- Spoiler: show
- Jan - Ratchet and Clank: Q-Force (PS3)
Feb - Life is Strange Episode 1 (Xbox One)
Mar - Deus Ex Go (Android)
Apr - Murdered: Soul Suspect (Xbox One)
Apr - Defense Grid 2 (Xbox One)
Apr - Opus: The search for Earth (Android)
Jun - Littlebigplanet 2 (PS3)
Jul - A World Of Keflings (Xbox 360)
it's been a bit of time but I have a couple more to add (and edited because I missed the first 'small' game in the list below ...)
Oct - Destiny 2 (Xbox One)
The main campaign at least. It looks lovely, plays great and overall is, well actually a bit meh.
The opening and closing missions are brilliantly crafted and there are some gorgeous visuals but the campaign quickly bogged down in the effort to unlock all the playable area's for endgame. There's a nice touch that some activities are not available to begin with so that there is time to get used to the game itself but it feels like that the area's accessible don't seem to be fleshed out quite as much as they could have been.
The lore seems, to me, to be downgraded in importance - I really wish that there was a grimoire library somewhere in game. It's nice that you can find snippets within the levels (and your ghost will actually face them when nearby to help find them) but there isn't any repository of this information. The vault storage is as useless as it was Destiny 1.
The game is certainly good, but not superb - definitely better with friends. It just feels like Bungie haven't quite taken all the opportunites that they could have.
For someone who came to Destiny late (only played when Rise Of Iron was released) I wonder if we again have the instance where it's going to take a year or so to really get the game together - something that seems to be the state of play for the AAA titles these days
Oct - Tales From The Borderlands Episode 1 (Xbox One)
I really enjoyed this - fleshes out Pandora nicely (like Mad Max through the eyes of Terry Prachett/Robert Rankin). All five episodes are currently available as part of Games With Gold through November so I'm looking forward to working my way through the rest and probably talk about a little more after that point
Nov - Ghost Recon Wildlands (xbox One)
Now this may be a little controversial but I had a lot of fun with this game also. I found It's take on open-world exploration to work very well in that you get involved as little or as much as needed. I took the time to collect all the weapons, legends and all story missions and left a large chunk of the rebel support missions alone and was able to have a very cohesive narrative experience. The drop-in co-op experience works very well and allows for members of a group to have different difficulties whilst still playing at the same time - friends infiltrating an underground base whilst (only after the alarm was raised) I grab an attack helicopter and start bombing runs to keep the enemy distracted.
A lot of the faults (helicopter controls) have been patched out since release though the vehicle handling is still a little bouncy - which they kind of embrace in the Nacro Road DLC with monster trucks!
it does have somewhat of a bombastic/imperialist tone for sure, which can be a little grating but then this is set in the Tom Clancy universe and I can perfectly see the CIA sending in a spec ops team as a response to an embassy bombing.
I like that the customisation level is left up to the player - you can have it on a light-hearted 3rd person shooter with all the aids, or you can switch off all the HUD and go for what I'm told is a more genuine Ghost Recon experience - we've recently been playing with the HUD entirely disabled with the aim of trekking from one checkpoint to another, no drone and no use of the map outside of the rebel checkpoints which makes for a totally different game, particularly with the Tier One difficulty pack active.
I also like the seasonal challenges where the devs can build on local legends or community requests (much improved now that they last for a few weeks rather than the few days when first introduced) and there is now a class-based PvP mode for those looking for squad based death match.
Not perfect by any means but it's telling that this game is probably the one that has appeared quite often on my xbox feed/youtube channel for photo shoots (that I must remember to disable the HUD for ...) and short action clips.
), but it happened in only a couple of specific areas and resolved itself after a couple of tries. I certainly experienced no lag, but can't say whether that's a platform-specific thing, either to the Xbox One or the One X (that I was playing on).
