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Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty PC Demo Impressions – Satisfying Rhythm-Based Combat

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In today’s gaming climate, releasing a free demo is emblematic of a developer’s utmost confidence — even more so on PC, a platform that has consistently received the short end of the stick in terms of optimisation. Team Ninja’s latest, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, shows some promise — it’s a theatrical dark-fantasy getaway that feels like a lovechild born of Nioh and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. The short demo gives us a peek into its China-set lore and showcases its flashy combat as well as new features that will ease your journey inoto the intimidating Souls-like experience. However, for a game that’s merely days away from launch, it also exposes some microstutters and a major issue with keyboard and mouse controls.

Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty Demo impressions: PC controls and camera

As a Koei Tecmo-published title, control issues on PC were somewhat expected, but I commend Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty’s controls for being far less complicated than those of the Nioh series of games from which it feels descended. Keyboard + mouse button prompts can be enabled, which is a major step up from 2021’s Nioh 2 PC port, which only showed controller button icons no matter what scheme you used. Sure, this was fixed in a patch, but until that happened, players were forced to spend time acquainting themselves with the mapping.

Camera controls in the Wo Long demo also aren’t up to par, and fail to respond well when using a mouse. Even after maxing the in-game sensitivity setting, I couldn’t shake the feeling of moving through sludge, as the camera would slow down at points and then a sudden jerk would turn it around. This was fairly common with vertical movement and when running around the map. Switching to a DualSense controller made the experience smooth and snappy. As someone who has played every Souls-like on a KB+M setup, the switch wasn’t easy, so I constantly swapped between low and high mouse DPI settings based on the situation. Thankfully, this didn’t pose a big problem during combat, as I could simply lock on to enemies.

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Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty Demo impressions: Premise and character creation

Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty throws you into a fictionalised version of the later Han Dynasty in China, plagued with demonic forces. Meanwhile, a mysterious Taoist in Black clings to the ideal of the Elixir — a rare substance that seemingly grants immortality. Amidst the madness and eternal bloodshed of the times, a hero rises, who we build in the character creation screen. I’d suggest going all-out with the customisation here since free demo progress carries over to the full game. You might as well save yourself some time after launch. The creation options here, while in-depth, are subtle, so any major changes to your character’s appearance won’t be evident unless you drag a slider to its extreme ends. Unlike Dark Souls, you can’t really mess around with crazy skin colour to create a pasty green Grinch or a blue Smurf, either. The most you can get is a light olive tone.

After selecting a base figure — male or female — you can mess around with their facial structure, hairstyle, and makeup; even including some dashing scars. Each eye can be edited to look a distinct colour, with adjustments to pupil sizes and shapes. You can even stretch ears to resemble those of an elf. Pick an ideal physique, decorate your body with tattoos, add an elongated neck for effect — those are just some of your options. None of this has any effect on your stats, though.

There’s a limit to how absurdly creative you can get with your characters
Photo Credit: Screenshot/ Rahul Chettiyar

You start out as a nameless soldier fighting the Yellow Turban Rebellion and eventually grow into a legend. If you’re short on time, pick a model from the numerous character templates, one of whom is a spitting image of William Adams, the protagonist from Nioh. Cool easter egg!

Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty Demo impressions: Gameplay and combat

The latest free demo consists of two key Chapters, the first of which places you in a village engulfed in flames with sparks flying about. The framerate is a little rough and choppy here, partly thanks to smoke and particle effects, though these remained consistent even in combat, in my experience. Enabling V-sync and motion blur barely had an effect on performance, which was disappointing. Things got smoother in the boss area and beyond, but I can see this opening segment leaving a bad impression on many people. The second area ran near buttery smooth at a consistent 60fps, but with minor hiccups.

Sekiro veterans will feel right at home here, as Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty’s gameplay relies on perfectly timed parries. You can try evading or blocking enemy attacks, but that will lead lead to needlessly long and drawn-out fights. Foes are smarter here, so they will stay en garde as long as you keep spamming attacks. And so, you remain patient. You wait until the very last second — when they’re just about to hit you — and then quickly deflect the assault, throwing them off balance to get a couple of strikes in. Repeat the process once the enemy reassumes their defensive stance, and you’ve basically mastered the core gameplay loop. However, depleting their health bars isn’t the only way to achieve victory.

‘Hesitation is defeat,’ a quote from Sekiro, fits perfectly in the context of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty’s combat
Photo Credit: Koei Tecmo

“Hesitation is defeat” is a quote from Sekiro that fits perfectly in this context. You see, the game has a Spirit Gauge that fills up as you successfully land hits or deflect incoming ones, granting you the ability to use martial arts, Spirit (heavy) attacks, and Wizardry Spells. The only way to ensure that its level stays up is to play aggressively, but beware, as getting hit by an enemy not only reduces your Spirit, but your health too. That said, it works the same way with baddies, so you could unload a barrage of attacks until their Spirit Gauges are drained, essentially staggering them and leaving them open to a fatal blow. It’s the same posture bar mechanic that Sekiro has, where your adversaries can have 100 percent health, but once you break their stance, it’s GGs.

There’s a steep learning curve to this combat style, especially when fighting demons with flailing movesets. But once it clicks, you realise that every fight is a dance, with the metallic clang of weapons serving as beats. There is a specific rhythm to it that you need to find.

The boss Zhang Liang has a terrifying second phase where he grows a flailing demonic arm
Photo Credit: Screenshot/ Rahul Chettiyar

Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty Demo Impressions: Exploration and looting

Compared to the Nioh games, exploration is more open, with a focus on verticality. You can jump onto huts to discover an opening in the roof that leads inside or search for loot elsewhere in the world. Who knows? You might come across handy shortcuts along the way. If you’re lucky enough, you can acquire better weapons, each catering to a different playstyle. The Polearm Podao that I found early in the game helped create some distance between myself and foes, whilst dealing swift piercing damage. On the other hand, the Great Club of Polaris, which I earned by defeating the first boss, Zhang Liang, dealt high damage numbers but was too heavy and slow for my liking. While you can beat the game with a single weapon, switching them based on enemy attack patterns is the ideal way to go. Additionally, if fighting a group head-on feels scary, simply whip out your bow and arrow, and shoot them from afar — one by one.

Weapons cater to different playstyles and scale with specific attributes
Photo Credit: Screenshot/ Rahul Chettiyar

Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty Demo Impressions: Morale system

Difficulty in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty ties into a Morale system, which is indicated by a floating number above each enemy’s head, helping you gauge whether it’s safe to engage them in combat or not. Think of it as a secondary levelling, so the higher your Morale rank, the stronger you are. However, if you die to an opponent, you lose the XP you collected throughout your run, and your Morale resets. Death results in the enemy stealing your Morale, and the only way to get it back is to kill the being who beat you last time — only now, they are way stronger. Still, it’s nothing a few perfectly timed deflects can’t solve.

Some of this resetting can be mitigated via Fortitude, which can be raised by placing flags at designated posts, preventing your Morale from ever dropping to absolute zero. For instance, if you collected 8 Fortitude, no matter how many times you die, your Morale will not fall below 8. This guarantees you have a better chance at redemption. The free Wo Long demo also includes a quality-of-life indicator in the top-right corner — a radar of sorts and icons that denote any remaining flagposts you can collect.

Morale is indicated by a floating number above the enemy’s heads
Photo Credit: Screenshot/ Rahul Chettiyar

Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty Demo impressions: Levelling

Flagposts also serve as checkpoints — or bonfires, as they’re called in Dark Souls — for levelling up your character and resetting ailments. These are divided into five phases or virtues. Wood affects your HP, Fire determines Spirit build-up when attacking, and Earth indicates your equipment weight limit. The Metal attribute lessens Spirit consumption when casting spells, and Water helps with stealth. In the early stages of this game, Wood might seem like the best choice, but once you master the art of deflection, you’ll realise how much more potent the other phases are. Some of these help with weapon scaling, granting bonus damage depending on what armament you’re wielding. Furthermore, these posts also let you fast-travel to other checkpoints, summon AI or players online for co-op, and even learn Wizardry Spells.

You can level up your character at Flagposts
Photo Credit: Screenshot/ Rahul Chettiyar

Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty Demo impressions: Wizardry Spells

All spells in the Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty demo align directly with the five aforementioned elements. Fire is more offence-based, letting you hurl fireballs, summon pillars of flame, or imbue weapons with temporary buffs. Alternatively, opting for water-based magic can briefly turn you invisible, send out a blinding fog, teleport you short distances, or even let you throw sharp icicles that freeze and slow down enemies. Poison or curse purists can dump their points into the Metal class, while lighting attacks and the ability to heal yourself align with Wood. There’s a lot to experiment with here.

You can only hold four Wizardry Spells at a time, which I personally think is sufficient. On keyboard, they are assigned to the 1–4 number keys for quick access — no unnecessarily long combinations. My only gripe with spells is the casting time, which could be reduced. You can also summon Divine Beasts to come in and deal destructive damage, when you’re in a pickle.

By learning Wizardry Spells, you can summon bolts of lightning to rain down on enemies
Photo Credit: Koei Tecmo

Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty Demo impressions: Closing thoughts

The PC demo for Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, much like other Koei Tecmo releases, certainly has issues with optimisation and keyboard + mouse controls. However, once you look past that, it offers a hard-to-master yet rewarding combat system, flexible exploration in an otherwise linear world, and tools to ease your playthrough. As an extension of the punishingly difficult Nioh games, the studio is clearly catering to a larger audience with its latest release, and this free demo serves as a great showcase to see if it suits you. Beneath all the mythology-inspired visual glamour, I suspect the narrative will involve some well-worn tropes, but as a video game, it shows deep promise. Plus, this game will be available for free to Xbox Game Pass members, which is always a positive!

Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty releases March 3 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S/X. The demo is now available to download for free across all platforms, with progress carrying over to the full release.

Finishing the demo grants access to a Crouching Dragon Helmet DLC.

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Far Cry 6 Review: Unrevolutionary Caribbean Adventure Is Mighty Fun in Co-Op

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Far Cry 6 — releasing Thursday worldwide — is not a great game. It often retreads what have become Ubisoft clichés. But at times, it’s a really fun game. Far Cry 6 has moments of genuine inspiration where its combination of tropical paradise, co-op support, and new ideas fuse together to deliver something memorable. But between those admittedly enjoyable adventures, Far Cry 6 will also make you do a series of things that aren’t too different from one another. That sameness is pervasive. It feels like padding, though it’s nowhere near as bad as on Ubisoft’s other major franchise, Assassin’s Creed. That said, the world of Far Cry 6, Yara — a fictional Caribbean island that is heavily based on Cuba in many aspects — is the biggest you’ll ever see in a Far Cry game.

Yara is ruled by Antón Castillo, played by Breaking Bad and The Mandalorian’s Giancarlo Esposito, who was essentially elected on the promise to “Make Yara Great Again”. Castillo believes sacrifices are necessary to achieve that dream, so he begins ruling Yara with an iron fist. His 300,000-strong armed force Fuerzas Nacionales de Defensa (FND) controls the land, the skies, and the waters. No can get out, no can get in. The protagonist, a former FND officer Dani Rojas — playable as a woman (Nisa Gunduz) or a man (Sean Rey) — wants to do exactly that in the beginning. They just want to leave Yara for good. But after witnessing Anton’s horrors first hand, Dani joins the guerrilla movement Libertad that is trying to free Yara. It’s time for a revolution.

This is where the new ideas start to come in. After being a support studio on previous entries, and co-developing Far Cry 5 with Ubisoft Montréal, Ubisoft Toronto finally takes the lead on a Far Cry game for the first time. And for the first time since the first-person shooter franchise began, the protagonist in Far Cry 6 has a face. Not only do you see them in cutscenes, you also see them in third-person view at friendly camps. Given that Ubisoft took the pain of designing third-person view, I would have loved it if they allowed you to switch between first and third-person view in combat and driving too.

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Since I’m on the topic of bias, personally I would’ve also loved it if Ubisoft put a bigger emphasis on Spanish casting. There’s too much English here, clearly because Far Cry 6 is designed primarily for English-speaking audiences. Yes, there is a Spanish dub option in the settings, but it doesn’t involve any of the main cast, including Esposito. I spent some time with the Spanish version, and though it feels more authentic and immersive — as with Japanese on Ghost of Tsushima — I ended up reverting to English because a) lip-sync and b) I can’t spoil Esposito’s face and acting with a dubbed voice.

Far Cry 6 combat

The goal on Far Cry 6 is to overthrow Castillo and his friends who control various parts of Yara. Along the way, you will to have form alliances aka do the bidding of three major factions that have a lot of influence among the commoners of Yara. Far Cry 6 narrative director Navid Khavari noted that this was a deliberate story choice, how in a revolution every side doesn’t want the same thing and their approaches don’t always align.

As for your combat approach, Far Cry 6 allows you to choose between the quiet stealth way or go out all guns blazing. I’m glad that it allows the user to pick and doesn’t force you into one or the other. You can make your way into mission area in a variety of ways too. You can take a boat and sneak in from under a fort. Zip line and swing in from the sides. Rappel and climb from another front. Or just drive through the front gates.

Tanks can be deadly in Far Cry 6
Photo Credit: Ubisoft

That said, Far Cry 6 encourages you to scout from high ground before bursting in. Using your phone, you can mark enemies and get a sense of what you’re up against. There are new enemy types in Far Cry 6, drawn from the fact that you’re not dealing with rogues like before but a full-fledged armed force at Castillo’s disposal. In addition to the standard riflemen and snipers, there are FND officers with varying ranks who can boost morale (read: stats), bring in reinforcements, and even call in airstrikes. Medics can help injured soldiers and revive them if they are bleeding to death. And engineers will plant turrets or trigger EMPs that will disable your vehicle. You know, they work like a unit. The FND also use shields, animals, tanks, alarm systems, and trip wires — by scouting, you know what can be disabled.

Far Cry 6 weapons

To deal with all these threats, Far Cry 6 gives you access to special weapons in addition to a range of standard weapons. At any point, you can have four weapons in the weapon wheel: a sidearm and three primary weapons. For the latter, you can pick between rifles, snipers, shotguns, and Resolver weapons.

Drawn from Cuba’s make-do-with-what-you-have Resolver way of life, Far Cry 6 lets you unlock a bunch of unique handcrafted guns: a flamethrower, a crossbow, a riot shield, silent nail gun, and a poison gun that turns enemies on each other. On top of all that, Far Cry 6 has “Supremo” backpacks that are like an additional super weapon. They offer guided missiles, an explosive ring, EMP pulse generator, or a rage booster that turns you into a mini-Hulk. It all feels very Just Cause-y, though it’s going even further with the zaniness, I must admit.

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When you use Supremos, Far Cry 6 briefly switches into third-person view to show you how the backpack functions. But that’s the only time you’ll see third-person during combat on Far Cry 6. More importantly, I would’ve appreciated a bit of manual control for Supremos. On one occasion, when there was a plane flying across in the sky, the backpack automatically locked onto the plane rather than the anti-aircraft installation that I was trying to target.

Gunplay is quite satisfying on Far Cry 6. You will grow into it, I believe, because you start off with weak weapons that give you the feeling you’re not entirely in control. But it gets better fairly quickly, as you unlock more powerful rifles with better scopes and other weapon mods.

Resolver weapon in Far Cry 6
Photo Credit: Ubisoft

All this equipment and weapon variety is important to Far Cry 6 because Ubisoft Toronto has ditched the RPG-style skill trees that were present in some of its predecessors. Though you still earn XP and level up, you won’t get any points that unlock new abilities. Those buffs have been transferred to the armour and clothing you put on. As you make your way across Yara, you will find new gloves, trousers, masks, and chest pieces that will dictate what kind of benefits you get. Weapon modding allows you to pick between various ammo choices — some are good against others but poor elsewhere. You can discover this when you’re scouting. Of course, headshots are headshots as always though (I had a lot of fun with this). You can also insta-kill by using a bow, or sneaking up to them.

Far Cry 6 vehicles and amigos

You can also kill enemies using the vehicles available in Far Cry 6. You’ve tanks, helicopters, planes, and cars and boats with turrets. (You can use all of them to get from point A to point B as well, in addition to horses which are back in Far Cry 6 and quite enjoyable.) Though you’ve to be careful how and where you use them. The FND has anti-aircraft installations across Yara. Wade into an area with one and you will invariably be shot down. If you jump out in time, you can deploy a parachute or wingsuit — the latter is especially fun — to land safely.

You can destroy the anti-aircraft guns. But as you cause chaos in Far Cry 6, your “heat” meter will rise. The maximum heat level is “wanted”, which brings in the FND special forces. But during my playtime, they didn’t pose a bigger threat or anything weirdly. My Xbox game stats tell me I shot down a bunch of special forces, but I don’t recall anything different or tougher from the ones I was already killing.

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To participate in the mayhem, you can also bring in an animal companion. The Fangs for Hire system returns as “Amigos” on Far Cry 6. Amigo choices include an alligator, dogs, and even a rooster. They will help you in combat by attacking or distracting enemies — this also feeds into the stealth or all-out approach. Amigos aren’t that helpful though honestly, and they seem like a thing that exists to sell toys and generate buzz on social media. I mean, that’s already happening with Chorizo, the wheelchair weiner dog that’s one of the Amigo options.

Since Amigos follow you everywhere, it results in hilarious scenarios at times. While dogs can get in alongside you in cars, alligators will follow your vehicle endlessly. They become weirdly inaccessible at times — not reappearing even after you try to call them back.

The alligator amigo Guapo in Far Cry 6
Photo Credit: Ubisoft

Far Cry 6 co-op

Far Cry 6 currencies

There are four in-game currencies in Far Cry 6: depleted uranium, Yaran pesos, Moneda, and Far Cry Credits.

Depleted uranium is found at army bases and anti-aircraft installations. It is needed to unlock more Supremo backpacks and Resolver weapons.

Yaran pesos is found on dead soldiers and in loot. You can use it to buy gear, weapons, and intel from double agents.

Moneda can be used to purchase unique weapons at a store.

Far Cry Credits come with pre-orders and special editions. You can also buy it with real money, an egregious practice that Ubisoft continues despite charging Rs. 4,000 or more for games upfront. Far Cry Credits can be used on the in-game store to buy cosmetics and more.

But dogs don’t fit in always too, depending on the vehicle and the number of amigos. That brings me to co-op.

Like previous entries, Far Cry 6 supports co-op across the entirety of its campaign. I wish Ubisoft also provided this opportunity with its other major franchises, Assassin’s Creed and Watch Dogs. Every game is more fun with friends, naturally. You get support during missions — I loved taking down a pair of soldiers at the same time with a friend — but you can also just have a good time around Yara. In a car, one can drive and the other can handle the turret. Jump into a helicopter, with one person flying and firing missiles, and the other as a gunner. Or heck, you can even get into a motorbike with a sidecar and have your own Sholay moment in Far Cry 6.

Playing co-op also helps you earn Moneda, an in-game currency that you can only get via co-op and special operations. There are a couple of niggles with co-op support though. You can’t access a vehicle’s additional controls like the radio or missiles. Additionally, you can’t go too far from your partner in co-op — unlike The Division 2 (also from Ubisoft) where there were no limitations. And sadly, there’s no support for cross-platform play. But it does offer cross-gen co-op support, on par with Watch Dogs: Legion and The Division 2.

Far Cry 6 missions and more

Thanks to the largest Far Cry map ever, Far Cry 6 has a lot of story missions to offer. As I pointed out earlier, some feel repetitive: travel to a place, kill everyone there, and you’re done. Some missions also quickly fell behind my rank. Though initially my level seemed to be falling behind what was required, eventually it was ahead of the missions available to me. I would’ve liked a The Division-type mechanic that ensured some quests were always at my level. Being level 7 and doing a level 3 mission is not very appealing.

Co-op horseriding in Far Cry 6
Photo Credit: Ubisoft

But there are other missions in Far Cry 6 that put a smile on your face. An early mission called Fire and Fury is scored to the famous revolution song “Bella Ciao”. No, it’s not called ‘that Money Heist song’. There’s another mission that feels like it belongs in a Bond film, except it would have been perfect if Ubisoft had the right sense to make it take place at night.

If you’re not in the mood for missions, Far Cry 6 has side activities on offer too. You can spend your time and money fishing, buying bait and reeling in the cash with the fish you catch. You can go hunting for treasure or big game. There’s also time trial racing that involves everything from horses to hovercraft. Neither of them are particularly special though — and I ended up being drawn back into the story…

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Hogwarts Legacy Review: Under a Spell

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Legacies are complicated. They carry the weight of what came before, but live in the light of what’s happening now, forever grappling with the wills of two different worlds. With time, legacies lose relevance, or acquire new meaning. To understand them better is a study in multiple timelines. So, what then is the legacy of Harry Potter? For someone like me, a millennial who experienced Pottermania first-hand, JK Rowling’s fantasy novels are like family heirlooms. All seven books are neatly lined up chronologically on my rack, unmoved through the years. And like family heirlooms, they’ve also gathered a bit of dust and neglect. They certainly don’t take up as much space in my mind now as they do on my bookshelf.

On the other hand, while the Harry Potter films have made a lot of money, they are hardly revered as cultural artefacts. The less said about the more recent Fantastic Beasts films, the better. The Wizarding World has not withered away but has surely seen some erosion. The world of Harry Potter is sustained by nostalgia, living on in the memories of a generation that came of age reading the books. Then, there’s the legacy of JK Rowling. The writer behind the best-selling book series of all time has come under fire for her views on transgender issues. Many cast members from the Harry Potter films, including Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Eddie Redmayne, have stood firmly and vocally against her, while others have politely distanced themselves from her opinions. Once revered as a self-made author and feminist icon, Rowling is now a pariah to progressives.

This cultural discourse has inevitably tailed Hogwarts Legacy, the much awaited and debated triple-A action RPG, which arrived February 10 on PS5, Xbox Series S/X, and PC. One of the biggest video game releases of the year, Hogwarts Legacy has already set records and has sold like hot cakes. It has also faced boycotts as a portion of the profits from sales will go to Rowling as royalty. Despite all the conversation surrounding the game, it is clearly in resonance with the Harry Potter fandom. In our initial impressions, Hogwarts Legacy felt like a worthy return to the Wizarding World — the great Harry Potter game that everyone had been waiting for. But under the shiny skin of Harry Potter, which lends it its cultural standing, do the flesh and bones of the game stand up on their own?

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The short answer is a resounding yes. Hogwarts Legacy works well as a video game, perhaps more than it does as an extension of the world of Harry Potter. Of course, everything that is familiar is present in often astonishing detail and obvious reverence — the majestic Hogwarts castle, the bell-and-chimes music reminiscent of the iconic John Williams score from the films, and the many easter eggs and collectibles scattered around the game world — but I found myself addicted to the pure gameplay. Wand-based magic combat surprised me more than anything. It’s a lesson in simple but effective video game design. Hogwarts Legacy’s combat could easily have been a stale third-person spell-shooter experience, but instead, it’s a carnival of combinations and spell-juggling. Exploring the grounds of Hogwarts and the highlands and hamlets beyond it is consistently fun and engaging. There’s a fast travel system that niftily ties into Harry Potter lore, but I found myself travelling to quest objectives on my broom most of the time. The game’s motley crew of non-playing characters make side activities and distractions fresh and fun. While the Wizarding World DNA ensures that the charm rarely turns into chore, I never did mind doing the homework.

The Hogwarts castle, in all its glory
Photo Credit: Screenshot/ Manas Mitul

Hogwarts Legacy surprises right from the start. Once you’ve created your desired witch or wizard, the game takes off into a sprawling, kinetic opening act reminiscent of early adventures in the books. On your way to Hogwarts as a new fifth-year student, accompanied by Professor Fig, you’re attacked by a dragon, teleported by a Portkey, and subsequently thrown into the heart of a long-dormant mystery deep within the caverns of Gringotts Wizarding Bank. You soon find out about a Goblin rebellion and a dark wizard conspiracy to uncover a forgotten ancient form of magic. The same ancient magic flows in you, making you the long-lost key to solving the riddle.

Hogwarts Legacy’s story revolves around this arcane magic, wells of which are hidden across the world. You meet students and professors who came before your time, talk to paintings, and chase ghosts as you slowly unravel the threads. The narrative succeeds in conjuring the air of a novel as quests unfold slowly and you’re encouraged to explore. Side activities that reveal more of the world and its characters accompany all main story threads. You feel your environment, even Hogwarts, change in small but noticeable ways that make you aware of the passage of time. At one point, I began seeing carved pumpkins for Halloween all over the castle.

Perhaps Hogwarts Legacy’s finest trick is the way it nails the feeling of being at school. Its side characters are written with distinct charm and their individuality shines through. Sebastian Sallow is mischievous but driven and has a major role to play in the main story; Poppy Sweeting cares more about magical beasts than she does about people; Nerida Roberts is obsessed with merpeople and is mostly seen hanging about the Hogwarts Lake. Your professors are all unique too, with clearly defined personalities. Your Potions teacher Aesop Sharp, a former Auror, is stern and hard to impress; Mirabel Garlick, the young Herbology professor, is warm and thoughtful; and your Charms teacher Abraham Ronen is, well, charming and quick-witted, with a quip just as ready at hand as his wand. While Hogwarts castle is overloaded with impossible detail in every corridor and corner, it is its occupants that truly make it come alive.

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The Great Hall at Hogwarts is dripping with detail
Photo Credit: Screenshot/ Manas Mitul

Loitering around Hogwarts is a fantasy-fulfilling experience, and even idle walks through the castle often present something new to look at or to find. You can summon floating Field Guide pages that are full of Hogwarts lore, or watch two magical suits of armour fight each other. You’ll see Peeves the notorious poltergeist ruining someone’s day, or a student floating like a balloon through a corridor — perhaps the victim of a magical experiment gone wrong. The castle is a maze, and it took me hours to find my footing. You could reach the end of a hallway and find yourself lost 30 hours deep into the game. The immersion is only broken when you reach a door that opens into a new section of the castle because there’s a bit of loading time before you can walk through to the other side; a minor annoyance in the way of seamless exploration.

Then there’s the world beyond the Hogwarts grounds. The castle’s surroundings, set in the Scottish Highlands, include hamlets, bogs, caverns, forests, lakes, and shores, each offering challenges and collectibles, from Merlin trials and Ancient Magic hotspots to infamous foes and astronomy tablets. Hogsmeade, the small village just north of Hogwarts, has been given just as much attention as the titular castle, with famous landmarks from the books painstakingly recreated. The festive energy of The Three Broomsticks, the sugary saturations of Honeydukes, and the questionable patronage at the Hog’s Head Inn are all apparent. Just on the outskirts of Hogsmeade lies the Forbidden Forest. In the daytime, the forest is an idyllic retreat bathed in pleasant sunshine. At night, it transforms into a moonlit eldritch maze, with thick trees and thicker fog.

The world of Hogwarts Legacy transforms at night
Photo Credit: Screenshot/ Manas Mitul

You attend classes and learn spells at Hogwarts, but your adventures mostly take place outside the school walls. In the wilderness you’ll encounter goblins, trolls, dark wizards and dugbogs. Your wand is your weapon and your handy spells your ammunition. Combat in Hogwarts Legacy is a refreshing take on the third-person action formula. Spells are utilised in purposeful combinations as duels become a sort of a dance between you and your foe. You can block an enemy’s attack with the Protego spell by tapping the Triangle button on the PS5 controller to create a protective orb around you, hit back with Levioso to suspend your opponent in the air, cast Accio to pull them closer, and finish with brute force using Descendo to slam them into the ground. This is just one example; you can come up with imaginative combos, lining up spells from your arsenal as you please.

You also have to keep changing your spell wheel on the fly. Each wheel has four spell slots, and you can unlock a total of four wheels as you upgrade your skills. So, as you’re dodging and shooting spells in the heat of battle, you also must judiciously juggle between you spell loadouts, switching between attack, control, and force magic. This can get chaotic and messy when taking on multiple enemies, but it’s never not fun. You can also choose the stealth route and turn yourself invisible with a disillusionment charm when infiltrating an enemy hideout to whittle down your foes before taking them on. To top it all off, you can also perform an Ancient Magic attack, which can be triggered when a corresponding meter fills up. Hogwarts Legacy has crafted a truly engaging combat system, but I feel it could have gone a step further by allowing for companions, in the spirit of the books. Professors and fellow students do tag along for some of the quests, but a fleshed-out system for teaming up to take on the world’s dangers would have worked wonders here. After all, all the best adventures at school involve your friends.

Hogwarts Legacy Early Impressions: A Worthy Return to the Wizarding World

Hogwarts Legacy’s combat is a carnival of magic combos and spell-juggling
Photo Credit: Avalanche Software

Beyond the combat playground, Hogwarts Legacy offers everything that you’d expect from an open-world action RPG. Hidden treasures, Merlin Trials, and enemy encampments dot the map, inviting you on extracurricular excursions that help you accumulate experience points and beef up your character with new skills and better gear. While most of these ancillary tasks avoid open-world tedium due to tight design and Wizarding World novelty, collecting pieces of gear quickly becomes unpleasant labour as they’re littered everywhere. You could constantly pick up a new pair gloves with marginally better stats than the ones you already have on, or the same hat you found a couple of hours ago. This balloons your inventory, and you must either sell, destroy, or discard the excess periodically.

Crafting in Hogwarts Legacy is limited to potions and plants, both of which can be brewed and bloomed in the Room of Requirement. There’s also a loom that lets you craft buffs for your gear. The game includes a creation system for its Vivarium, a sort of magical zoo into which you can release captured beasts to build a wildlife ecosystem. Caring for the beasts in the Vivarium grants you magical ingredients required for the loom. It’s tacked on and completely optional, but you can go crazy with it if you want and create your beastly imaginarium.

Whether you’re walking the halls of Hogwarts or hoarding Hippogriffs, it all looks good. Hogwarts Legacy goes big on atmosphere and finds the visual sweet spot for an RPG. It barely ever looks wooden and lifeless like many major genre games tend to. It does veer close to the uncanny valley sometimes, but even in its rustic animations during cutscenes and dialogue, the game retains a measure of charm. The castle itself is nothing short of glorious and its visual splendour is evident night and day. The game does have issues with lighting, and I encountered flickering several times. There’s also a persistent issue with drawing fog; every time you open a door to head outdoors, the game takes a moment to draw weather effects. Draw distance suffers when flying around on your broom, as objects in frame pop in late.

Forspoken Review: Missing the Magic

A Hippogriff ride around Hogwarts is every bit as magical as it sounds
Photo Credit: Screenshot/ Manas Mitul

These are all minor gripes, though. Hogwarts Legacy is not a looker like Horizon…

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Returnal PC Review: Eternal Awakenings on a Lovecraftian Planet

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Returnal might have struggled to wow gamers after its initial reveal as a PS5 exclusive, but it amassed a niche following when some gameplay emerged online. Finnish developer Housemarque faced a few challenges: for one, it was a less-known studio trying to sell an original IP for a full $70 — competing against a pool of well-established AAA creators that anyone could blindly trust. Furthermore, in its original marketing campaign, Sony portrayed the game as a generic action shooter, where all you do is run around and kill aliens. While that is true to an extent, its highly addictive roguelike DNA was made clear a bit later — ultimately turning heads. Joining hands with Climax Studios, Returnal’s frenzied bullet-hell action now heads to PC, with some tweaks for a new audience.

The game opens in a rather abrupt fashion, setting you among the stars as deep space voyager Selene Vassos. Steering her ship into the eye of a cyclone, she approaches the forbidden planet Atropos to investigate a mysterious signal called “White Shadow.” Unfortunately, things go awry and she crashlands on the surface, overgrown with exotic vegetation and strewn with the ruins of an ancient Xeno-type civilisation. Barebone introductions are a hallmark of roguelike titles, giving you only just enough information to get going, as the larger narrative unfurls through repeated runs.

You see, Selene is stuck in a bizarre, infinite time loop, in which every death brings her back to the crash site and scrambles her brain a little. In fact, our journey in Returnal starts right in the middle of one, but that isn’t conveyed directly. By exploring the world and retrieving Scout logs (audio recordings) left by your former selves, you slowly peel apart the layers of the mystery. If anything, Selene’s hazy memory serves as a tool to immerse you, by feeding exposition in a less obvious manner. “I don’t remember recording that,” she says at one point, closing the gap between the character and the player’s mentality. Both start on a similar, relatable note with scant knowledge of the situation they’re in.

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With no dramatic build-up but loads of questions, Returnal gets straight into the action with zero hand-holding. Selene is pitted against an array of door-to-door levels, where both the environment and the hostile aliens within them are randomised upon subsequent deaths and runs. While roguelikes commonly have an isometric or top-down view, Housemarque has shaken things up by presenting Returnal in a third-person shooter format. Not only is it visually unique, but the design serves as a gateway for mainstream gamers to get a taste of this niche genre. Even with the pivot, the developer has retained its core bullet-hell philosophy from past titles such as Nex Machina and Matterfall — urging you to time jumps and dashes against a barrage of brightly glowing projectiles. It’s tough, and you will die a bunch of times before getting the hang of it. Don’t feel bad about that, because a bunch of story elements are tucked within those death scenes as well.

Gameplay is clearly the highlight here, with Atropos’ ever-changing landscape providing fresh scenarios that keep each run exciting and give you new challenges to overcome. The rules are simple. You start each run with your base weapons and go adventuring across the randomly generated dungeons, killing enemies, looting items, and finding upgrades, before eventually making it to the bosses who grant access to the next biome. Die somewhere along the way, and you’re sent back to the very beginning with an empty inventory. The back-and-forth trips to unravel each mystery can get quite mind-numbing, especially if you lack patience. Returnal counters this sense of drudgery through its frantic gunplay, which always keeps you moving, and the experience is elevated by an ever-present cosmic horror aesthetic.

Atropos thrives with unforgiving beasts that are randomised at the start of each run
Photo Credit: Housemarque

Running through the first couple of rooms in the Overgrown Ruins, Housemarque’s emphasis on speed is instantly noticeable. Selene is extremely agile and has no stamina limitations, letting her manoeuvre and change directions constantly. Her standard movement speed is much like sprinting in most other action games, but Returnal also punishes you for relying on it too much. Unlike roguelikes such as Hades, looting in Returnal requires puzzle-solving skills, as some valuable upgrade items are stowed in hard-to-reach areas. Equipped with a jetpack, I could hop across complex platforms to reach my destination, but upon landing, I found this fast pace to be a hindrance, causing me to run off ledges or at times fall straight into the abyss. In the early stages, Selene can’t swim, so I kept rushing haphazardly into water bodies in pursuit of shiny loot, only to get injured. Some of this can be solved by upping the brightness, which makes terrain formations more visible. You’ll also unlock a grappling hook later, which lets you swing around and reach high areas.

The planet Atropos is full of unforgiving beasts, designed uniquely after the habitat they belong to. For instance, the forest biome is packed with celestial parasitic organisms, splashed in a Lovecraftian coat of paint. Meanwhile, desert areas such as the Crimson Wastes are cast in red with giant vertebrae pillars, and are inhabited by formidable enemies such as hard-shelled crustaceans and floating squids, reminding me of the Caelid region from Elden Ring. The barren foundations of the Derelict Citadel, however, are endlessly patrolled by automatons that fire lasers. It just keeps getting worse, doesn’t it?

Tentacles are a recurring theme, with their bioluminescent strands firing waves of neon orbs towards you. While the ambushes were hectic at first, I soon found it easy to just shoot twice, dash in, and slice the tentacles with my Atropian Blade. Repeat this across levels and you’ll be treated to glorious explosions, with the severed appendages wiggling about on the ground. Some particle effects might cause heavy stutters on low-end PCs, so I’d recommend messing around with the slew of graphics options available in Returnal on PC. It also has an FOV (field-of-view) slider — a new PC-exclusive feature — that helps adjust how much of your surroundings can be seen and need to be rendered on screen.

Returnal PC System Requirements and Features Revealed

Tentacles are a recurring theme in Returnal
Photo Credit: Housemarque

Just when you think you’ve mastered combat, Returnal surprises you with new threats that test your ability to adapt. There are airborne creatures that close distances, teleporting corpses that send out fungal spores, and even minibosses that serve to make your life hell — and this is in just the first biome! Forgetting my learned tactics, I began making decisions on the fly — panic dodging, missing shots, and wrongly timing skill checks, which led to longer reloads. As fights grew in intensity, all I could think of was somehow zigzagging my way to healing items, hoping I didn’t get shot in the back. The highly devastating Alt Fire mode, which every firearm you come across has, saved my sorry butt so many times, inflicting big chunks of damage that made quick work of minibosses. You can lob a grenade, shoot a flurry of homing bullets, and deal continuous shock damage for crowd control — akin to Winston from Overwatch. There’s also one weapon that fires tentacular creatures that latch onto foes and deplete their health over time.

Having lived through all that, it was time to reap rewards. In addition to looting upgrade items from chests and random areas on the map, Returnal has an in-game shop. Here, you can exchange Obolites collected during gameplay for single-use consumables, enhancements, and traps that give you an extra edge in heated moments. Some rooms might provide higher-level guns, or lead you to purple-hued malignant items that inflict a negative effect. Think of this as a high-risk high-reward trade, where you’re granted a decent perk but get a debuff as well. Assess whether the pros outweigh the cons, and make informed decisions for the run ahead. Try not to overthink it, as these ‘malfunctions’ can be cleansed by completing specific objectives or by spending Ether, a rare Atropian resource. That said, I’d recommend saving the latter since it has a more beneficial use — respawning — more on that later :). Ether also happens to be the only item that stays in your inventory after deaths.

Dead Space Review: A Bloodcurdling Return to the Ishimura

You can exchange Obolites for upgrade items and consumables at shops
Photo Credit: Screenshot/ Rahul Chettiyar

It’s easy to get mesmerised by the bosses’ appearance, but try not to get carried away as a simple mistake could cost you an entire run. No matter whether you face the three-armed Phrike in the chasms or the airborne Ixiom atop the mountains of the Crimson Wastes, your strategy will more or less have to remain the same. Think of fighting Sigrún in God of War (2018), where everything you’ve learnt from past battles culminates in this supreme moment. That said, the boss fights in Returnal do not feel like a test of endurance. Sure, they have three phases each, but bosses’ attack patterns change accordingly — switching between relentless barrages of orbs, laser beams, and spiralling bullets that are guaranteed to test your mettle.

I’d gotten way too comfortable with spamming Selene’s dash ability, abusing its brief invincibility window to cheese past boss attacks. The game recognised this and in response, integrated some energy ring/ wall attacks that demanded I leap over them while simultaneously trying to avoid incoming projectiles. It’s safe to say that I relied on my muscle memory too much and died pretty quickly.

The boss fights in Returnal are unforgiving, demanding timed dodges and jumps
Photo Credit: Housemarque

However, I wasn’t dispirited. Yes, I kept losing my items. Yes, I choked at some pivotal points in fights. But there was something so alluring about memorising attack patterns and going through the loop over and over again until I perfected my runs. If you don’t feel the same way or can’t afford to no-life this game, you just need to be lucky enough to reach Reconstructors scattered across the biomes. Remember when I told you to save Ether earlier? By exchanging six of these tokens at designated sites, you can activate a checkpoint. If you die later on, you will respawn at the Reconstructor without being penalised by way of lost weapons, upgrades, and progress. It’s essentially an extra life. Also, since Returnal’s PC port carries over the co-op mode from the original PS5 version, you can summon friends or random players online to help ease your journey.

Reconstructors can be used to respawn in exchange for Ether
Photo Credit: Screenshot/ Rahul Chettiyar

Throughout repeated runs, you’ll also encounter a mysterious, out-of-place house, nested within the Overgrown Ruins. Echoing the vibes of Hideo Kojima’s P.T., you’ll find horror mini-games that serve as fragmented storytelling devices, dropping clues to Selene’s past and what led her to embark on this interstellar trip. It’s super cryptic — the kind of challenging narrative that demands you come up with interpretations and piece things together. My favourite kind of storytelling! Adding to the immersion is a sudden shift to a first-person perspective, where instead of a chest POV, — as seen in other FPS games — the camera is enclosed within Selene’s space helmet. While it feels disorienting at first, Housemarque’s goal was to foster a greater sense of intimacy, and the claustrophobia of that effect is further improved by masked breathing noises and grunts. Thanks to support for Dolby Atmos audio, the right equipment could make Returnal’s sound design come alive.

Returnal PC review: Verdict

Returnal is a test of the human capacity to adapt and persevere, fuelled by a relentless stream of Lovecraftian horror. Mixing roguelike mechanics with the wonders of exploration, every biome on planet Atropos offers fresh challenges through randomised gameplay design, plus satisfying gunplay. The cryptic storytelling might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it never failed to keep my attention, making Selene an intriguing protagonist. There were a few performance dips here and there, but that’s…

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Call of Duty Vanguard Review: Big on Cinema, Short on Play

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Call of Duty: Vanguard rubs and polishes the trite World War II theme to cinematic brilliance. What follows, though, is an epic story that never quite reaches a crescendo. The enigmatic heroes that knock your socks off in carefully imagined cutscenes render into one-trick-pony operatives for the most part. Call of Duty: Vanguard injects the biggest flights of World War II into a spin-off story about the mythical Fourth Reich, which is worthy of a big round of applause. But the 18th instalment of Activision’s priced series suffers from the consequences of its lofty intentions.

The single-player campaign developed by Sledgehammer Games spends so much time in defining its four prime characters — and two Nazi shmucks — that the story wraps up before it can get going. The gameplay is classic CoD: fast and dynamic like an elite obstacle course, with a few party tricks that make the experience less humdrum.

Call of Duty: Vanguard multiplayer mode gets more attention. The expansive mode has 20 maps at launch and a new ‘Combat Pacing’ matchmaking that lets you control the pace of the game — you can choose the number of players vis-à-vis the map size — and not be forced into a sniper contest or a bloodbath where you only survive for a few short breaths. While the game controls are the same, the experience is markedly different (not worse, not better) from Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War.

The Zombies mode in Call of Duty: Vanguard, though, is in its infancy compared to the last instalment. Treyarch Studios claims to have a clear roadmap, but one that is yet to take a formidable shape.

The gaming experience in all three formats begins with a lot of excitement — thanks to a great storyline, beautiful cinema, next-generation graphics, and steady marketing — but it becomes pretty obvious that something has gone amiss as the game progresses.

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Call of Duty: Vanguard single-player campaign review

Call of Duty: Vanguard campaign is roughly a six-hour run. For a hugely anticipated game that was advertised to capture the whole world at war, it’s unsettling. What’s worse, though, is that it’s pretty great. So, you’re left wanting more, but not in a good way.

My other major grouse is that the game’s difficulty setting is lopsided. There are four levels to it: Recruit, Regular, Hardened, and Veteran. And the six-hour run I mentioned was on Hardened. It’s uncanny how not hard it was to speed run through the campaign, especially if you have played other titles from CoD Black Ops or Modern Warfare series that are less forgiving. The storyline does not help either. Since all of our heroes get their own introductory missions before they come together as Task Force One to force the Nazis to skedaddle for good, the difficulty remains almost flat throughout.

A still from Call of Duty: Vanguard
Photo Credit: Activision

On the subject of heroes, you play as five characters. There’s the level-headed Brit leader Arthur Kingsley (voice of Chiké Okonkwo), the foul-mouthed Aussie Lucas Riggs (Martin Copping), the American show-off Wade Jackson (Derek Phillips), and the Russian straight-faced killer Polina Petrova (Laura Bailey). It’s a pleasure to watch and play such fleshed-out characters in a first-person shooter (FPS) campaign. Each has a back story, a specialty, and a special ability in combat.

Kingsley is a natural leader and can direct troops to focus fire on a particular target when you play him. Riggs is a demolition expert who can lob grenades with a precise aim. Wade, the American dive bomber pilot, has a Max Payne-esque focus ability to slow time but also see enemies through walls and obstacles when on the ground. Lastly, the Russian sniper Petrova can climb walls, crawl through debris and tiny spaces, and whistle an enemy sniper into wasting a shot who will then probably die reloading.

This mix of eclectic characters, individual missions, and a non-linear storyline adds variety and dynamism to the gameplay that makes Call of Duty: Vanguard stand out. I just wish the gameplay was a little less predictable.

The abilities are heavily prescribed, which means you’ll still be following a linear path laid down for you. You as Kingsley, for instance, are given a maximum of two targets to choose from where others can focus fire on your command. What you choose makes little difference and it can get repetitive. Focus fire, subdue a sniper or an SMG bunker, gain some ground, and do it again. All windows Petrova can climb into are marked with a yellow cloth, and so on. You begin the story with a sense of control — playing different characters, making use of new controls like mounting weapons on flat surfaces or blind firing from cover — that eventually fades away. The world’s a stage, we’re all actors.

Call of Duty: Vanguard campaign is fresh. The writing is smart, the characters are defined — Petrova takes the cake here — and the cinema is worth the experience. It’s a little disappointing that it rushes into a heavily scripted climax before you can feel like you were challenged.

Call of Duty: Vanguard multiplayer review

More games each day are dropping the pretense of putting the single-player campaign at the centre of the experience when online multiplayer is where the big money lies. Call of Duty: Vanguard tries to balance the act by giving more attention to characters that accentuate both modes. Even the operators (or skins) that have nothing to do with the campaign get their own cutscenes in multiplayer. But with a short campaign, it’s largely the online multiplayer mode Activision hopes will keep the game alive beyond a year.

A shot from Call of Duty: Vanguard
Photo Credit: Activision

It’s the 1940s, the world’s at war, and the setting is mostly bathed in shades of green and brown. It’s not the most palatable choice of colours, but one that does justice to the combat of its time. Can’t be said the same about the pace though.

Call of Duty: Vanguard multiplayer gameplay feels a lot faster than CoD: Black Ops – Cold War as well as Call of Duty: Warzone that is set to discourage new or less-experienced players. It’s also heavily customisable — guns now have 10 attachments. Too much to do might also put some people off who are just trying to get into quick matches and learn things on the fly. There’s a bit more strategic thinking in terms of maps, pacing, and loadouts that are needed to survive CoD Vanguard than the other titles in the franchise.

Combat pacing basically allows you to pick how many players are in a match with you. Choosing Tactical gets you in 6v6 matches where you can hang back; Assault will have you in with up to 28 people in maps that can give you a little less breathing space and more to kill; Blitz is the madness a lot of us love with up to 48 players shooting in every direction.

In our experience on an Xbox Series S with crossplay enabled, the difference with pacing was not as pronounced, but it at least gives you the option to not be in certain situations — big map, way too less players and vice versa — which keeps things interesting. Destructible in-game environments, which are basically flimsy wood panels that you can shoot through is also a lot less menacing than it sounds.

It’s a little more wall-banging than the last CoD title and you can inflict more damage if you know the map well, but you won’t be killing people unawares. Then there’s blind fire (firing from cover without aiming) and weapon mounting (placing your gun on flat surfaces to reduce recoil) that can be put to good use in Tactical pacing, rarely in Assault and not so much in Blitz.

Another great feature of Call of Duty: Vanguard multiplayer is the new Champion Hill mode. It’s a game mode that puts Solos, Duos, and Trios against other teams in a round-robin (elimination) contest. It’s obviously more fun to win in a team but Solos is also a great way to test how good you are 1v1 on a level-playing field. It’s highly competitive and has made me consider ditching the Xbox controller for a keyboard and mouse to even the odds. Win or lose, Champion Hill is mighty fun.

Another still from the game Call of Duty: Vangaurd
Photo Credit: Activision

What’s off about Call of Duty: Vanguard multiplayer, though, is that despite it looking stellar on paper — expansive, customisable, and fresh — the game has quirks that severely alters the experience that Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War and Call of Duty: Warzone players have come to love. The colours, as mentioned before, don’t help the visibility. And keeping in mind that Vanguard’s multiplayer kicks the pace up a notch, the new, more animated hit marker sound and visual effects make it worse. You die sooner with less to learn from it.

Call of Duty: Vanguard multiplayer has a lot more content, plays faster, and is more challenging. You can customise the hell out of the weapons, choose your pace, study the maps, and dominate. The problem is that it’s a huge investment and there are plenty of FPS multiplayer games in the fray, including Call of Duty’s own accomplished titles in Black Ops – Cold War and Warzone, that might appeal better to casual gamers looking for quick matches where they don’t feel like cannon fodder.

Call of Duty: Vanguard Zombies review

Let’s keep this one short because that’s what Treyarch has done with it. Call of Duty: Vanguard Zombies has launched with just one mode for the pre-season (before Battle Pass seasons begin). It’s called Der Anfang. The mode is doom-sy enough as was expected from the studio behind CoD Black Ops – Cold War’s Zombies mode, but it’s not quite the Nazi slaughterhouse that I was expecting.

The melodrama is on point though. The Nazis were too proud to lose and went to the rotten ends of the Earth to look for an occult secret that would overwhelm the Axis forces. Enter ‘dark powers’ that manifest through an ancient relic and resurrect corpses to give the Nazi top-dog an army of the dead. And you can gleefully while away hours at it.

Zombies mode by definition is a Hold-style, repetitive game mode that thrives on our urge to be the ultimate apocalyptic survivors and our greed of upgrading weapons for the highly competitive CoD multiplayer. Killing undead Nazis is an altruistic bonus. But the game slips a bit here.

There are a lot of new elements in Call of Duty: Vanguard Zombies — like the new Covenant upgrades and the portal challenge of escorting a skull — but nothing can compensate for the lack of content at launch. Treyarch has alas just made small additions to the Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War Zombies mode instead of overhauling the experience to match the theme of CoD: Vanguard.

A still from Call of Duty; Vanguard
Photo Credit: Activision

I was expecting the Nazi zombies to be more exciting, but all I met were hordes of skeletons that were different to tell apart from any other league of rising corpses. Treyarch has announced a roadmap that should bring more game modes to make the non-stop killing more interesting. That said, Call of Duty: Vanguard Zombies mode was subjected to a rushed launch and is no match for its predecessor’s now superbly evolved Zombies mode that is entirely worth spending money on.

Call of Duty: Vanguard review verdict

The services of Swedish cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (Tenet) have paid off. Call of Duty: Vanguard is beautiful to watch and has a story and characters that will leave an impression. The Russian sniper Petrova’s story and missions is a standout example. The cinematic cutscenes make for a gripping story and the in-game visuals and graphics back it up. Even the depiction of World War II is better than anything we have seen in the Call of Duty franchise — Vanguard is the sixth title on the subject.

All of this is precisely why Call of Duty: Vanguard is a missed opportunity for Sledgehammer Games, Treyarch, and Activision. The game suffers from an uncomfortable contradiction: the campaign and its visual cues favour newbies, while its multiplayer and its cranked-up pace is a veteran extravaganza. The single-player campaign is also unsatisfyingly short, while Zombies barely qualifies as a full game mode.

That said, Call of Duty: Vanguard campaign has an undeniable visual appeal that makes it worth a run, and its multiplayer has enough newness to hold its own. Its potential is what makes the experience slightly underwhelming.

Pros:​

  • Beautiful cinema
  • Well-written single-player…

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Gotham Knights Review: Batman Arkham Meets Marvel’s Spider-Man, Minus the Ingenuity

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The great tragedy of Gotham Knights — out Friday on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S/X — is that it was always going to be pitted against the beloved and critically-acclaimed Batman: Arkham games. For one, it’s the first open world Gotham City entry since 2015’s largely well-received final chapter, Batman: Arkham Knight. And two, more importantly, Gotham Knights comes from the same developer — in WB Games Montréal — who gave us that series’ poorest instalment, the 2013 prequel Batman: Arkham Origins. The comparisons were inevitable and unavoidable.

But in the seven years it’s taken for a return to Gotham, a rival superhero has left its mark on the video game world: Spider-Man. The PlayStation-exclusive won awards after its arrival in 2018, delivered a beautiful-looking spin-off in 2020, and is due for a sequel next year. Interestingly, you can feel traces of inspiration from Marvel’s Spider-Man here. Gotham Knights certainly doesn’t have the same cinematographic flair or fluidity to combat that the Spider-Man games have done so well, but there are traces of stylish camera angles at times.

Annoyingly, Gotham Knights also shares some of its problems. Marvel’s Spider-Man was rightly criticised for its lack of open-world innovation. Its New York seemed a little too crime-infested, with a carjacking, an armed robbery, or a hostage situation happening in virtually every other city block. All that is true of Gotham Knights’ Gotham City as well. But unlike Spider-Man, there’s even less variety on offer here outside of petty crimes. The side quests are meh, forgettable, and repetitive.

There’s still fun to be had. Whenever you encounter a new criminal activity, Gotham Knights will assign primary and bonus objectives. The latter can be stealth-based, or something different like an environment takedown. On top of that, Gotham Knights encourages you to scan and identify potential informers among the criminals. (You can hit down on the D-pad to trigger AR scan, which puts a red outline around all threats. And holding down the button gives you more info on each criminal.) If you interrogate them before putting them to sleep, you can discover locations of future crimes. While you can always jump straight into fisticuff combat and ignore the rest, it’s interesting to figure out a gameplan that allows you to achieve more.

Everything You Need to Know About Gotham Knights

Gotham Knights review: devoid of life

But the Gotham of Gotham Knights is not a living breathing world. Apart from the comments you hear as you pass them by on the street, there’s little to no interaction between the heroes and the denizens of Gotham they protect. In Marvel’s Spider-Man, New Yorkers would applaud, whoop, or recoil as you swung close to them or moved amidst them. In Gotham Knights, they will move if you try to run them over with the Batcycle. But outside of that, there’s nothing. What makes it laughable is that civilians don’t react to crime at all. As armed thugs shot at cops in a police vehicle, I saw a passer-by with an umbrella stroll by, as if it was a lovely Sunday morning.

And it isn’t particularly rich either. It’s too …clean? It’s almost as if the Gotham Knights set designers and their teams weren’t given time or resources to make the city feel real. The world feels empty, and comes across as a sandbox built just for you. This Gotham doesn’t feel like a city riddled with crime, and not one occupied by millions of citizens who go about their lives every day. In this sense, Gotham Knights could’ve looked to The Batman — Matt Reeves’ moody take on the Dark Knight, starring Robert Pattinson — which knew not only how to create a mood, but a distinct Gotham that was ugly, lived-in, and infested.

Gotham Knights does share one aspect with The Batman. And it’s that we almost never see Gotham during the day. To prevent themselves from having to design and animate the city twice, WB Games Montréal have come up with a justification to keep our heroes cooped up in their Belfry headquarters when the sun is out. Every time you leave the HQ — to patrol, solve crimes, collect clues, and progress the story — the clock fast forwards to night. The clues you return at dawn with help unlock new crime locations for the following night.

Gotham Knights Has The ‘Biggest Version’ of Batman’s City in a Game Ever

Nightwing in Gotham Knights
Photo Credit: WB Games Montréal

Gotham Knights review: heroes and combat

Before you set out for the evening patrol, you can rotate freely between the four heroes: Dick Grayson/ Nightwing (Christopher Sean), Tim Drake/ Robin (Sloane Morgan Siegel), Barbara Gordon/ Batgirl (America Young), and Jason Todd/ Red Hood (Stephen Oyoung). The responsibility to keep Gotham City safe has fallen on their shoulders, following the death of their mentor and father figure, Bruce Wayne/ Batman (Michael Antonakos).

But once you venture out into the Gotham night, there’s no option to switch between the four heroes. You must return to the Belfry HQ to change characters, which isn’t convenient as it “ends” that night of patrol. Any unsolved crimes will disappear off the map. In other words, Gotham Knights encourages you to stick with the hero you’ve chosen every night.

This is a weird sort of restriction, one that I never understood. Why is WB Games Montréal getting in the way? Is it implying that the other heroes are out and about — and hence unavailable? That logic wouldn’t track as you learn, time and again, that all four heroes were “doing” the same task you were given. Non-playable characters (NPCs) will often talk to character #2 about an event that character #1 was involved in. It’s unintentionally funny. It then reads as though the rest of them were just chilling at home.

The problem is that Gotham Knights hasn’t really figured out how to make it seem that all four characters have their separate lives. Yes, their personalities are different — Jason takes things head on, Tim seems laid-back (and loves taking selfies), Dick is a bit closed off, and Barbara is the group’s heart — but it pretty much stops there. (They also have different superhero friends, with the likes of Superman, Wonder Woman, and Black Canary dropping into your emails, depending on what hero you play as. But that’s an Easter egg, it doesn’t mean anything.)

And that — the lack of differences — extends to combat in Gotham Knights. All four heroes can perform melee (A on Xbox, cross on PlayStation) and ranged attacks (Y or triangle), in both “light” and “heavy” forms. A tap performs a light attack, while holding down the same button does a heavy. Heavy attacks can break through enemy armour, and open them up to more blows.

Gotham Knights to CoD Modern Warfare II, the Biggest Games in October

Robin in Gotham Knights
Photo Credit: WB Games Montréal

When you’re first asked to pick between the four heroes at the start, Gotham Knights offers a glimpse of what they are good at, letting you decide what your preferences are. For example, Nightwing can jump around, Robin is shifty, Batgirl is tech-heavy, and Red Hood has guns. (Combat isn’t always compulsory — you can use stealth to get around certain situations.) But despite that, playing as every character feels more or less the same.

You can help expand the differences with their additional skills. Levelling up in Gotham Knights grants ability points to every character, which can be spent on their individualised skill tree. You can also unlock new “Momentum Abilities” — think of them as powerful combos — by completing in-game challenges. But you won’t feel any of this for the first few hours. It’s only as you delve deeper into their skill trees that you will be treated to abilities that push them in different directions. While Batgirl becomes more of a hacker, Robin prefers decoys and evasion, while Red Hood and Nightwing embrace brute force.

Gotham Knights review: traversal

The four heroes also share the aforementioned vehicle: the Batcycle. Every time you hit its dedicated call button (up on the D-pad), the Batcycle emerges out of thin air, as if it was cloaked like James Bond’s car from Die Another Day. (A bit like the horse in The Witcher 3.) And in what is a campy inclusion, there’s a button to do wheelies. Because, why not? Despite that, the Batcycle isn’t great fun to drive in Gotham Knights. It never felt as thrilling as it did to see Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman roll around in The Dark Knight Rises, the climactic third chapter in Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale’s trilogy. But I was forced to use it anyway, as Gotham Knights doesn’t offer fast travel options for the first few hours.

When distances were short, I relied on “parkouring” — if you can call it that. As with the Batman: Arkham games, you can use the grappling hook and latch onto the edges of most buildings and structures. Before you get to the end of your tether, you can jump and spring yourself forward. Then, you try and latch again with the grapple. Unlike Batman though, none of the four heroes can glide. (Well, not until you unlock Nightwing’s glider anyway.) The heroes just sink to the ground, in between the jumps and the next grapple on Gotham Knights.

Uncharted PC Review: A Breathtaking Sight, With a Few Rough Patches

Red Hood in Gotham Knights
Photo Credit: WB Games Montréal

More importantly, traversal in Gotham Knights doesn’t have the same flow or smoothness, as in Batman: Arkham or Marvel’s Spider-Man. (This is a general issue in fact. Body animations don’t feel as natural as what we’ve seen elsewhere, be it superhero games or the likes of The Last of Us Part I.) Swinging around New York was one of my favourite things to do in the latter series of games, but I never felt that sense of joy here. It felt like a stop-and-start thing, where I was constantly losing momentum. With Batman: Arkham, even though it was never as cinematic, the Dark Knight’s cape added to both flair and functionality. Capes are impractical in most cases, but I missed them in Gotham Knights.

Gotham Knights review: co-op, performance, and verdict

What I also missed was support for cross-play. While Gotham Knights allows for two-player co-op in campaign and four-player co-op will be added in an upcoming standalone mode, you can’t play with friends across platforms. PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S/X lobbies are treated separately. For what it’s worth, Gotham Knights gives you a variety of ways to look for co-op partners. You can manually invite friends, open your lobby to friends of friends, or even have a public lobby should you desire. I opted for the last of them, and had a couple of players drop in. Gameplay was smooth and I encountered no issues.

This was also largely true of performance in general with Gotham Knights. The only time I felt stutters or frame drops was when I was on the Batcycle at high speed. A lot has been made of its 30fps console restriction — the demands on PC to achieve 60fps are, well, staggering — but what’s more important is how it performs with those limitations. This is no Cyberpunk 2077 at launch, where the game regularly dropped into single-digit frames per second. Sure, Gotham Knights could have been better and more equipped, but it’s playable and that’s what matters.

In fact, that’s how I feel about Gotham Knights at large. Drawing from the refined toolkit that powered Batman: Arkham and Marvel’s Spider-Man, WB Games Montréal has produced a cookie-cutter superhero experience that’s not looking to push any boundaries. It’s got flair in parts, an attempt to do a bit of heartfelt storytelling, and limited ideas for what an open-world Gotham can be. But it’s also lacking charm, the oomph and drive to its narrative, and the desire to be something special. Gotham Knights is a cash grab in the era of superheroes — and nothing more.

Pros:

  • Fun to strategise combat
  • Four heroes to choose from
  • Campaign co-op
  • Traces of flair

Cons:

  • Unrealistic open world
  • Traversal isn’t free-flowing
  • Side quests are repetitive
  • Can’t freely switch between heroes
  • Batcycle isn’t great fun to drive
  • No cross-platform play
  • Heroes don’t have separate lives
  • Combat feels the same with every hero in the beginning
  • Minor stuttering in Batcycle segments

Rating (out of 10): 6

Gotham Knights is released Friday, October 21 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S/X.

Pricing starts at Rs. 2,999 on Steam and Epic Games Store for PC, and Rs. 4,399 on PlayStation Store and Xbox Store.

Affiliate links may be automatically…

.

Gotham Knights Review: Batman Arkham Meets Marvel’s Spider-Man, Minus the Ingenuity

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The great tragedy of Gotham Knights — out Friday on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S/X — is that it was always going to be pitted against the beloved and critically-acclaimed Batman: Arkham games. For one, it’s the first open world Gotham City entry since 2015’s largely well-received final chapter, Batman: Arkham Knight. And two, more importantly, Gotham Knights comes from the same developer — in WB Games Montréal — who gave us that series’ poorest instalment, the 2013 prequel Batman: Arkham Origins. The comparisons were inevitable and unavoidable.

But in the seven years it’s taken for a return to Gotham, a rival superhero has left its mark on the video game world: Spider-Man. The PlayStation-exclusive won awards after its arrival in 2018, delivered a beautiful-looking spin-off in 2020, and is due for a sequel next year. Interestingly, you can feel traces of inspiration from Marvel’s Spider-Man here. Gotham Knights certainly doesn’t have the same cinematographic flair or fluidity to combat that the Spider-Man games have done so well, but there are traces of stylish camera angles at times.

Annoyingly, Gotham Knights also shares some of its problems. Marvel’s Spider-Man was rightly criticised for its lack of open-world innovation. Its New York seemed a little too crime-infested, with a carjacking, an armed robbery, or a hostage situation happening in virtually every other city block. All that is true of Gotham Knights’ Gotham City as well. But unlike Spider-Man, there’s even less variety on offer here outside of petty crimes. The side quests are meh, forgettable, and repetitive.

There’s still fun to be had. Whenever you encounter a new criminal activity, Gotham Knights will assign primary and bonus objectives. The latter can be stealth-based, or something different like an environment takedown. On top of that, Gotham Knights encourages you to scan and identify potential informers among the criminals. (You can hit down on the D-pad to trigger AR scan, which puts a red outline around all threats. And holding down the button gives you more info on each criminal.) If you interrogate them before putting them to sleep, you can discover locations of future crimes. While you can always jump straight into fisticuff combat and ignore the rest, it’s interesting to figure out a gameplan that allows you to achieve more.

Everything You Need to Know About Gotham Knights

Gotham Knights review: devoid of life

But the Gotham of Gotham Knights is not a living breathing world. Apart from the comments you hear as you pass them by on the street, there’s little to no interaction between the heroes and the denizens of Gotham they protect. In Marvel’s Spider-Man, New Yorkers would applaud, whoop, or recoil as you swung close to them or moved amidst them. In Gotham Knights, they will move if you try to run them over with the Batcycle. But outside of that, there’s nothing. What makes it laughable is that civilians don’t react to crime at all. As armed thugs shot at cops in a police vehicle, I saw a passer-by with an umbrella stroll by, as if it was a lovely Sunday morning.

And it isn’t particularly rich either. It’s too …clean? It’s almost as if the Gotham Knights set designers and their teams weren’t given time or resources to make the city feel real. The world feels empty, and comes across as a sandbox built just for you. This Gotham doesn’t feel like a city riddled with crime, and not one occupied by millions of citizens who go about their lives every day. In this sense, Gotham Knights could’ve looked to The Batman — Matt Reeves’ moody take on the Dark Knight, starring Robert Pattinson — which knew not only how to create a mood, but a distinct Gotham that was ugly, lived-in, and infested.

Gotham Knights does share one aspect with The Batman. And it’s that we almost never see Gotham during the day. To prevent themselves from having to design and animate the city twice, WB Games Montréal have come up with a justification to keep our heroes cooped up in their Belfry headquarters when the sun is out. Every time you leave the HQ — to patrol, solve crimes, collect clues, and progress the story — the clock fast forwards to night. The clues you return at dawn with help unlock new crime locations for the following night.

Gotham Knights Has The ‘Biggest Version’ of Batman’s City in a Game Ever

Nightwing in Gotham Knights
Photo Credit: WB Games Montréal

Gotham Knights review: heroes and combat

Before you set out for the evening patrol, you can rotate freely between the four heroes: Dick Grayson/ Nightwing (Christopher Sean), Tim Drake/ Robin (Sloane Morgan Siegel), Barbara Gordon/ Batgirl (America Young), and Jason Todd/ Red Hood (Stephen Oyoung). The responsibility to keep Gotham City safe has fallen on their shoulders, following the death of their mentor and father figure, Bruce Wayne/ Batman (Michael Antonakos).

But once you venture out into the Gotham night, there’s no option to switch between the four heroes. You must return to the Belfry HQ to change characters, which isn’t convenient as it “ends” that night of patrol. Any unsolved crimes will disappear off the map. In other words, Gotham Knights encourages you to stick with the hero you’ve chosen every night.

This is a weird sort of restriction, one that I never understood. Why is WB Games Montréal getting in the way? Is it implying that the other heroes are out and about — and hence unavailable? That logic wouldn’t track as you learn, time and again, that all four heroes were “doing” the same task you were given. Non-playable characters (NPCs) will often talk to character #2 about an event that character #1 was involved in. It’s unintentionally funny. It then reads as though the rest of them were just chilling at home.

The problem is that Gotham Knights hasn’t really figured out how to make it seem that all four characters have their separate lives. Yes, their personalities are different — Jason takes things head on, Tim seems laid-back (and loves taking selfies), Dick is a bit closed off, and Barbara is the group’s heart — but it pretty much stops there. (They also have different superhero friends, with the likes of Superman, Wonder Woman, and Black Canary dropping into your emails, depending on what hero you play as. But that’s an Easter egg, it doesn’t mean anything.)

And that — the lack of differences — extends to combat in Gotham Knights. All four heroes can perform melee (A on Xbox, cross on PlayStation) and ranged attacks (Y or triangle), in both “light” and “heavy” forms. A tap performs a light attack, while holding down the same button does a heavy. Heavy attacks can break through enemy armour, and open them up to more blows.

Gotham Knights to CoD Modern Warfare II, the Biggest Games in October

Robin in Gotham Knights
Photo Credit: WB Games Montréal

When you’re first asked to pick between the four heroes at the start, Gotham Knights offers a glimpse of what they are good at, letting you decide what your preferences are. For example, Nightwing can jump around, Robin is shifty, Batgirl is tech-heavy, and Red Hood has guns. (Combat isn’t always compulsory — you can use stealth to get around certain situations.) But despite that, playing as every character feels more or less the same.

You can help expand the differences with their additional skills. Levelling up in Gotham Knights grants ability points to every character, which can be spent on their individualised skill tree. You can also unlock new “Momentum Abilities” — think of them as powerful combos — by completing in-game challenges. But you won’t feel any of this for the first few hours. It’s only as you delve deeper into their skill trees that you will be treated to abilities that push them in different directions. While Batgirl becomes more of a hacker, Robin prefers decoys and evasion, while Red Hood and Nightwing embrace brute force.

Gotham Knights review: traversal

The four heroes also share the aforementioned vehicle: the Batcycle. Every time you hit its dedicated call button (up on the D-pad), the Batcycle emerges out of thin air, as if it was cloaked like James Bond’s car from Die Another Day. (A bit like the horse in The Witcher 3.) And in what is a campy inclusion, there’s a button to do wheelies. Because, why not? Despite that, the Batcycle isn’t great fun to drive in Gotham Knights. It never felt as thrilling as it did to see Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman roll around in The Dark Knight Rises, the climactic third chapter in Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale’s trilogy. But I was forced to use it anyway, as Gotham Knights doesn’t offer fast travel options for the first few hours.

When distances were short, I relied on “parkouring” — if you can call it that. As with the Batman: Arkham games, you can use the grappling hook and latch onto the edges of most buildings and structures. Before you get to the end of your tether, you can jump and spring yourself forward. Then, you try and latch again with the grapple. Unlike Batman though, none of the four heroes can glide. (Well, not until you unlock Nightwing’s glider anyway.) The heroes just sink to the ground, in between the jumps and the next grapple on Gotham Knights.

Uncharted PC Review: A Breathtaking Sight, With a Few Rough Patches

Red Hood in Gotham Knights
Photo Credit: WB Games Montréal

More importantly, traversal in Gotham Knights doesn’t have the same flow or smoothness, as in Batman: Arkham or Marvel’s Spider-Man. (This is a general issue in fact. Body animations don’t feel as natural as what we’ve seen elsewhere, be it superhero games or the likes of The Last of Us Part I.) Swinging around New York was one of my favourite things to do in the latter series of games, but I never felt that sense of joy here. It felt like a stop-and-start thing, where I was constantly losing momentum. With Batman: Arkham, even though it was never as cinematic, the Dark Knight’s cape added to both flair and functionality. Capes are impractical in most cases, but I missed them in Gotham Knights.

Gotham Knights review: co-op, performance, and verdict

What I also missed was support for cross-play. While Gotham Knights allows for two-player co-op in campaign and four-player co-op will be added in an upcoming standalone mode, you can’t play with friends across platforms. PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S/X lobbies are treated separately. For what it’s worth, Gotham Knights gives you a variety of ways to look for co-op partners. You can manually invite friends, open your lobby to friends of friends, or even have a public lobby should you desire. I opted for the last of them, and had a couple of players drop in. Gameplay was smooth and I encountered no issues.

This was also largely true of performance in general with Gotham Knights. The only time I felt stutters or frame drops was when I was on the Batcycle at high speed. A lot has been made of its 30fps console restriction — the demands on PC to achieve 60fps are, well, staggering — but what’s more important is how it performs with those limitations. This is no Cyberpunk 2077 at launch, where the game regularly dropped into single-digit frames per second. Sure, Gotham Knights could have been better and more equipped, but it’s playable and that’s what matters.

In fact, that’s how I feel about Gotham Knights at large. Drawing from the refined toolkit that powered Batman: Arkham and Marvel’s Spider-Man, WB Games Montréal has produced a cookie-cutter superhero experience that’s not looking to push any boundaries. It’s got flair in parts, an attempt to do a bit of heartfelt storytelling, and limited ideas for what an open-world Gotham can be. But it’s also lacking charm, the oomph and drive to its narrative, and the desire to be something special. Gotham Knights is a cash grab in the era of superheroes — and nothing more.

Pros:

  • Fun to strategise combat
  • Four heroes to choose from
  • Campaign co-op
  • Traces of flair

Cons:

  • Unrealistic open world
  • Traversal isn’t free-flowing
  • Side quests are repetitive
  • Can’t freely switch between heroes
  • Batcycle isn’t great fun to drive
  • No cross-platform play
  • Heroes don’t have separate lives
  • Combat feels the same with every hero in the beginning
  • Minor stuttering in Batcycle segments

Rating (out of 10): 6

Gotham Knights is released Friday, October 21 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S/X.

Pricing starts at Rs. 2,999 on Steam and Epic Games Store for PC, and Rs. 4,399 on PlayStation Store and Xbox Store.

Affiliate links may be automatically…

.