Assassin's Creed Mirage is what we all feared it might be: a throwback to the old formula, with little effort made to adapt or advance that formula in any way. It also has the weakest characters and plot of any AC I've played. My review:

Update 2.0 and Phantom Liberty both expand and refine Cyberpunk 2077, but the truth is: coming back to Night City for the first time in 3 years, it wasn't the new stuff that impressed me - it was how well a lot of the old stuff held up. My review:

lesssgooooooooooooooooooo

Alan Wake II is Remedy weird, it's film noir, it's cutting edge visual presentation, it's genre bending and it's never not totally fascinating. I was keen for this, but three hours hands on with it shot it straight to the top of my end of year wish-list:

IGN on the matter:

The good news is that this time around. CDPR have nothing to hide. The game’s performance and stability is excellent. But that doesn’t change the fact that reviews should never be limited to b-roll only. We cannot let it become an industry trend.

Reviews are where we showcase our experience, particularly as it pertains to actual visuals, performance, stability etc. They are not a space for developers to showcase more carefully selected b-roll.

My Cyberpunk review will be live next week. CDPR have (yet again) restricted review footage to provided B roll only. We are not allowed to use our captured gameplay until next week. No publisher or developer should ever impose that restriction in a review. Its bullshit 1/2.

We all need to give our Switch's a loving embrace tonight, thankful that it sold enough units to stave of a potential reality where Microsoft bought Nintendo.

I played Spider-Man 2. You probably don't need me to tell you that it's excellent, but I will anyway:

Creation engine logging in to twitter to see the latest game engine discourse;

100 hours deep, it is simply absurd how good Baldur's Gate III remains. Hour after hour it never stops surprising you. Never stops making you feel as though everything you do is worth your time, and that every decision matters.

Didn’t get a review code for Starfield so no need to F5 the channel. Even with a few outlier scores it’s clear that Todd pulled it off and that Starfield is the game everyone hoped it would be. Congrats to BGS and Microsoft. Looking forward to playing it soon.

Dropping the 'feature parity' requirement for the Xbox Series S is a very smart move from Microsoft. God bless the Series S (it's a great machine) but it shouldn't be holding back developers from shipping features to more powerful hardware.

Gonna preview Space Marine 2 later tonight. Spoiler alert: it fkn rules.

Overall, it's 12-15 hours of MCU-style story-telling and CoD style campaign action. It's silly and over the top and not all of it works well, but its relaxed tone and gameplay were just what I needed during this stacked release season. I liked it, and I recommend it.

The combat is fun, but it lacks impact. Spell slinging is hard to translate into gameplay 'feel' and Ascendant haven't been able to crack it here. Coupled with some limited enemy and scenario design, combat gets the job done but little more.

Visually it's *technically* impressive thanks to Unreal Engine 5, but it really struggles to find a visual identity that feels unique and cohesive. It's a lot of gilded halls and faceless automatons and particle effects (LOTS of particle effects)

Story wise, it's surprisingly. good (if you can handle the gags). It was written by the same person who wrote Morrowind and Oblivion, so the world building is actually excellent, though the characters can be a little too joke-happy (Gina Torres crushes it as always)