To call Bioshock Infinite a missed opportunity would be harsh, it’s a game that has improved on its predecessor(s) in just about every way, and in many areas has few peers. However, there’s things wrong with Bioshock Infinite, things both serious and numerous enough to make this quite an easy review to write, in fact it throws up so many talking points that the review could easily end up twice as long.

Lets start with the background though, you play as Booker Dewitt, a former Pinkerton detective, hired to recover a young girl from the floating city of Columbia (“bring us the girl and wipe away the debt”). You get to Columbia to find that it’s less wholesome than you imagined, rife with segregation and discrepancy with the threat of an uprising beginning to rear its head. And that’s where I’ll leave the story for now, as I don’t want to spoil anything.

Other than to say (sorry) you do eventually rescue Elizabeth, the girl locked in the tower, but getting off Columbia isn’t going to be easy, especially as the entire city is after your blood (which we’ll get to in a bit). Elizabeth is far from helpless though, while the plot has you rescuing her in gameplay terms you don’t need to worry about her. She won’t get directly involved in combat, but will throw you ammo, health, money and salts for your vigors (plasmids). She can also bring items in to aid you in combat, these range from turrets to ammo and health stocks, freight hooks to grapple on to, even cover to hide behind.

Unusually for a Bioshock game the combat is arguably the star of the show. When it comes though, and it takes a while to, it’s relentless for the next few hours. It’s odd going from pure narrative exploration to relentless shooting, but it also seems slightly at odds with the tone of the franchise, either way it seems to correct itself, I’m not sure whether I adjusted or the game did, but there seems to be more downtime as you progress.

The combat itself starts very basic, you’re armed with a pistol to shoot people and a vigor to control turrets for a limited amount of time. Once Elizabeth joins you though things begin to open up; as mentioned she can bring things in to the fight to help you, meaning you can make the environment suit your style or your needs. At points the sky-rails you occasionally use to traverse the city make their way in to combat, making you mobile, hard to hit, using them to avoid danger then leap and attack from on high. These moments are few and far between though, especially considering how prevalent they are in the trailers and demo footage.

My main problem with Bioshock Infinite is one that it shares with the original game, the design of the levels. You walk from A to B then back to A again, you do that in every area, and every time you take a backwards step new enemies have somehow appeared. Remember the bit in Bioshock where you have to go and see a scientist, to get to her office you have to go through her empty quarters, populated by dormant turrets, remember how you knew exactly what was going to happen? That’s what Infinite suffers from too often, there’s a section that literally leads you in a big circle, and the ‘Hall of Heroes’ really could have been lifted from the first game. There’s doors arbitrarily closed to you until you do that thing that takes all of 20 seconds, then all of a sudden they’re welcoming you in, the worst offender for this is probably if you go and explore in Fink’s district.

As mentioned, considering you’re on a floating city, and the promise of an abundance of sky-rail combat, it’s surprising how closed Columbia feels. Most of your time is spent indoors, which to be fair allows them to play with some design themes, but even when you’re outside it feels narrow, closed, almost like you’re inside with a sky coloured roof. There’s other small annoyances too, like enemies and turrets attacking you from beyond the depth of field blur, but they’re largely trivial when compared to what the game does right.

For me Columbia doesn’t reach the heights (shut up) of Rapture, and while I’m loathed to compare, the game does so I kind of have to. It’s probably personal taste but I prefer the dark, unsettling, decayed structures of the underground city to the bright, almost ethereal floating city of Columbia. This is true of the story too, I just didn’t get hooked the way I did with the first Bioshock, I think this is because the core story for Infinite is presented as being about racism, there’s no great mystery to it until later on. On that note I will just add that I found the motivations for some of the characters lacking, there’s a point where things shift, I didn’t really buy that I’d be an enemy to that group, especially given how I was greeted by one of them.

When Bioshock Infinite puts the Elizabeth narrative front and centre in the back half of the game it’s much more interesting. Unlike the first game, Infinite boasts a number of characters that are likable, I like Booker, I like Elizabeth, and I like the Lutece twins. The story is wrapped up well, making you feel a little blindsided, sympathetically matching one of the characters. And it’s for that reason you should play Bioshock Infinite, it’s not perfect, in pure gameplay terms it’s got issues, more than I can fit in to this review, but equally I’ve not done the good things it does justice, and frankly, how often does a game like this come around?

I have an awful lot of time for Sleeping Dogs, it was brilliant, on the face of things it was a straight-faced GTA clone, but it had a streak of the absurd running through it. It’s no surprise that Year of the Snake fits the same description. The problem is that while the main game kept you busy for hours, the dlc has, so far, been unfulfilling.

Year of the Snake has more in common with Nightmare in North Point than Wheels of Fury or Zodiac Tournament. It’s a story based dlc set aside from and after the events of the main game. It’s Chinese new year time and just as the rest of the city is starting their celebrations Wei is demoted for all the trouble he’s caused. Now back on the beat, Wei’s new mundane work life of handing out parking tickets starts to get a lot more exciting as he uncovers a suspicious cult, determined to make the new years celebrations go with a bang (I’m really sorry).

Unlike Zodiac Tournament, Year of the Snake has a decent mix of gameplay types. A lot of the early game will be spent getting in to fights and driving imminently exploding cars into the sea. This part of the game feels uncharacteristically restrictive, your moves and cars have been stripped away, but what they’ve been replaced with isn’t as interesting. For instance your grapples tend to either end in handcuffing or tasering the criminal (or random passer-by). It does open up later though, the nightstick moveset is particularly satisfying.

This is true of the mission types too, you start to get different types of car missions, including some vehicular combat, chase missions, and even a bit of gunplay. There’s a good sense of progress through Year of the Snake, things get more interesting and more explosive as you progress.

There are a few issues with Year of the Snake, it’s quite buggy, some fairly minor, some not. Wei moves his mouth while other people are talking at the start of missions, it’s a minor problem, certainly nothing game breaking. However, I had one mission that disappeared as an option because I failed it at the point where it started (rather than arresting the perp Wei snapped his neck). On another mission Wei was supposed to get in the passenger seat of a police car and begin a chase, instead I watched him fly across the district and teleport into the passenger seat of another car parked probably 400 metres away, there he was trapped inside the car and so the mission couldn’t begin. Both missions sorted themselves out after I exited to the main menu, but it’s still problematic.

To end on a positive note though, if you’re going to do all the missions, not all the collectable stuff, just the stuff that has an icon on the map, you’re looking at a decent sized bit of content. I can’t be exact but it took me over 2 hours, probably not as long as 4 though. There’s one or two moments where you’ve got a long drive across the map to start a mission, but those moments of game lengthening are few and far between, in fact quite often you’ll finish a mission right next to a couple of new bonus ones.

Year of the Snake is perhaps not as funny as Zodiac Tournament, nor as tonally interesting as Nightmare in North Point, but it is probably Sleeping Dog’s best piece of downloadable content. It’s even priced below £5, which seals it as being well worth picking up.

What became apparent while playing through Sir Hammerlock’s Big Game Hunt, the latest dlc for Borderlands 2, is what an impossible task Gearbox and their support teams have getting the balance right for the smorgasbord of play styles. You’ve got players of differing levels, with different builds, playing as different characters, using different weapons, playing in single player, or playing with a friend, or two, or three.

With all that in mind you can see how it’s difficult for them to cater for everyone, and for a reviewer to reflect your experience. That being said let’s start with some things that aren’t under question; Sir Hammerlock’s Big Game Hunt offers the most new content of the 3 Borderlands 2 dlc we’ve had so far. The dlc is a set in a loose African safari environment, and features ‘caricature’ enemies like witch-doctors and tribesmen.

Missions are themed around the safari concept, you’ll be asked to hunt a selection of rare animals, spring traps, and collect eggs. There’s a couple of really good boss fights, including one against a seemingly invulnerable bullymong. There’s not many story missions, and if you do nothing but them then you probably wont get your moneys worth from the dlc, but there are a decent amount of side quests for extra content. The landmass is fairly substantial, and given that you can’t be over-levelled due to the level cap, there should always be a bit of a challenge.

And that’s where things get complicated. I found the witch-doctors difficult pretty much all the way through the dlc, I was playing solo as a commando, the witch-doctor’s whirlwind attack was destroying my turret, leaving me to deal with their powered up minions alone whilst they themselves powered up and healed. Similarly the last boss was hugely frustrating, not helped that dying meant having to restart the fight from scratch.

I had a problem with getting stuck on geometry quite a lot, it led to a few deaths, but was also apparent when just navigating the landscape. Some of the battles were a bit too wave based, and I can’t say I got all that much good loot making my way through the dlc, certainly my 2 go to weapons I entered the dlc with were what I was using at the end of it. That said you are rewarded with an interesting weapon for beating the final boss, plus a huge amount of loot as a reward.

I suspect a lot of the problems I had with Sir Hammerlock’s Big Game Hunt wouldn’t be an issue in multiplayer, certainly the waves of enemies and witch-doctors would be a lot more fun to deal with. I do take issue with the level cap still not being raised, perhaps that’s not something for this review, but if someone who has just been playing through the dlc as it’s come out can hit the cap then the more dedicated players will have been there for a while.

For my money though Sir Hammerlock’s Big Game Hunt is the best of the Borderlands 2 dlc so far, while it doesn’t have the most amount, or the most interesting story, it’s a big play area with quite a lot to do. There’s new monsters, new enemies, a decent loot reward, and nothing you’ll actively dislike. If the 4th dlc can better this then Boderlands 2 season 1 will finish with a bang.

You might have missed it, what with Christmas, a steam sale, and over a year having passed since the game was released, but a couple of weeks ago Rage got its first dlc. The Scorchers is a story based dlc, very similar in structure to the main game, that fits in seamlessly to Rage’s world.

Before we start it’s worth mentioning that the dlc adds a mission select, so if you beat Rage and never went back you can select The Scorchers mission from the list. If you haven’t finished the game, or restarted (in which case you’ll still get the mission select) you can select the mission from your job list and head back to the Hagar compound to kick things off.

This creates a slight balance issue, my save was part of a 2nd play through where I hadn’t yet unlocked the main town, which meant I was at the most feeble you can be in the game. Alternatively you could spend a couple of hours re-immersing yourself in the game world, stock up on ammo, money and supplies, get some better weapons and armour, then go and play the dlc.

I’m not entirely sure what happens if you jump straight from a completed game save to the dlc. If you use the mission/scenario select mode on missions you’ve already completed you get to choose a load-out then enter the mission, once you reach the end you’re back to the mission select screen. I suspect if it’s your first attempt at the dlc but you’ve completed the game you’re given a load-out but are allowed to progress as though it was a story mission, seeing the dialogue and travelling between areas.

Tonally The Scorchers fits in well with the rest of Rage, it is at times creepy, tense and stressful, although arguably it relies too much on the familiar mutants to achieve this. The Scorchers themselves are well done, they aren’t strikingly different from some of the other human A.I. in the game, but they will try to outflank you, to rush you, and even take to the air to throw you off. The dlc also features locations that were present in the main game but not open before, again it helps it fit.

There’s a new weapon, a nail gun that, I’ll be honest, I rarely used. It’s a rapid fire weapon that tears through ammo, it’s quite useful against Scorchers but then so are the machine gun, the shotgun, the sniper rifle and the Authority rifle. There’s also a new ‘ultra-nightmare’ difficulty should you want more of a challenge from Rage.

So is The Scorchers worth getting back in to Rage for, yes I think so. It’s fairly cheap at £3.50, introduces a couple of interesting characters, and has more of Rage’s excellent gunplay. It’s not a long piece of dlc, if you’re not doing anything but the dlc it’s going to be about 2 fairly packed hours. It does have a decent mix of gameplay though, there’s a Mutant Bash tv section, a boss fight, plus the different challenges of fighting humans and mutants.

For a game as short as it is To The Moon takes its time to get going. The time you spend wandering around the play area, talking to characters, and discovering things you don't have an answer to, none of that time is wasted, it's all there to set up what you're about to play through. The doses of humour endear the characters to you, even Neil's more irritating moments are there for a reason.

You play as two scientists who work for a company that allows people to alter their memories so that they can experience their one great ambition. Imagine you'd wanted to be a top footballer, they'd have to download your memories then enter them so they could lay a seed that alters the course of your life, then they upload these new memories back in to your head to overwrite your real memories, simple right? Actually no, it turns out you can't just jump back to a suitable early memory and alter it, instead you have to find links from recent memories to earlier ones and use them to jump backwards.

In this case it turns out the client wants to go to the moon, no reason is given but it's clear there's something you aren't being told. As you jump backwards more and more questions are raised, what is with the paper rabbits, why is the lighthouse so important, and what is with the relationship between our client and his wife?

Mechanically To the Moon is incredibly simple, you explore an area for 5 linkable items, find the memory point (another item), then solve a tile flipping puzzle to progress. There's no time limit, there's no punishment for messing up, there's nothing to stop you carrying on with the story.

And that's why you're here, the story. To The Moon is a roller coaster, there's some great geek humour in there, it's genuinely funny, then all of a sudden it's incredibly tragic. I don't just mean tragic like someone dies, I mean the tragedies of life, watching someone live and feeling pity for them, that's what To The Moon deals in. Your relationship with the characters reflects this, I loathed Neil (one of the scientists) at the start of the game, by the end I was completely on his side, My sympathy for the client was shattered before coming right back again.

I'm being very careful not to spoil anything, but To The Moon's success is that despite the sci-fi backdrop it's very much grounded in the real world, off hand I can't think of another game that features neurological-behavioural disorders, and not only features them but addresses issues around them. There are a couple of moments where all of a sudden everything clicks together, the latter of which happened for me just as it did my character, I actually muttered “oh fuck”.

To The Moon will stay with me, there's only a handful of games I've felt emotionally invested in and this is one, it's a game you're desperate for other people to play. I can't think of a better paced game I've played in recent years, once you get past the slow opening at least. To The Moon may not be the perfect game, it's barely a game, but you really should play it.

Gearbox certainly aren’t keeping us waiting for more Borderlands, with Mr Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage, the 2nd Borderlands 2 dlc, arriving just a few months after the game. This time the vault hunter(s) is told of another vault located in Mr Torgue’s ‘Badass Crater of Badassery’. Finding it won’t be as easy as fast travelling your way there, instead you’re thrown in to a tournament of sorts, a bit like the assassin ladder in No More Heroes, where you must become the no.1 ranked Badass to gain access to the vault.

If it wasn’t already apparent the theme for this dlc is uber-machoism, think 80s/90s era WWE with more extreme steroid abuse. It’s a good idea to hang the dlc around, I’m not sure it works that well, certainly none of the humour landed with me but I can buy in to the concept. Mr Torgue isn’t the only character not to click, there’s also the returning characters of Moxxi, Scooter, and Tiny Tina. I’ll be honest I don’t hate Tina as much as the rest of the internet, I save that for Scooter, but even Moxxi resorts to deconstructing her own act before using her same routine anyway. It’s a theme running through a lot of the dialogue, the characters are very aware of what they are.

Mr Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage isn’t a great piece of dlc, and it’s certainly not as good as Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty, which was pretty decent all told. I mention Captain Scarlett because it was quite an open, sprawling world, it felt like an area from the game, and there was loot! Mr Torgue’s… by contrast is fairly densely packed, but the trade off is that to go anywhere interesting you have to load up a new area, it makes things feel segregated, not the large world of the main game and Scarlett.

It also sends you back to areas too often, be it to do side quests, or more irritatingly moments like having to collect cookies for Tina only to have to turn around at the end and go back the way you came from to destroy the cookie dispensers. Loading in and out of areas often brings the problem of fighting the same enemies over and over too, it’s a problem the first Borderland’s suffered from, but one the sequel did a better job of avoiding.

The boss fights are almost uniformly terrible too, while I’m mentioning the first game, there was a fight in that where you were in your vehicle fighting a boss in his and his minions in theirs. It’s was an awful fight, and one that was best solved by dying and not returning to the arena to fight, rather staying just outside and blasting away. While there are a couple of bosses not too dissimilar to that, for the final boss of Mr Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage the designers have actually recognised that that’s what you’re going to do and given you some concrete blocks to hide behind, from which you’re pretty much invulnerable.

There’s also not enough loot. To mention Scarlett again, while half the loot in that dlc was cursed in some way, I was at least getting something interesting stuff periodically, and the loot I got at the end was mostly pretty special. Here you get a spurt of loot right at the end of the game, most of which is going to be useless. You don’t even get to go inside the vault. There is some good loot in Mr Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage, but it’s locked away in vending machines that require tokens specific to this dlc, and you don’t get enough of them playing through the game normally.

Which brings me to my final point, if you’re playing multiplayer then you’ll probably get more out of it. There’s ways to farm tokens, the bosses should be less frustrating, and you could even work together in the arena fights. Mr Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage isn’t devoid of merit, it’s more Borderlands after all, and there are one or two decent missions in there, and you’re still getting plenty of game for your money, the problem is too often it’s everything that’s wrong with Borderlands

You stand motionless by the closed door, waiting for your moment to strike. Two men on the opposite side of the door; one patrolling the circumference of the room armed with a knife, the other watching the door as motionless as you are, though he is armed with a shotgun. You're no superhero. If one of these men sees you and you don’t act accordingly you’re dead. No second chance. This is the kind of puzzle Hotline Miami is essentially made up of. That is the essence of it. The game moves at such a fast pace that if your attacks on the groups aren't quick, efficient, accurate cobra-like strikes then you yourself will meet an instant death.

Anyone who has seen the film Drive will be familiar with the tone of Hotline Miami after only a few minutes. The way Ryan Gosling’s makes his kills in claustrophobic motel rooms is comparable in how violent and disturbing they are, what with the similar brain splattering result. It’s not only the violence that Hotline Miami shares with Drive but also it's late 80's inspired electronic soundtrack. The harsh, pulsating, synthesised music pushes you through the level at a pace you’re not quite comfortable with but have to deal with. Looking at Hotline Miami for a few moments will likely make you draw comparisons to the first two Grand Theft Auto games: what with its fixed top down perspective, retro look with crudely pixelated characters lying flat in their own blood, and the sleazy crime setting. Though that is where the similarities end. Hotline Miami isn't a work of satire, showing a twisted reflection of some of American and western culture. Hotline Miami is just bleak.

You spend your time in Hotline Miami breaking down doors and eliminating anyone who crosses you in apartment buildings, nightclubs and police stations; or wherever the mysterious agency wants someone dead. You can take the silent approach by using weapons such as knives, baseball bats and lead pipes, all of which can be thrown as well as used more conventionally. These cause less noise, except for the sound of the squelching of brain leaving skull, which is too subtle for any nearby psychos to be alarmed by. Firearms are also available you want to dispatch your enemies from afar but the game encourages you to be mindful of the noise as if you’re too trigger happy then you will be punished by swarms of bastards armed with everything from baseball bats, knives, assault rifles to shotguns. When a group like that gets together it doesn't matter how good you are, you will die. Like I said earlier, being smart and efficient is the key for dealing with everyone and staying alive.

Though, it isn't as frustrating as it may seem. The game moves at such a fast pace that you rarely lose a lot of progress. It has a pace to it that will be familiar to anyone who’s had that ‘just one more go’ feeling from games such as Trials HD or Super Meat Boy. You die, but the game instantly starts again with no waiting around.

The enemy AI is also interestingly implemented. Many enemies react quite predictably by just shooting you on sight or running to the source of a noise but others are very stubborn. They may not even move from their post even if one of their comrades falls into a pool of their own blood right in their line of sight, so you then have to rethink the situation and not rely solely on the same tried and tested strategies. While it may seem unrealistic at first you begin to see that the AI is weaved into the level design to really vary up the gameplay and keep you on your toes.

It’s not always a fine example of a game. There are a few bosses which do disturb the flow of the game. They have particular patterns and there is only one way to defeat them and that style of gameplay sits awkwardly with the rest of the game. Thanks to the one hit death you can get caught in a loop quite easily of dying and restarting, and when you have to keep doing the same thing to beat them it can get tiresome. When you’re in a death loop in the main game you often have various strategies and routes to complete the level and not having those same options in boss battles is disappointing. It seems repetition and persistence is all you need to fight bosses.

There are also some issues with the top down graphical style as it can sometimes be hard to tell how high some objects are which leads to deaths when you thought you were hidden or in cover, but this isn't common.

Hotline Miami is a satisfyingly dark and twisted action game which also requires the strategic thinking of a killer in the mould of the nameless protagonist from Drive. Hotline Miami grips you and doesn't let go, and you won’t want it to let go.

I really enjoyed Sleeping Dogs, the kind of really enjoyed that will probably see it find a place in my top 10 of the year come December, and as such the promise of more is always going to interest me. So far the dlc for Sleeping Dogs has been a bit uninspired, new outfits and a handful of extra missions, but Nightmare in North Point offers proper, meaty story content.

Or kind of anyway, Nightmare in North Point exists outside of the main game, meaning lost old friends can make a come back, but unfortunately it’s also pretty short. That’s not to say it’s a lazy piece of content, far from it, nor is it a bank breaker (priced at £4.39), but it does end before you really feel like you’ve sunk your teeth in.

This is where I should type “no pun intended”, as North Point has been overrun with the walking dead, traditional Chinese vampires called Jiāng Shī. They aren’t your traditional western vampires, no one turns in to a bat or gets involved in a love triangle with a human and a vampire; instead they hop around, arms outstretched… a bit like Tigger. While the Jiāng Shī aren’t exactly terrifying, their glowing eyes, traditional garb, and peculiar movement soaks them in character, something that deserves special mention in what would otherwise be another ‘zombie dlc’.

Also worthy of note is that to deal with these new types of enemies Wei has new types of attack. Replacing the Face meter from the main game is a magic meter that once filled allows you to harm otherwise invulnerable enemies, and just generally makes you more damaging to the standard enemies. It freshens things up, and it adds to the tone of the dlc.

The missions of the main game have been dropped in favour of a small selection of new ones too. Gone are racing, hacking security cameras and hijacking money vans, instead you’ll be dispatching 7 ft demons and chucking vampires in to portals. And that’s kind of it, the story missions throw in a couple of chase sequences, a smidgen of gunplay, but after that it’s back to punching the undead in the face and gorilla-pressing them in to spawn points. It’s what makes the dlc’s length so disappointing, given the similarities between the story and bonus missions there’s no reason why they couldn’t have added a few more.

For your money you’re getting less than 3 hours of content, easily less if you have no interest in doing the side missions (seriously, do them), you’re not even making full use of the map only the one district (North Point fittingly enough). It’s a shame because what is there is really good fun, I loved being back in the world and the Hong Kong ghost story works great, but then you realise you’re approaching the last mission and hoping that there’s some sort of twist that keeps things going.

If you’re a Sleeping Dogs fan you’ll have a great time with Nightmare in North Point, and the score doesn’t really reflect my enjoyment, just know you’re buying a nights entertainment rather than a weekends

Every football fan has given a variation of Football Manager a try over the years, it all stems from that knowledge buried deep down that you can do a better job than whomever is in control of your favourite team. We all have our tales of success and stories of war, the player that turned into a superstar and the "knocks on the door" from bigger clubs trying to poach him away. Thats what makes Football Manager such an established yearly title in most British gamers catalogue.



Over the past few years however noise has begun to generate that the franchise felt a little bloated and unaccessible, that players were having to spend more time playing with training regimes and making minor adjustments to their tactics in order to generate any kind of success. For some this was great, it offered the level of depth they'd been crying out for, for others it was far too over bearing. This year Sports Interactive appear to have listened to pretty much everybody and tried to address this by making available three different modes. "Football Manager" offers the same experience that has been available in previous versions, "Football Manager Classic" provides the player with a more accessible, stripped back and quicker version of the same game whilst "Challenge Mode" gives players an experience that was thus far only available in the handheld versions of Football Manager wherein you choose from a handful of different tasks of varying difficulties and try to succeed within a given time limit.

The main focus appears to be on how Football Manager Classic differs from its full fat brother. The mode's title is a bit misleading, anybody going in expecting something a little more like the days when the series was using the Championship Manager title, the aim here appears to mainly make the overall experience quicker than the main game mode would normally be. Sports Interactive have gone to great lengths to try and include all of the features they've brought to the franchise over the year but have stripped them back as much as possible to remove the sheer level of complexity that is on offer in the fuller game. For alot of us, this is how Football Manager should be (although I've ended up spending more time with my Peterborough United save on the main mode rather than my West Brom save on the Classic mode).

That doesn't mean the staff have ignored the bigger longer experience. Right from the off you'll notice the differences, the user interface feels much more natural and cleaner for a start and the amount of information thats given to you by your Assistant Manager in a rather Twitter feed like manner is amazingly useful and much less vague than it ever was, players reactions to your orders (both via team talks and "Shouts") are more noticeable than ever too, touchline management now actually feels like it makes a difference and thanks to the manner in which such menu's have been implemented its incredibly easy to change formation, tell your players what sort of play to focus on or wether they need to be more disciplined with their positions or not.

If anything the development of Classic Mode seems to have aided them in making full game a little more accessible, players who storm through a couple of seasons in a week in Classic Mode may find they long for something a little more challenging or they have a need to develop their own formations and tactics in a manner not afforded to them by the newer mode, whilst players who find they're getting bored of it taking so long for their long-term plans to come to fruition in the fuller game may find solace with the tempo of Classic mode, add in the aforementioned Challenge mode plus a whole wealth of new multiplayer modes and leaderboards thanks to the series really beginning to take advantage of being a Steamworks title and theres something here for every single football fan.

Dear Esther is going to be a difficult game to review, firstly it’s a hard game to effectively describe, phrases like ‘interactive poem’ or ‘narrative adventure’ are meaningless. To put it bluntly, you’re walking a linear path through an empty world, a sparse segment of a Scottish Far Cry with all the enemies long since perished.

Secondly, like Braid and Limbo, giving too much information will ruin your game, but then look at the above paragraph, what is there to sell Dear Esther to you? It’s made especially difficult because unlike the two aforementioned games, there’s no gameplay to speak of. You could play through Limbo, enjoy it, and not even pick up on the narrative until the end, and even then not care and still love it. Thirdly, unlike The Passage, which is equally thematic and lacking in what you’d regard as ‘proper’ gameplay, Dear Esther costs you money, £7 to be exact. It feels slightly dirty to attribute a monetary value to what is clearly a piece of art, but in a review it’s something you have to give thought to, especially as the game is no more than 2 hours long.

Enough of what you can’t do in Dear Esther, what you can do is explore, in fact that’s pretty much all you can do. You start the game to a narration, the beginnings of a tale of death and guilt, with a run down house to your right, naturally you enter, study the books and paraphernalia scattered around, and wonder what button it is to interact and whether your even meant to. You give up and leave the house, set out on one of the paths, either high or low, and which you choose effects what you hear and see. There might be a reference to a beach, there might be a cave and a reference to a hermit. All of it means something.

And that’s the essence of why Dear Esther works, it drip feeds you information, at first meaningless ramblings, but it soon dawns on you that what you’ve been hearing are jigsaw pieces, and it’s only towards the end of the game that you get the corner pieces. It’s a rare and peculiar feeling to have realisation wash over you, rarer still that a game will keep feeding it, leaving you opened mouthed at every new reference you uncover. It is then that Dear Esther becomes compulsive and exhilarating, and a game that will stay with you for a while.

I can’t believe I’ve left it until the end to mention the graphics and sound! In most games they’re something you check off. You use words like “functional” and only write more than a few lines if there’s something particularly novel or broken about them. The graphics in Dear Esther are nothing short of staggering, the foliage is so dense, the environment diverse. While some item textures can be typically flat for a Source Engine game, and some of the buildings have an overly grainy look to them, the lighting more than makes up for it. The cave section is astonishing, the use of blue tones, the reflections in the water, it’s so impressive, and I‘m happy to declare that chapter the most beautiful thing I have seen in a game.

The score too, sparse and rarely used, there isn’t a single piece of music in the game that is anything less than affecting. It helps build the atmosphere, as you open the final chapter, the graphics, the music, and the narration all pull together to keep you absolutely captivated for the 2nd half of the game.

Dear Esther is not for everyone, if you aren’t interested in the Poe-esque narration then the pretty sights aren’t really enough to justify the cost, especially as there’s nothing else on the table. The game is also incredibly short, I clocked 100 minutes with a lot of exploring. However a 2nd play-though does offer some reward, I’ll leave you to browse various forums for more details once you’ve completed the story.

Regardless of the score below, I can honestly say that Dear Esther is probably the most affected I have ever been by a game, it pulls together better than Braid and Limbo, and has a stronger and deeper narrative than Flower, Passage and Lucidity. The short answer as to whether Dear Esther is for you, it made me write this review with the first few paragraphs as my head up my arse, if you understand that compulsion you’ll get something from it.