Recent reviews by Harry101UK

Democracy has truly been served and the threat of the Sony scourge has been defeated. Well done Helldivers.

Oh and the game is fantastic.

A ton of fun so far. Graphics are absolutely gorgeous, performance is stellar, controls are smooth and responsive, and the gore system is sublime.

Tons of weapon variety, with blunt, knives, axes, swords, scythes, staffs, daggers, handguns, rifles, crossbows, pickaxes....and tons more. On top of that, every weapon is customizable with elements, so they can emit electricity, fire, acid, or you can simply improve stats like damage and durability. There's so much variety in how you take on enemies.

The gore system is wild. Kicking zombies into a pool of acid and watching their flesh and muscle melt off the bones as they slump to the floor is...an experience. All enemies have a full 'layer' system, with flesh, muscle, bone, etc, which can be cut and stripped away by different types of damage. Smashing a zombies face in and seeing the jaw swinging around and the eyes flopping out of the sockets is gnarly.

The game also makes a lot of really cool use of environmental elements, like cans of water, fuel or acid. Each of which can be picked up, shot and thrown. So you can create an oil spill to set ablaze. Or pour out a trail of water and then electrify it to kill enemies or power up a locked door or something. It makes for some really dynamic encounters.

Playing on a 4080 and i7 13700K with everything cranked to the max, it runs at 240fps (300fps uncapped) and looks insanely good. FOV controls and plenty of accessibility options for UI elements, etc, is nice too.

Story is fairly standard fair, with overly exaggerated L.A characters, some cringey Youtube + A-List movie star type characters, etc. Lots of caricatures dialled up to 11. That said, all the performances are solid and keep things interesting. The player character (of which you can choose from 5) each have fully voiced dialogue and are pretty entertaining too.

The world design consists of lots of open 'hub' areas, like Beverly Hills, where you can fully explore a lot of streets, homes, shops, etc. Lots of cool environments and details to find, with hidden loot and collectables. Along the way there are optional side missions for characters.

If you enjoyed Dead Island 1, or the Dying Light games, there's plenty to like here.

Absolutely incredible port. Nearly 20 hours in so far and it has been flawless. No bugs, no crashes, the graphics leave my jaw on the floor constantly, and performance is smoother than silk.

It makes full use of Direct Storage too, so on a fast NVME SSD, loading times are about 2 seconds. Can load up the game from the desktop and be running around in-game in less than 5 seconds.

Controls and options have everything you could want, including FOV adjustments, ultrawide support, 240hz support, full control rebinding, real-time graphics adjustment, etc.

Gameplay-wise, it's basically a bigger, more fleshed-out version of the previous Zero Dawn game. With a lot more diverse biomes to explore, more streamlined movement options, and a ton of cool stuff to find. Characters are far more lively, with fantastic performances and realistic rendering. Makes meeting the large cast a lot of fun.

My PC is on the high end, but with everything cranked up to Ultra + DLAA, with Frame Gen, it never drops below 160fps. On the same PC, a lot of worse ports come nowhere close to that.
RTX 4080
i7 13700K
64GB DDR5
2560x1440 240hz

I never played the original so there was no nostalgia or bias toward the more cartoony style. The remake looks fantastic. It feels like a modern animated movie, with amazingly detailed and cinematic characters and cutscenes. The puzzles are fairly simple but give you that "Aha!" moment over and over, and you are constantly up against new types of challenge.

The story and environments are very good at stirring emotion. A very memorable, unique, short and sweet experience that everyone should play. Though it's very short, at around 3 hours.

The controls are very clunky and imprecise. It makes what should be a relaxing, calm experience into something far more tedious and sluggish. Glad it was only 2 hours long because I couldn't wait for it to end.

Half of the 'puzzles' consist of spamming endlessly spawning lego bricks around the entire map until you have a path built to walk to the exit. The other half involve blindly throwing bricks together until you build precisely what the game wants you to and lets you progress. Not very fun, and doesn't allow much improv / creativity. There's never an 'aha!' moment, more like "What the f*** did the game just make me build?" moments.

I also thought the game was bugged when I started it, because there's no menu music or effects. Just a black screen with the game logo on it, and when you click, it silently opens a buggy looking menu where all the options are crammed so tightly together it looks like the interface is broken. It feels incredibly unpolished.

Once in-game, it's a graphical showpiece though, with very pretty ultra realistic lego pieces, with full ray tracing effects. Everything has small finger smudges, perfect reflections and feels like actual plastic with light shining through it. Though even on an RTX 4080 at 90fps, it feels sluggish and laggy due to what feels like a 60hz cap, and the aforementioned clunky mouse controls.

A really fun shooter, that's very reminiscent of the classic F.E.A.R game, with similar combat, some nice psychological horror, and generally just a very similar vibe with jump-kicking, sliding and gore. It also has some of the best 'intense' AI enemies I've ever played against. Even on the lower difficulty modes they're no joke; they'll flank you endlessly, provide suppressing fire to your last known location to stop you moving, flush you out with grenades, and overall just push into you really hard. It really feels like they want you DEAD.

On top of this, the soldiers have some of the best and most immersive chatter I've ever heard in a shooter. They bark orders at each other, and then do the thing they said - "Cover me, I'm going in" one shouts as he moves in and the others sit back and fire at the window you're hiding behind. If you wipe out a squad and leave one, he'll shout taunts at you, and stuff like "Alright F****, it's just you and me!". It's great.

To combat their extreme aggression and tactics, you have 'super soldier' abilities, such as a cloak to help flanking, and slow-motion to take out multiple enemies at a time. Sliding around a corner and blowing a dude's head off in slowmo never gets old.

Much like F.E.A.R, combat erupts in a storm of flying sparks, debris and red mist. Things feel truly hectic, and there are some outstandingly satisfying moments as bodies ragdoll through the air and wounded soldiers scream in the distance.

In terms of story, it's pretty hit and miss. Some of the dialog is great, while most is kinda generic and filler. I was never really invested in anything - although I will say that some of the psychological horror sections were genuinely some of the most unsettling I've ever experienced. The use of sound, vocalisations and environment design is absolutely fantastic at times.

Every mission basically feels like they watched a movie or played another game and thought "Let's do that!". And you end up with an eclectic mix of separate Matrix-style lobby shooting sections, F.E.A.R / Backrooms horror moments, corrupted AI machines and some other one-off moments that I won't spoil. Each mission feels disjointed, but it does keep things interesting.

Weapon variety is sadly lacking. There's a single weapon in each category; a basic pistol, shotgun, SMG, machine gun, sniper, and a couple of more powerful weapons during miniboss arenas. Though you can find weapon accessories in each mission which add things like suppressors, scopes and lasers to some weapons, aside from the scopes, they have very little affect on gameplay.

Overall, I'd recommend it on sale for the satisfying combat alone.

Fantastic and very immersive. I haven't played the original 1994 release yet, but grew up with System Shock 2, and even replaying it these days, SS2 is still one of the best Immersive Sims ever made. This remake is really hitting all the right notes and feels just like being back in SS2. If you're a fan of games like Prey (2016), Deus Ex, Bioshock or System Shock 2, this is amazing! The world needs more Immersive Sims.

The premise is simple; you're a hacker who wakes up on a space station and finds out that the ship AI (SHODAN) has grown a god-complex and wants to wipe out humanity. As you explore you'll find tons of corpses and audio logs that flesh out what happened on the ship. The ship AI occasionally talks to you and the performance is haunting. They brought back the original iconic voice actress and it's as creepy and memorable as ever.

The game doesn't tell you much (on Medium+ at least - Easy apparently adds waypoints and guides you a bit), and lets you figure things out on your own for the most part. That's a breath of fresh air in my opinion, and I'm having an absolute blast wandering around the ship and working out how things work, what certain items do, etc. The enemies and hazards can be quite challenging at times.

As an Im-Sim, there's quite a lot of inventory management, and as you explore you'll find tons of different food, medical supplies, perks, stims, weapon types, ammo types, hacking tools and grenades. Any junk items can be scrapped or put into recycler machines to gain credits, which can in turn be used at vendor machines to buy food or ammo, as well as weapon upgrades.

There's a variety of weapons from melee, pistols, shotguns, rifles and energy weapons. Each of which has multiple ammo types that can be swapped at any time for more damage to certain enemies. Energy weapons can be used as much as you need, until you run out of power, which can be refilled at charging stations across the ship. You can even click a spare weapon in your inventory and unload the ammo from it if you picked up a duplicate weapon.

The controls and menus have been completely redone and feel very smooth and modernised, playing like a modern FPS.

Graphically it looks quite nice, with a retro aesthetic and stylised pixellated textures. The lighting can be dramatic at times, and dark rooms can be quite eery. It feels very faithful to the original art style, but with modern touches like dynamic shadows, parrallax mapping and screen-space reflections.

Performance has been perfect too, I have it cranked to the max at 2560x1440 on a 2080 Super and i7 6700K (from 2015) and the game is locked to a perfect 120fps. Not a single bug or crash in 5 hours of play so far. Everything feels very solid and polished.

Better than the previous game in every imaginable way. The world design, characters, gameplay loop and overall polish is off the charts.

I'd heard horror stories about the performance at launch and held off for a while, but picking it up as of today it has been pretty smooth. My CPU is below minimum spec (i7 6700K from 2015), paired with a 2080 Super. I've got the game cranked up to Epic at 2560x1440 (no ray tracing) and it runs at a pretty steady 60-90fps most of the time. Any more modern CPU and GPU should crush this easily. There are some stutters when the shaders and world loads, but at this point, that happens in almost every Unreal Engine 4 game.

Overall, it plays identically to the last Fallen Order game, though the worlds are 10 times larger, and the end-game skills from before are all given to you from the start here. You can double-jump, swim and use all force powers from the very beginning and this makes the gameplay so much more fun. Taking on groups of enemies make you feel very badass right away. Having all the navigation abilities makes exploring the worlds really nice too, with wall-running, double-jumping and swimming opening up lots of pathways right away.

The larger worlds offer tons more exploration, with unique minibosses, collectables and side-quests to find. So far, the world designs have been a massive improvement over all the previous games' areas. The variation and detail is mind-boggling and exploring is very rewarding. The Metroid-like gameplay returns, with tons of hidden areas opening up as you gain more abilities and tools.

Combat is more or less the same, though the animations and overall feel are tighter, and you can dismember human enemies as well as creatures. Dual-wielding lightsabers is now available as a permanent stance too, as well as the double-staff. Switching between them for different encounters feels great and opens up more skilled play.

Graphically, this is a huge jump from the last game. The amount of detail and density in the environments, as well as the lighting quality is simply breathtaking. Cranked up to Epic on a HDR OLED screen it's among the best visuals I've ever seen.

Familiar characters return, as well as a bunch of new ones and they're an absolute joy, filled with fantastic performances and character designs. Animation quality and cutscenes are also top-tier.

Customisation has been expanded tremendously, with the ability to fully customise the lightsaber again, as well as the companion BD-1 droid (everything from new eyes, heads, legs, bodies and full paint colouring). Cal also gets a full wardrobe with changeable hair styles, beards, shirts, jackets and trousers. This is truly Fashion Wars: Return of the Drip.

For fans of Star Wars in general, or people who enjoyed Fallen Order, this is a must-buy.

A really fun platformer with a fantastic soundtrack. It does some really cool things by timing certain levels to music, with enemies and hazards moving to the beat, etc. Nothing like dodging deadly spikes to the beat of a David Bowie song!

Art style, animation and level designs are all immaculate. It's a joy to play through the various biomes. It's a lot more linear, and has no creative mode like the older Little Big Planet games, but the story that is there is fun and the characters have a ton of personality. Unique boss fights and levels with extra gameplay mechanics / tools keep things fresh throughout.

Graphically it looks great too, filled with tons of detail and personality. Ray traced reflections and ambient occlusion add a lot of nice detail to the various surfaces, whether they're shiny or rusty metals, plastics, etc. DLSS is also present to help boost performance and it looks great.

Performance is very impressive; even with ray tracing and ultra settings, I had no trouble running at over 120fps on a 2080 Super (and i7 6700K from 2015). Smooth as silk and tons of fun.

If you're a fan of games like Mario Odyssey, Crash Bandicoot, or the original Little Big Planet's, this is a lot of fun.

An absolutely incredible REmake of RE4, with a great PC port (with a few fixable issues) and some nice modern quality-of-life changes.

Fans of the OG RE4 will find a lot to like here. A few things were cut, but also a lot of new stuff was added. It feels familiar enough, with plenty of fresh changes to keep you on your toes. The campy dialogue is back in full force, and Leon is a quip-machine. Overall, it remains very faithful to the original. Almost all of the story beats and environments happen the same as before, just with more added detail, some better lore cohesion, and things feel a little more grounded, similar to REmake 2.

The environments are lush and extremely detailed. Exploring the village, castle and labs are a real treat. Things are constantly changing and progressing, so things don't get too stale, and the RE Engine has some noticeable upgrades compared to older games like Village and RE2. New shadow rendering with far more detail and distance-based softening, foliage deformation as you walk through it, destructible environments and props when you thrown enemies through them, and simulated hair strands for more swishy looking characters - to name a few. Resident Evil has never looked so good!

The game is far more action-heavy compared to RE2, but at the same time, REmake 4 introduces a lot more puzzle and survival-horror elements compared to the original. Supplies on the harder difficulties can be pretty scarce if you don't manage them well enough, making combat encounters a lot more tense. There are more puzzles throughout, and some of them can be quite tricky - they also change depending on the difficulty you play at.

Combat is extremely satisfying with beefy sounding weapons, lots of detailed gore and dismemberment (blowing enemies in half with a shotgun never gets old) and all the round-house kicks you could want. Enemy counts are heavily increased and you can be swarmed by around 10 enemies at a time. Things can get very hectic and challenging at times.

The PC port is overall fantastic, with incredible optimisation. On an ageing i7 6700K, 2080 Super with 32gb, at 2560x1440, I've cranked the game up to the max and had 100-144fps most of the time. It looks fantastic and feels even better. Mouse and keyboard controls for combat and inventory management are smooth and feel great.

Now, the issues. The game's antialiasing (TAA) is basically useless. The game looks like a jittery aliased mess no matter what resolution or settings you use. AMD's FSR 2.0 just blurs the hell out of the image. Thankfully, the community stepped in and with the 'RE Framework' mod, you can enable DLSS on Nvidia RTX GPU's (and XeSS on Intel) to instantly clean up the visuals, for a sharper, cleaner image, while also boosting frame rates a bunch.

The game has an FOV slider, but the max setting is still only 70 degrees and uncomfortably zoomed in. Again, the 'RE Framework' mod adds a much-needed FOV slider with higher limits, making the camera and gameplay much more comfortable.

For fans of Resident Evil, this is some of the best it has ever been.