Beautiful Sakura: Surfing Club is perhaps the most cynical, half-hearted attempt at weedling £10 out of someone’s pockets, and no amount of baby-oil and AI-generated creepy-fingers can justify its existence. If this is the future of gaming then stop the bus, because we’re getting off.
Aabs Animals is less a game and more a transaction. It’s a shifty guy in a dark alley selling 1000G for £7.99. “Just look at a cat mate”, he says, as he pockets the cash and runs giggling over the horizon.
With more polished combat, a better world and story threads, a few more original ideas, and fewer sloppy inconsistencies, The Bounty Huntress could at least be a passable little game. As it is, though, it barely feels finished.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mini Hockey Battle. It takes all the accumulated years of history, rules and charm of ice hockey, and consolidates it into a game of piggy-in-the-middle. Wayne Gretzky, you did it all wrong.
The real horror here is the fact that as the sixth instalment of a so called “series”, Outbreak: Endless Nightmares has absolutely no semblance of a functioning video game. This feels like an incomplete gamma build of a hobby project, and I shudder to think what the five prequels would be like. A solo development effort is an admirable endeavour, and making games is incredibly difficult, but there is simply no valid excuse to churning out a completely broken and non-functioning experience.
After playing Beyond Enemy Lines - Remastered Edition on the Xbox for more hours than it deserves, we feel shell-shocked. If it worked, which it doesn’t, it would still be magnitudes of awful thanks to a misunderstanding of what a stealth game is. It could at least have the courtesy of being forgiving when it’s bombarding you with bugs and bad decisions, but no - it keeps kicking you while you’re down and then tosses you to the start to experience it all again.
I think we can all agree, the gaming market could do with an exciting and realistic horse racing game, I’d almost go as far as saying any new gaming representations of the sport will do. Actually, no, let me take that back, I didn’t mean it – you’ll realise why shortly. Horse Racing 2016 is the game vying to fill the gap with a supposed ‘fabulous and entertaining’ realistic experience. The only gap it should be filling though is that of a black hole.
