It has been an awesome year for gaming but for every success, we have had our share of disappointments. I wouldn't say No Mans Sky was a disappointment for me personally because I was sceptical from the start but one game that has let me down is Mafia 3. As we well know, games that don't send review copies out usually (but not always) have something to hide and unfortunately Mafia 3 has plenty.
Things didn't get off to a great start when the game launched with an FPS cap of thirty, obviously, the PC forums exploded and negative Steam reviews starting flooding in. With media outlets starting to review the game at launch this at least gave me a chance to furnish the world with a PC review that wasn't out a week after the big boys. The first thing I did was map the crouch key from 'X' to 'C' but when this essential skill stopped working entirely I ended up spending four hours and two fresh installs just to get the game working again. After the weekend patch, the FPS cap has been removed but only after all the skills have been remapped to completely different keys than before. To make matters worse the games performance is fairly poor and there are more bugs that the Bayou. Even with the repetitious gameplay loops Mafia 3 does have some very nice elements such as amazing cut scenes and compelling storytelling. If I'm honest while I'm annoyed PC gamers once again have been given a shitty port, I did have some fun with Mafia 3. You can check out my full review here.
These last three weeks I have actually been replaying one of my favourite gaming series of all time: Bioshock. Last month 2K released the Bioshock collection which allegedly remastered the first two games on PC and all of them on console. This port is shocking condition and instead of telling people about this legendary game I had to spend time picking through the mess of problems. Borked mouse acceleration, hard crashes, settings changing at random and the removal of all but the basic graphical options. It is interesting how the same company who worked on the Mafia 3 port also did the work on the Bioshock series (Blind Squirrel Entertainment), it seems these guys just don't think PC gamers deserve a game that works properly. I played through these problems and still had an absolute blast revisiting Rapture and Columbia once more: this time I also played through the two DLC story missions after Infinite. I now consider Burial at Sea (parts 1 & 2) as actually essential to the ending of Bioshock because so many mysteries and secrets are uncovered. You can find all three games in the review section as well as Burial at Sea which is also a final analysis of the whole series (so spoilers!).
As the Autumn nights grow darker many games pull on a Halloween themes coat and Overwatch has led the charge this year. There are now Halloween-esk skins etc for players to pick up in loot boxes and unlike the Olympic Games cosmetics: some of these can be bought with in-game currency. As I hoped it would, Overwatch has totally energised our community: myself and friends play it at least three times a week. Blizzard never seems to cease working on their new IP and it is really paying off for them.
So now I've polished off the Mafia 3 review what is next for this month? Well, games don't sneak up on me often these days, however, after seeing the review for Shadow Warrior 2 reviewed by ACG and Idiotech I decided to give it the review treatment which you can find here. I have also been chipping away at two early access games called Everspace and Osiris: New Dawn. The former is a space themed rogue like that so far is proving very enjoyable. Osiris is also a very interesting title but despite having some strong foundations still needs a lot of work. I am in fact still trying to decide what to do with early access titles as they don't really belong in reviews section: so some site formatting might be in order. Two games now firmly on the horizon are Battlefield 1 and Dishonored 2: so while many games have now landed the game of the year title is still very much for the taking.
Last of all I just wanted to touch on two unfortunate news stories that have come out this week, the first being that Watchdogs 2 will now be delayed from the 15th of November to the 29th of November on PC. Ubisoft released a statement yesterday stating that this extra time would allow them to "ensure that Watchdogs 2 runs smoothly across a broad range of hardware". As usual with these bullshit statements I translate this to mean they have now finished the all important console version and are now rushing to get the PC port in a playable state so they can then release it and start a system of patches over the next six months. In less surprising news while the gaming world celebrates the news that Red Dead Redemption is getting a sequel, PC gamers learn that once again we are being left out in the cold. I say it is not surprising because Rockstar who have never been big fans of PC (which is their prerogative) took two years to get the PC version of GTA 5 out and have never released the original Red Dead on PC despite a massive interest. I just think it's a real shame that we have a games platform that can make games look so good and for 'reasons' we're always last in the queue.
Those are my fortnightly ramblings for nowguys, if you do visit my site and like it please return soon and tell everyone you can about me. Every single like and retweet on Twitter is wholeheartedly appreciated and you can find me @riggedforepic