The Rogue Prince of Persia Review (Switch 2)

We didn’t have a Dead Cells inspired Prince of Persia rogue-like game on our prediction list but now it’s here we are certainly glad it exists. The team responsible for some of the Dead Cells DLC are behind the wheel here and while it is clear what the template is, it also does enough to stand out. It released digitally a while ago, but with the physical release on the horizon we decided to take a deeper look.

The story is that the kingdom is under siege from the Hun. The Prince is knocked out during a battle on the outskirts of the city and awakens three days later to find the city besieged. He now must make his way through to the inner palace to save the day. It follows the same sort of format as Dead Cells does. You enter an area, are allotted a standard weapon, a tool and an upgrade from the unlocked roster and then search for an exit to the next realm. There is normally more than one route you can discover to add some variety, and more can be added as you discover maps and information in your adventure.

There is a stronger story element than Dead Cells though. As you discover clues and information, you’ll get little mini quests to complete to further the plot. These are normally things like finding out who has been kidnapped or locating certain items, but they add another layer to the game and the gradual unravelling of events is entertaining. There are also NPC’s to talk to and some will return to the Oasis to offer services and more plot specific points. Away from this it’s the standard structure of push forward as far as you can, unlock as many permanent upgrades as possible and rinse and repeat until you win the day.

The pace of the game is also much faster than Dead Cells. The sense of inertia and momentum we now associate with the Prince of Persia has been captured beautifully. There are a whole host of zooms, walls run, wall jumps and other moves that keep the Prince bouncing around the levels, and the combat fits perfectly into the pace as well as you dodge and flip around. It’s clear a lot of thought and feedback has gone into getting this just right and it makes each run a fluid joy. As a result, the game is also far more platform heavy than Dead Cells to the point of being Super Meat Boy like with its traps and contraptions at times.

The ‘Sands of Time’ reversal mechanic is tied into the narrative this time by the fact that when the Prince dies, he reverses back to awakening in the starting Oasis. Only, any people he has rescued or story points he discovers return with him. You can’t rewind time when you make a mistake though, a good choice as that would clash with the genre conventions.

The look of the game is closer to the long-forgotten cell shaded Prince of Persia which came after the ‘Sands’ trilogy. It gives it a story book aesthetic which works well and allows for clear definition on the screen. We are also very grateful to see a host of colour-blind options that can be set - something Dead Cells really needed when we first played it. As a result, it means frustration is kept to your own limits of your skill set rather than things you can’t see on the screen.

Overall, The Rogue Prince of Persia has been put together very well. This may seem like a strange source of a Rogue-like title but it in practice it works perfectly. There’s even an argument to be had here about it being better than the Metroidvania version of the Prince we got not so long ago. We are slightly surprised it wasn’t a piece of extended Dead Cells DLC, but it’s certainly been fleshed out into a rewarding and fun game. It’s very much worth playing if you are a fan of Dead Cells or Prince of Persia.

Overall 8/10

Assassin's Creed: Syndicate Review (PS4)

Another year and another Assassin’s Creed steps forth to fulfil our running and stealth based needs. The games have certainly come a long way since Altair first donned his white garb and disrupted the Middle Eastern streets. Since then we’ve moved to Italy, Turkey, France, America and even the Caribbean. Our next destination is Victorian London and we eagerly dived in hoping to find a game to put into the series’ ‘good’ category.

We’ll have to be honest and say we didn’t really spend enough time with Unity to form an opinion on it so we are coming at this after the excellent Black Flag. We loved Black Flag and it’s about as close as we are ever likely to get to a modern version of Sid Meier’s Pirates! Jumping into Syndicate was a change of pace right from the start and the game certainly has a personality of its own. Syndicate is like sneaking your way through Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes version of Victorian London. 

This time you take control brother and sister Evie and Jacob Frye who come to industrial London to loosen the Templar grip and stop them from taking over the world. You can switch between both characters freely and each one is a bit better at certain things. Evie is better at stealth and knives while Jacob is a better fighter and is better with a gun. You can level up your assassins by completing the various tasks and missions and then choosing what to spend experience on. You can also level up more quickly by paying real money which is something we are never a fan of. That said we never really found the ‘pay to win’ mechanic intruded upon our play through and is easily ignorable.

Evie and Jacob are excellent characters and each has a distinct personality. Their voice acting is excellent throughout and everything always stays the right side of ridiculous cockney accents. The strong voice cast help to make the story seem important and interesting and it’s one of the stronger entries in the series from a narrative point of view.

London itself is pretty much completely open to you from the very start. Different areas display the recommended level for you character to be but there is nothing stopping you going and trying to undertake side missions if you so wish. There are far fewer viewpoints though, so fast traveling around can be a bit of a pain. You do have a train which trundles around the map (and acts as your mobile base), which you can also fast travel to and this proves very useful at times.

The detail of London is excellent with horse drawn carriages rolling along the streets and a large population of NPC characters going around their daily lives. There’s been a bit of geographic manipulation but it gives a real feel of a city in the midst of an industrial revolution. When the sky dims and all the lanterns come on it can be very impressive to look at and we never grew tired of wandering around the streets on our way to the next objective.

Speaking of objectives, you are certainly not going to be short of things to do. As well as the main story missions there are countless other side quests to get involved in and endless amounts of trinkets to find. Each area of London is under control of a gang called the Blighters. In order to take it back you need to kill Templars, free work house children, take out gang members and kidnap criminals. These tasks all follow the theme of sneaking in somewhere and then either killing or capturing targets within enclosed areas. 

Once the missions have been carried out the Blighters will challenge you and your gang the Rooks to a fight for the area. These are the only real low point of the game as the enemy gang leaders are huge tanks with massive health bars and you are stuck in an enclosed space with them and not able to use much of your equipment. We got stuck on one for hours as the boss could kill us with four hits and the game kept forcing us into quick time event sequences where he would continually strike at us when his health bar reached certain levels. 

The easiest thing to do is try and kill the bosses when they first appear at the end of the initial gang war sections. If you can get them before they get away then you won’t have to deal with them later in the territory fight.

Aside from the tank bosses the only other major issue we had is the fact it has no colour blind options. There are now a ton of things represented on your map and for gamers with colour blindness you are likely going to struggle with identifying what they are. You now have your enemies, police, ally Rooks, escaping criminals, street kids, carriages and a host of other things. All represented by coloured dots with no other symbol. It’s really bad in this day and age to think that this hasn’t been taken into account and is certainly something that needs to be addressed to make it more accessible.

On top of these side missions you can also get involved in fight clubs, raid cargo, go looking for flowers, beer bottles and other collectibles and take part in ‘memory’ sequences which explore some of myth and folk lore of London. There’s so much to do that we spent hours skipping around away from the main quest and seemingly never even really made a dent in it.

Of course, if the game doesn’t play well then you aren’t going to want to spend hours with it. But this time everything works excellently. Your characters are fluid and control as you would want and combat is pretty much as it’s always been. You get a new gadget to play with which lets you grappling hook to the top of buildings and across large streets which solves the problem of London not perhaps fitting a free running world as cities have done in the past. The only bugs we found were that occasionally weapons didn’t appear in enemies hands and sometimes characters would vanish in cut scenes. 

Overall, we had a lot of fun with Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate. It’s different enough from the other games to feel fresh while still holding onto the core of what makes the games great in much the same way Black Flag was. It’s a bit more action based than a lot of the other games and has bucket loads of personality. It’s certainly closer to the quality of Assassin’s Creed 2 than the miss-steps of the series. There are still a few frustrating sections and there will be many that feel the series should have stopped being an annual outing but you can’t deny that when the formulae works it creates a great adventure. Just sort out your colour blind options Ubisoft.

Overall 8/10

Colour Blind Issues - Yes
Review Code - Yes

Valiant Hearts: The Great War Review (PS3)

Valiant Hearts is the fourth game from Ubisoft to use its UbiArt Framework. Before it Rayman Origins, Legends and Child of Light were also built using the system that creates beautiful 2D games. Valiant Hearts is the story of four characters set against the backdrop of the First World War. Their story runs throughout the conflict as they are thrown together and pulled apart. Above all else it’s really a story about love and friendship.

The real draw of the game is its style. It look absolutely stunning and though presented in a comic book way really brings home the suffering and horror of the situation. This is done through very subtle touches and often in the background of scenes. The one that sticks most in our mind is a small boy crying over the body of his parent in a pile of rubble after the assault on a French town. The depiction of chemical warfare certainly has an impact as well.

These subtle images are underscored with a sensitive and gorgeous musical score which really helps to build emotion as you play. You’ll really begin to care about your characters and understand just how horrific the conflict was. It also does a good job of showing how families were pulled apart and how people living near the borders of different nationalities were separated during the conflict.

One of the characters you will play as is Karl, a German man married to a French women named Marie. He is drafted into the German army at the outbreak of the war and much of the story revolves around him trying to get back home to be with his wife and child. Another character is Karl’s father in-law Emilie who is drafted into the French army where he meets our third character –an American soldier serving in the French army named Freddie. The last character is Anna, a Belgium woman who becomes a battlefield nurse. You also quickly pick up a dog companion who can be used to pull switches, distract soldiers and gather objects from hard to reach places.

The game itself plays out like a 2D adventure game. Most of the time you’ll need to find an item and take it to the place where that item needs to be used. There are also sections where you’ll have to get past enemy gunfire and the odd very whimsical bit where you try and outrun something in a car while a crazy tune plays. There are puzzles to solve as well. These normally involve making pipes fit together or throwing something at something else at a particular angle. There’s a bit of stealth also as you hide behind barrels or bushes to avoid guards and searchlights. It’s certainly not the most difficult game in the world but it certainly flows well and it’s also quite a sizable game, clocking in at around six hours.

Exploring the levels is important as it helps to give you an overall picture of what you are trying to do. There is no speech in the game world with everything being done via thought bubbles.  Unless you look around it’s highly likely you’ll have no idea what to do with those braces you just found or that lump of coal. There are also a number of artefacts littering each level which unlock facts and information about the war.

Now, we don’t claim to be great historians on World War 1 so we can’t lay claim to how accurate the game itself is. That said, the facts and pictures unlocked are usually referenced and if nothing else it certainly awakened a curiosity in us to try and find out more about the subject matter at hand and that can only be a good thing.

It may sound a little simple but it’s amazing how well it all works together. You really do care about the characters and we had the urge to keep going to find out what was going to happen next to them. You could perhaps argue that the tone is a little inconsistent with the car missions but for the most part it hits the correct notes and carries a sombre feeling of people doing what must be done even though the situation is horrendous. 

Overall, we can say that we haven’t played anything quite like this before. The setting and style are unique and it reminded us a bit of the Ralph Bakshi film Wizards. A lot is going to come down to if you invest in the characters and story. We did and we feel Ubisoft has done everything they can to make players feel genuine emotion while playing. It’s a touching, heartfelt story that someone clearly cared about when making. It’s crafted beautifully and told poignantly and we really can’t ask for any more than that.

Overall 9/10

Rayman Legends Review (PS3)

Rayman Origins was a rousing return to the limbless hero’s 2D roots. A breath of fresh air upon release, it was cruelly ignored by large numbers of gamers who overlooked its colourful style and anarchic reverence for the something more familiar, possibly containing guns.

Now it’s the turn of Rayman legends to attempt to spread joy to a wider range of gamers. Starting life as a Wii U exclusive the game is now hitting pretty much everywhere and it’s lucky for anyone without a Wii U that it is because this is one of the best platformers to grace any system for years.

The game has Rayman and an assortment of friends leaping into action after the bubble dreamer had some very bad dreams and conjured up a whole host of nasty creatures. What this means is our heroes must leap around an assortment of fairy tale and fantasy themed worlds, rescue some teensies and princesses’ and defeat the evil dark teensies to save the day.

If Origins was a touch on the crazy side then Legends is full lunacy with the different themed worlds offering up all sorts of opportunities for creative levels and large amounts of silly fun. Every world stays consistent to its theme throughout and takes in everything from classic medieval legends to Cinco de Mayo. There are also a number of nods to other video games and films such as Bioshock and Star Wars. Everything is implemented brilliantly and the quality never drops. The game has also had pretty much all of the rough edges removed that were found in Origins. The most obvious of these is the difficulty and fairness of levels. Certain stages in origins fell into the trap of being memory tests, this is rarely the case in legends and as a result the feeling of fun and enjoyment is kept to a maximum. That isn’t to say legends isn’t a challenging game, it’s just not as unfair as Origins.

The main bulk of the games levels split themselves into a few different styles. There’s the standard platform and swimming levels, levels where you run from or after something and the odd stage which turns into a sort of side scrolling shooter with Rayman floating around in jet streams. Each world also has a boss fight at the end. Each of these is unique and loses much of the instant deaths and frustration of the encounters in Origins. One of the best of these is a fight against a giant Mexican wrestler beating a huge drum which sends you flying up into the air.

Once the boss of each world is vanquished you can enter the music level. These stages are a straight run to the finish but take the form of a semi-rhythm action game with jumps and attacks needing to be implemented with precision in order to avoid death. Each of these is a highlight and a great way for players to end each of the worlds. 

The game is also absolutely filled to brim with content. Aside from sizable six main worlds to complete there are also a host of redesigned levels from the Origins to play through as well. Invasion levels also unlock as you progress which see’s you having tor ace through a remixed stage to rescue three teensies strapped to fireworks. If you’re too slow they gradually get fired off into the sky and explode. 

If that isn’t enough there are also a number of daily and weekly challenges that you can take part in to earn lums. Here you have a set goal such as racing through a level or collecting lums and you are then ranked globally. Weirdly, it works much in the same way as SSX. If that isn’t enough for you then you can also spend your time collecting creatures and unlocking all the hidden characters as well. Rest assured this is going to keep you busy for a very long time.

There are of course a few differences to the Wii U version of the game. The loss of the touch screen means that the levels originally having the player control Murphy the fly via the gamepad as Globox wandered around automatically have been altered. Now you continue to control Rayman and press the O button have Murphy life platforms, spread guacamole or tickle monsters. These levels feel a bit odd as they clearly don’t work in the way originally intended. That said they are still excellent and you soon get used to how it all works.

Overall, Rayman Legends is an exceptional game. The levels of invention, fun and polish are simply off the chart. There’s clearly a lot of love from the development team in this and it’s just a riotously good time from start to finish. Ok, so this version isn’t quite as strong as the Wii U game but it’s like saying a gold bar with a fly on it isn’t as good as one without. This is one of strongest titles in the PS3 library and should be heralded as the classic that it is.

9/10

Rayman 3 Review (Game Cube)

Another unoriginal platform game then? Well yes obviously its going to be unoriginal, but think what platform games these days make the impact of Mario 64 or the original sonic the hedgehog games. None, the problem is that its near impossible to create something fresh in this genre, (just look at Vexx for evidence of that) even Mario Sunshine struggled to do it. However, that doesn't stop developers being able to present some aging ideas in a fun filled and polished new way and that's what Rayman 3 achieves.

The Rayman series has always had a style of its own and that continues in this instalment. Graphically it looks like no other game, somewhere between being very cute and very twisted. The visuals are truly stunning, better looking than even Mario Sunshine due simply to the amount of colour on the screen. Its clear attention has been paid to even the tiniest details as you move from swamps to underground caverns, each area looking dramatically different to last.This means you never get stuck with staring at the same old background or textures. Everything is polished up to its shiny best, not a rough edge anywhere, though I suspect the Playstation 2 version may have a few.

Furthermore the cut scenes have to be seen to be believed truly gorgeous. What really compliments the graphics in creating the unique feel of the game is the wacky humour packed into almost every inch of it. Whether it be the characters shouting insults, or on one occasion Globox talking to flowers, this game is funny. It made me laugh on numerous occasions as one bizarre thing happens after another. Those crazy French. The humour is also personified in some of the extras. Under the bonus section is a list of unlockable lessons. What these amount to are about fifteen or so small sketches in the same sort of style asMonsters Inc, where by a black lump is shown how to attack Rayman. Hard to describe but hilarious to watch.

Happily the game play matches the fun set up by the graphical finesse. There is very little in this game that will frustrate you. The camera is just about perfect, and the controls are the most responsive that I have come across for a long time. You can hover around, swing about and punch to your hearts content happy in the knowledge Rayman is reacting as fast as you are. The only minor problem is sometimes the camera is just a touch too far away and you can end up misjudging the distance of where the next ledge that you need to grip onto is. However, this occurs about twice in the whole game so not a major issue.

Levels themselves are more or less your standard platform fare, move around the 3D environment, unlock doors, find hooks in the sky to swing on ect ect. But there are a few nice moments such as skating along inside a disco jukebox and racing about in a shoe, which apart from being just plain weird helps to brake up the more standard play. Unfortunately the problem with the game is simply that it's too easy. I managed to get through the whole thing and died about four times.

That said, you don't care because it's so genuinely great to play. But once finished there isnt a lot of replay value to be had except to unlock more extras such as the lessons and the mini-games. Really that isn't enough as the mini-games themselves aren't that good and consist of mainly dull things such as bouncing on balloons or driving a missile through an assault course.

There are a couple of exceptions however, the frog squashing game is genius and the link up shoe racing Tetris hybrid is one of the most brilliant things ever done in a video game. Basically this involves one player with the game cube driving Rayman down a road in a shoe towards a goal. The other player must build the road on the GameBoy Advance where blocks fall down the screen in the style of Tetris. Its totally addictive and you don't even need the Rayman 3 GameBoy Advance release to play it.

To sum up I loved playing Rayman 3, it's fun, colourful and very funny. Just dont be expecting either a major leap forward for the platform genre or a stiff challenge as it's lacking in both. What's here is polished and beautiful -there's just not enough of it. Saying that, if you have a GameBoy Advance as well its a must have game simply for the shoe racing.

8/10