles, audio diaries, and other “research items”. When you’ve got enough experience, you can use it to unlock upgrades. There are three upgrades for the three different aspects of the phaser: “Kill”, which is just the main firing mode, “Stun”, which is secondary fire and allows you to stun enemies to take them down non-lethally, and a third category that just deals with overall performance of the gun. The problem is that you can only actually have one of these upgrades active at a time, so there’s no real point in buying all of them.

There’s also usually one upgrade per section that is obviously far superior to the rest; for example, why would you choose to bounce bullets off the walls when you can just set your phaser to full-auto? There’s an upgrade to the “Stun” ability for Kirk that takes down enemies in one shot. One. Even on hard difficulty. It causes your gun to overheat instantly, but when you’re often only dealing with about four or five enemies, it’s incredibly easy to just hide in cover and wait for your gun to cool down before popping out and insta-killing another enemy. The upgrade system is badly thought out and effectively pointless, other than giving you the ability to one-shot kill almost every single enemy.

As previously mentioned, you need to scan things to gain XP. To do this, you have to use your tricorder, a little gadget that highlights objects in the environment that can be scanned, show you your current objectives, and it can also be upgraded with a variety of pointless add-ons, including the ability to heal your partner (which you’ll never need to do) and dematerialize the bodies of dead enemies so other enemies don’t spot them during stealth sections (which happens, but never has any real effect on proceedings). The collectibles come in the form of scanning new things, giving you a moderately humorous description written by Scotty, and audio diaries, the ever-popular backstory delivery method. Sadly, even the audio diaries are terrible – early diaries simply give you information that you’ll hear again in a cutscene only a couple of levels later, and it’s only when you get closer to the end and start hearing the opinions of the Enterprise crew that they start to get interesting. It’s a largely wasted opportunity to provide some more dimension to the characters, who all come across as lifeless drones throughout the entire game.

Hacking mini-games are also present around nearly every corner, allowing you to take control of enemy turrets, cameras and mines, or simply to open doors. And, in true hacking mini-game fashion, they’re incredibly dull, and appear far too frequently. They come in three different flavours dependent on what you’re hacking; there’s the matching mini-game, where you have to pair up sound waves in an incredibly generous time limit, a Snake-esque one where you have to manoeuvre a dot on a grid into a square, and a co-op hacking game where each character has to hold the left stick in a specific spot for a short amount of time. There’s a reason these don’t sound fun, and it’s because they aren’t. There’s also, as I said, far too many of them, particularly given that mines can be hacked as well. You don’t have to, but it’s the most effective way of getting XP, given you’re awarded nothing for destroying the camera/turret/mine instead.

But it isn’t all just shooting lizards and scanning things – remember how I said it’s an Uncharted rip-off? That means there’s plenty of platforming to do as well, and if you hadn’t already guessed, it’s really badly handled. You know you’re going to have to do some jumping around because – since you’re so often in a spaceship of some kind – the spots you can climb have big yellow and black stripes on them. The jumping controls aren’t horrendous, but it’s the camera that really starts to hinder your progress – if you ever have to start moving round corners, the camera starts following your character as he moves, leading to you having to battle with the camera as you try to work out where the hell you’re going. The camera troubles then screw up the controls as well, and you’ll soon be flinging yourself off the platform into a gaping abyss rather than managing to point the stick in such a manner that the game finally realises you wanted to jump to the next platform. It’s needlessly infuriating, and the platforming isn’t fun enough to even warrant being there – if the developers had simply left Star Trek as a straight up shooter it would’ve been infinitely less aggravating.

The infuriation doesn’t end there. As is so often the case in a co-op game with an AI partner for single-player, the friendly AI is atrocious. My AI Spock frequently got in the way, ran into turret fire, and when given orders frequently ignored them or straight up told me no. This is especially annoying during the numerous stealth sections, where enemies will spot Spock from across the map after he’s decided to trail behind and refused to move up when told. Really, your AI partner is only useful for reviving you, which Spock only did after telling me I was injured. Really, Spock? I’m lying on the ground bleeding out and you think I might be injured? His reviving skills range from fantastic to useless as well – on numerous occasions I was revived from halfway across the map, whereas sometimes Spock would stand over me, pissing about with his gun with no enemies around, telling me I was injured rather than healing me. He’s not much help in combat either, unless you particularly enjoy him stealing every kill after you’ve poured plenty of rounds into enemies. AI partners have never been particularly useful, but in Star Trek they’re even worse than you can imagine.

The enemy AI isn’t much cop either. The Gorn have two different tactics – run straight at you or hide in cover. Running at you can sometimes be a pain if there’s enough of them doing it, but taking cover is regularly quite a pointless endeavour since their bodies are often longer than the cover, meaning you’ll frequently be able to kill them even while they’re hiding. There is enough variety in the enemies to keep things interesting when encountering them, but they’re so stupid – and can be easily taken out with Kirk’s one shot kill – that you’ll be more annoyed at having to see them than admiring their variety.

Star Trek may pitch itself as a shooter with platforming sections, but there are a bunch of other game ideas that the developers decided to throw in to mix things up. The first you’ll encounter is a space battle, where you control a turret on top of the Enterprise, swapping between firing at enemies and bringing up the shields. This section is actually possibly the most accurate Star Trek moment in the whole game, given that the Enterprise is pretty useless in a fight. Without the shields up, your hull integrity takes a pounding in seconds, even on the easiest difficulty, but there’s some enemies that can completely wipe out your shields. It’s fairly easy to beat, but unless you practice the level repeatedly, you’re liable to end the stage with your health dwindling. Next up on the random feature list is swimming, which handles awfully, but is thankfully only used for one level. The underwater sections are also really badly laid out – there are crevices that lead nowhere apart from into a pit with a mine that will instantly kill you. It’s like the developers were just thinking up more ways of pissing you off than progressing through the title.

On more than one occasion you’ll engage in an on-rails flying sequence, where you must dodge out of the way of objects as your character falls or flies through the air; this is straightforward apart from the times where you’ll instantly die by colliding with nothing. There’s also a flashback sequence, which consists purely of walking forward in a first-person view (you are not told this, and instead Spock just kept bitching at me about having to “search harder”, which is not a good tip) and watching a cutscene, which you repeat three times. Finally, there’s a thirty second brawl, and again you’re given no clue on how to do it, but after a bit of button mashing to work out the controls, you can floor your opponent with ease. This mish-mash of ideas serve no purpose – they’re thrown at you with no warning and wild abandon, to the point where you wish you could just go back to shooting things rather than messing about with the additional stuff.

Well, you’d like to go back to the shooting, but instead you’ll be busy reloading the level after a bug has reared its ugly head and forced you to restart. There are numerous bugs littering this product, from moments where I couldn’t pull out my gun to being unable to pick up an essential item to solve a puzzle. I once walked out of a room to find a sniper clinging to a wall that didn’t exist. If it were just minor things, then there wouldn’t be an issue, but having to restart a level just so you can pick up a power generator is ridiculous, and in the end I had to get Spock to do it for me anyway.

Graphically, there isn’t much to write home about. The characters do look like their real-life counterparts, but that’s about as good as it gets. The environments are often a series of bland grey space corridors, and even when you get onto a planet, it’s mostly just brown walls with more space equipment littered around the place. The textures are regularly blurry and the characters are pretty bizarrely animated, particularly during climbing sections, where the usually rather rigid bodies suddenly become a collection of rubbery limbs that flail around in mid-air. It’s passable, and there’s nothing intensely ugly, but that’s about as nice as I can be.

When it comes to sound, however, I have nothing but criticism. The soundtrack is often too epic, with no room for the calmer moments. It’s too big and grand at all the wrong times, and never changes to fit the mood – I have often felt that games too often use music to indicate that you’ve defeated every enemy, but Star Trek has shown me that this is actually an incredibly desirable feature to have. The sound effects all sound like they fit in the Trek universe, with plenty of sci-fi bleeps and bloops, but the phaser sometimes sounds like they’re using a sample from a Skrillex song, and the guns and explosions never sound particularly weighty.

By far the worst problem is the absolutely atrocious voice-work, coupled with a dreadful script. I was amazed to discover that the entire cast of the recent films lent their voices, because aside from a passable performance from Chris Pine as Kirk, and a fun delivery by Simon Pegg as Scotty, the rest of the cast seem to have phoned it in so hard that the characters all come across as lifeless drones rather than human beings. This is most evident in Zachary Quinto’s turn as Spock, who reels off each line with a tired, bored drone in his voice. I appreciate that Spock is a Vulcan, the race who don’t feel emotions, but that has never meant that they couldn’t express themselves in any way other than completely straight. Also, Spock is half-human, and so is perfectly capable of emotion. But Quinto just sounds bored, and it might just be because of the dire script filled with great lines such as “you are injured, Captain”, muttered when you’re on the ground dying, “I believe this space station is beyond repair”, said as the space station explodes around you and you’ve just watched five people die, and who can forget the classic “We must return power to the station”, rolled out about ten times in one section because I wasn’t solving the puzzle fast enough. It’s dull, uninspiring, and had me turning the volume off, rather than suffer through another badly delivered line.

Overall, there’s not a whole lot here that you’re going to enjoy. The graphics are passable, but that’s about it. The controls work, but the rest of the gameplay is as confused as it is uninspired. The soundtrack is nice and epic, but it never varies in pace or amplitude, and the less said about the dialogue the better. It’s bugged up the arse, and has absolutely no replay value. I came away from Star Trek pissed off and worn out, having sworn at Spock for about six hours straight and almost crying as I saw the name Digital Extremes, the team behind one of my favourite releases of last year – The Darkness 2 – roll before my eyes. Unless you’re a masochist, I could not recommend this to you. Don’t play it. Save yourself.