Thief

Early on in Thief, master burglar Garrett says to his accomplice, "It's not how much you steal—it's what you steal." He then spends the next twenty hours pilfering knives and spoons at four gold apiece.

Why do I bring that up? Because the hypocritical anecdote sums up this fun, but ultimately forgettable reboot of the classic stealth series held so deeply in the hearts of legions of gamers. Let's dig in. 

Is it really Thief?

Thief is a reboot, but it once again puts us in control of the aforementioned Garrett, a master thief who for some inexplicable reason feels the need to steal every little trinket he sees instead of merely focusing on the prize at hand. As you might expect from a game about thievery, it's a stealth game played out from the first-person perspective. You'll take on all manner of jobs around The City—one part medieval-era slum, one part Industrial Revolution-era factory town.

This time you have amnesia, of all things (video game trope #1: check). After a job gone wrong, you awake to find you've forgotten the last year. What were you doing the whole time? Why is the entire city ravaged by a plague known as The Gloom? And who the hell did the people of this city call on to do their interminable, inane fetch quests while you were gone?

Good ol' Garrett. Even amnesia can't get him down.

Let's forget all the "Is Thief Thief-y enough for a Thief fan?" controversy for the moment—that whole argument is too subjective for me to really want to delve into. Suffice it to say, Eidos Montreal did not take a Dungeon Keeper-esque crap on a beloved franchise. This might not be exactly the Thief game you wanted, but it's also not a mockery of everything you held sacred.

Many of the hallmarks of the series are here: heists and capers, incidental petty theft, environmental puzzles and traps, a bow that shoots too many types of arrows, multiple paths to objectives, and a touch of the supernatural.

Unfortunately it takes about twelve hours too long for all of this to come into play.

Slow starter

I'm about to lay into Thief pretty hard, so I'd like to state for the record: I think Thief is a perfectly decent game. It's a serviceable reboot, and a fine time-waster to cap off the slow February release schedule.

That being said, I have a lot of problems with the game—some so minor they're more properly termed "quibbles," and some very serious.

So much city. So many forgettable quests.

For one, the first half of Thief is so forgettable that I've quite literally forgotten most of it already, a mere two days after playing it. We're talking about ten to twelve hours of lead-up and fetch questing—on relatively linear levels—before the plot really finds its way and you get a feel for the world. To say it "starts slow" is a gross understatement.

But once started, the story is actually fairly compelling in that summer blockbuster way we've all come to expect from AAA games. It's an amalgam of a bunch of game tropes—for instance, game trope #2: level taking place in a mental institute, and game trope #3: vital information conveyed through notes conveniently scattered around the level—but it's all pieced together with enough intrigue and tragedy that it held my attention through at least the back half of a solid 20+ hour experience.

As you can see, the story goes to some dark places.

The game even manages to do supernatural without seeming hokey—no small feat. I'd go so far as to say that Thief has the best Amnesia: The Dark Descent-esque horror level since Amnesia itself.

A post-Dishonored world

But while Thief's lore has its die-hards, most people are just here for the larceny.

So let's talk Dishonored for a bit, because as far as I was concerned we'd already gotten a modernized Thief game. Remember when Fallout 3 came out and everyone dismissed it as "Oblivion with guns"? And then by the time Skyrim came out, people were joking that it was Fallout with swords?

Dishonored took some of the best parts of Thief—weird industrial-fantasy setting, multi-path stealth gameplay—and attached it to a superb combat system that was there if you wanted it, though you were of course free to run each level without killing people. (Plus it had that cool teleport spell.)

So much of Thief feels similar to so much of Dishonored.

Which brings us to Thief. Thief plays a lot like a Dishonored prototype. Like Dishonored, except you're not quite as agile, and you suck at combat. In other words, like Dishonoredbefore Arkane really figured out what would set Dishonored apart. And, as a result, I spent most of my time with Thief wishing I could just replay Dishonored.

Thief feels torn between tradition and modernity. It wants so badly to feel like originalThief, but it also wants to feel approachable like Dishonored. As a result, it's something of an unholy abomination of the two. Thief even has a pseudo-teleport: An action the game labels "swooping," which allows you to run rapidly across a brightly lit area without being seen, as if the guards are too dumb to see the man clearly sprinting across the light in front of them.

Garrett is just not very agile, however—even less so now that there's no dedicated button for jumping. Instead, one button makes you free run like you're in Assassin's Creed. This is not Assassin's Creed, though (except when the game pulls back into third person perspective for no reason and you climb a wall like Assassin's Creed).

Yes, this is a screenshot from Thief. No, I don't know why they added these weird third-person sections.

I remember going to a Thief preview event and the person running our demo told me, "I'd save every time I get on the roof if I were you. Otherwise there's a good chance you'll jump off by accident and die." Things have not gotten better. I committed at least a dozen accidental suicides by mistakenly jumping off the edge of the roof. There are also plenty of times I was stopped in my path by a box ankle-high.

The lack of a jump button, to me, is the fundamental area where Thief breaks down. It ties into everything. Level designs are simplified—you can only get to areas the developers clearly mark as climbable, so all paths to your goal are relatively obvious and there's less chance for items to be truly hidden. It's easy to get frustrated by puzzles because you clearly see the solution, but Garrett won't do what he's supposed to. Garrett just doesn't move like a master thief.

The other problem is the enemy AI. I'm not just talking about it being too easy on the game's equivalent to Normal difficulty (though it is really easy). The enemies are inconsistent. Sometimes you're taking out a guard's buddies in broad daylight and he doesn't even notice. Other times you're quietly sneaking up on him from behind and he whips around with an "A-ha, I just caught you eating the last piece of cake you bastard," look on his face without provocation.

She lies. The enemies are too dumb to be threatening.

And forget about that talk of enemies knowing the level layout and searching for you accordingly—at least on Normal, enemies are woefully dumb when it comes to your whereabouts.

No, I don't even want to bring up the infuriating boss fight 90% of the way through the game.

Might as well be Van Gogh

I also think the sound deserves a specific complaint section in this game. Stealth games live and die by their sound—it's essential to know where enemies are at all times, and since you're often hiding behind objects it falls to your ears to keep things straight.

Thief has major audio issues. Sometimes you'll enter areas and two characters will repeat the same conversation ad nauseam until your brain breaks. Sometimes two sets of two characters will have the same conversation overlapping each other, like they're singing a round.

Ambient noises don't fade as you walk away; they drop out. Noticeably. And then come back in full volume immediately when you step back into range.

At least it looks good.

Sometimes a guard speaking in the same room as you is whisper-quiet. Other times the guard three floors above you comes in loud and clear.

It's all a bit disconcerting, and makes your life as a thief even harder because your ears are basically useless. Hopefully this can be fixed in a patch, but at the moment it's a bit of a mess. No word whether the console versions have the same problem (I played the PC version).

Bottom line

I know I've hit Thief pretty hard in this review. But for all its flaws, I really did enjoy Thief for what it is, and "what it is" is a harmless and even sometimes fun game that I kind of wish was Dishonored. Thief is both a decent version of its ancestors and a decent version ofDishonored, but doesn't excel at anything on its own—and as a result, it won't amaze or stick with anyone. At the end of the year, when it comes time to create your own game of the year list, it will be one of those titles you think back on and go, "Oh yeah, Thief came out this year didn't it? Hm."

That's it. No hatred. No love. Just total ambivalence and faint recollection of a few fond hours spent stealing the nobility's dishware.

Rust

Rust is a game about survival. But that takes time. Initially, it's just about death. It's about freezing to death, and starving to death, being shot to death and getting bitten to death; occasionally mixing things up a little by slipping on a warm radiation coat and fading faster than your faith in humanity after being stabbed in the back by a supposed friend's hatchet. Sometimes you get gored to death. Other times, bored to death. It's not easy, surviving post-apocalyptic civilisation with nothing but a rock - especially when your enemies have guns, and double-especially in a game that makes you work just to earn a pair of basic trousers.

Even this early into development, Rust's mix of DayZ and Minecraft (the easiest comparison, though Wurm Online is more apt) has won it no shortage of fans - some of them not even psychopaths, hackers and trolls on the hunt for new victims to murder and mock over voice chat. It's the kind of game that's less a shooter than an engine designed to tell stories. Those stories are mostly, as ever, in the field of bastardom, but there's scope for some humanity amongst all the pranks and murder. It's also a world that focuses on demanding effort rather than promising to reward it: starting players out naked and hungry and alone, dangling the potential of going on to build forts, craft weapons, and finally savour the air at the top of the food chain.

Crafting is the most important part of this, though there are loot crates - both in radioactive remnants of civilisation and regularly dropped from passing planes - that provide free toys to play with and blueprints for advanced gear that, unlike your inventory, survives death. Early on, the priority is making basic tools like a stone hatchet, a bow, a hut and a sleeping bag by beating supplies out of trees and rocks and animals... usually cloth, for some reason. Later, blueprints, furnaces and workbenches offer more advanced gear like metal doors that other players can't so easily get through, and armour capable of protecting against bullets and lingering radiation fields, as well as keeping you warm and covering up your naughty bits.

Building a solid place to call your own is by far the most important thing to focus on - ideally backed up by friends, because on default rules, your character becomes an unconscious, vulnerable sleeper rather than vanishing on log-out. Not all servers use this though, with some even going for pure co-op. It's not a very fun mode to play, though, odd as missing the gankers might seem. Too quiet. Too much time grinding without distraction.

As far as game completion goes, all the basic components here are in place and fully playable, including wildlife to hunt and be hunted by, a range of weapons to craft, and a decent-sized map that's more than capable of handling over a hundred players in its valleys, forests and ruins. Current stress tests are cranking that up to 300 for true Spartan madness.

The basic goal underpinning the action - "Survive!" - feels somewhat unambitious, as well as depressingly acting as license for a player-base of social Darwinists to be on their worst behaviour

That said, most of the details are very rough, with much work left in everything from making combat mechanically satisfying, to putting proper sound effects in, to generally finding the balance between Rust's various inspirations. The map, for instance, is far blander than DayZ's Chernarus, and mostly filled with generic forestry and plains and space left empty to give players scope to develop each server in their own image. This sounds cool, but at the moment, the primitive components don't offer anything like enough freedom to create interesting things. On a Minecraft server, absolutely anything could be waiting around the next corner in all its blocky glory. Here, it's almost always going to be a generic wood shack or tower, usually long abandoned or fiercely guarded by a proprietorial player who thinks himself a post-apocalyptic badass but acts far more like Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel.

That side of things being so prominent also makes the basic goal underpinning the action - "Survive!" - feel somewhat unambitious, as well as depressingly acting as license for a player-base of social Darwinists to be on their worst behaviour. The same can be said of DayZ, of course, but in that game the setting and mood go hand in hand with the brutality - ruthless scavengers picking through a broken world gone long past the point of no return. Rust presents something with more possibilities, and in doing so often feels like it should be offering more to actually survive for. At least, something more than finally scraping together the explosives to go kick over other kids' sandcastles.

Simply getting to that point offers plenty of challenge, however, not least because the resource economy is currently completely broken - especially on busy servers. Survival requires food, but you can easily starve to death without even seeing an animal to extract life-saving chicken breasts from. (For the moment, it's always chicken, even if it's a pig, though other foods are available elsewhere.) It can also take several lives just to luck into enough stone to construct the most basic hatchet for gathering supplies, or a single piece of the cloth you need to construct a sleeping bag that acts as a respawn point, only to lose it all after being spotted by a player with a gun or getting too close to a wild animal or zombie. Speaking of which, yes, Rust has zombies. Of course it does. They're not around in huge numbers though, and thankfully not long for the world, hanging on for the moment as placeholders for something that can't help but be better simply by not being more bloody zombies.

Rust is firmly a base for what might be a great game later on rather than a great one right now. It's seen best in quiet moments, when players aren't around to troll and murder, and crafting and raw survival take the focus. There's more than enough here to suggest great things in Rust's future as it evolves its crafting, its combat, and clears out the zombies to further find its own niche in 2014's upcoming war of survival games. It has the tools to become something very special, and hopefully will provide players with enough to do the same.Provided you're in the mood for a player-versus-player game that makes you work to not simply be a victim, and ideally have a few friends to band together and scare off passing opportunists, Rust's challenge already offers enough of a survival experience to be worth a look. It's as primitive as its rock-smashing cavemen in many ways, and lacks both DayZ's atmosphere and the raw punch of its setting, but the focus on building and crafting does make for a notably different experience. It's worth waiting for a few more patches, though, so that the developers at Facepunch can fix the resource lottery that makes getting started such a chore - and even then, you should take time to find a server where operators are watching for hackers instead of letting them have their fun.

Watch Dogs

GameCentral gets its first chance to play Ubisoft’s highly anticipated new game, but is it a genuinely next gen title or just another GTA clone?

Having now played most of the launch games for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 we have to face the inevitable question of which is ‘best’. Comparing Need For Speed: Rivals to Call Of Duty: Ghosts may seem silly but with more than 20 new games out for each console somehow a decision needs to be made. Either way we won’t be able to make a final determination for several months yet, but it’s obvious that Watch Dogs is an early frontrunner.

If you don’t count the late lamented Star Wars 1313, and ignore the fact that it’s also on current gen formats, Watch Dogs was the first next generation game ever to be revealed. Ubisoft wouldn’t admit it at the time but back at E3 2012 it was obvious that the demo they were showing looked far better than the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 could ever possibly manage.

Not in an overtly showy way perhaps, but the level of detail in its open world recreation of Chicago is at times staggering. From the wind gently blowing rubbish across the street to the hordes of ordinary people going about their business this feels more like a living, functioning city than any other game before it.

And yet at first glance it does seem to be nothing but a high res Grand Theft Auto clone. And indeed in basic gameplay terms that’s exactly what it is. There are a number of cleverly next gen features, they’re just not necessarily the ones you’d expect.

In the half hour demo we played we were technically allowed to go anywhere and do anything, but were gently encouraged to visit a nearby security centre in order to hack their systems. As you may know the game’s story revolves around Chicago using a new all-powerful computer system that controls every utility and electrical system in the city. But your character, and others, are able to hack the system and cause various kinds of mayhem as a result.

All this is controlled via an in-game smartphone, although what we didn’t realise until Gamescom is that you cannot hack anything at a distance until you take out the local hub. This is guarded by very angry-looking men with guns, who shoo us away for even approaching the place. The attending developer is sweetly ambiguous about whether we should just shoot our way in or try something more clever, so we formulate a compromise and perform a headshot on the nearest guard before ducking around the other side of the complex as everyone else rushes to where their dead comrade is.

As we jump over a fence and stealthily creep towards our goal the plan works better than we hope and we’re able to hack a security camera, which then controls another camera inside the building, which in turn has a bead directly on the central hub computer. (The developer happily informs us that we’re the best she’s seen at this bit all day, although we’re not so sure that’s not due to luck rather than skill.)

Once our hacking is done we sneak back the way we came, but find that the guards don’t have the goldfish memories of other computer bad guys and we’re shoot at as we escape. Luckily we’re able to commandeer a parked car along the way and can disappear into the downtown area where another point of interest lies.

Along the way we get a chance to marvel at the sheer size of the city. We’ve never been, so we’ve no idea how accurate it is, but the game gives a convincing impression of a real place, as the shabby outskirts we start in give way to a connecting motorway and then more salubrious buildings of ever-increasing size.

This also seems a good point to note that, since we’re playing the PlayStation 4 version, the newly redesigned triggers for the DualShock 4 controller work great when driving a car. In fact the vehicle handling and gunplay are both excellent, and miles ahead of anything Rockstar has been able to manage so far.

We’re not quite sure how much of what happens next the developer new about in advance, but she points out that a nearby electronics hub is ‘interesting’ and as we hack into it a nearby mobile elevator is activated. Getting into this creates a shortcut across the block but suddenly our screen goes funny and we’re told we’re being ‘hacked’.

As another cheeky-looking developer peers round from the TV on the other side of ours it’s revealed that he’s barged into our game and is attempting to take control of our system in order to boost his own online high score and speed up his general hacking ability. Doing so doesn’t really inconvenience you as a player, but it’s clearly intended as a less severe version of Dark Souls’ player invasions.

The only way to stop our intruder is to hack everyone’s phone nearby and find him through a process of elimination. Even when you set your phone on search, so that all nearby hackable devices are automatically highlighted, this is a difficult process in the short time limit you have (a progress bar at the top of the screen is quickly counting up to 100%).

But we find our man and pursue him down an alleyway and after a quick bit of parkour (pressing the triangle button leaps you over most objects) we perforate him for his impertinence. Again we seem to have pleased our unusually cheerful developer, who congratulates us and encourages us to get our own back by invading his world.

This we do and, having caught him trying to hide in plain sight amongst the crowds, start the hack and then run straight down a back alley and keep out of sight. Circling back round the other side of the building we can see our mark rushing around trying to search everyone but we keep out of his way just long enough to complete the hack and win the kudos of all (well, of the developer and the two people standing behind us).

Given the obvious comparisons to Dark Souls you could argue this isn’t necessarily all that new an idea, but given the fidelity of the city, the competency of the driving and shooting, and the novelty of the hacking we came away very impressed.

What’s equally impressive is a separate demo afterwards, in which we indulge Ubisoft’s new love for tablet connectivity. Although the hack attacks can happen at any time this other competitive mode has to be agreed upon by both players first, not least because one of them is using a tablet (and so can be anywhere in the world) and the other the console and standard controller.

The developer briefly explains the set-up, as the player on the console (us in this case) is tasked with getting through a number of checkpoints in the city within a strict time limit. The other player on the tablet has to stop us, by directing the police via an overhead chopper and setting off exploding steam pipes or changing the traffic lights.

With our magic smartphone we can do the same thing though and in fact it’s our first real excuse to use hacking skills in anger, as we try to trap police cars in sudden traffic jams or punt them through the air as a bollard suddenly rises up out of the road. Those steam pipes are a problem though and can wreck a car in a single go, although we do have the advantage that although the player on the tablet can see all our objectives he doesn’t know in which order we have to get them.

We run out of the time in the end but it’s an impressive little tech demo and seeing a fully interactive version of the in-game map on tablet is a neat trick, especially if you imagine it being halfway across the world instead of in the hands of the person standing next to us.

We wouldn’t suggest that Watch Dogs is necessarily going to change the world or that many of its features are especially original but for a new IP designed primarily for new consoles it has that most important of qualities: it’s fun. And after the obnoxious amount of advertising, that’s surely only going to get worse in the coming months, it’s nice to know that all the fuss is worth it.

Source : metro.co.uk

Grand Theft Auto V

If first impressions count, Grand Theft Auto V is in trouble. This is a miserable opening, breaking the series tradition of dropping you into a fast car in a beautiful city, instead kicking off in a snow-driven town in the American Midwest with a flashback heist. The first thing you do is hold up on the left analogue stick for two seconds before control is snatched away from you. Behind the wheel of a car, you spin out on icy roads. As a way of beginning a story it makes sense, but it’s a lacklustre way to open a videogame. Thankfully, within half an hour we’ve got one car stuck on a fire hydrant, flipped another over into the path of an oncoming train, and taken a third on a police chase out of the city and made our escape on a jetski. Normal service is resumed. And it just gets better from there.

We’ll start, even if Rockstar won’t, with the city. Los Santos borrows Red Dead Redemption’s dramatic skies and soft colour palette, lit with bloom and lens flare by day and gentle, fuzzy depth of field at night. It has almost no loading screens – borrowing Max Payne 3’s enforced slow walk to disguise cutscene loads – and runs at a consistent 30fps. It’s a remarkable recreation of Los Angeles’ urban sprawl, a stark contrast of poverty and the superficial veneer of immeasurable wealth. And like LA itself, it’s intimidatingly large at first, the whole world open from the start, the map filling in as you explore. Drive a few blocks from South Central’s street-corner gangbangers and you’ll find the primped boutiques of Vinewood. Head north and you’ll arrive at the hilltop mansions of the city’s monied elite; keep going and you’ll find desert and the verdant hills surrounding Mount Chiliad. Down south there’s a ramshackle beachfront, a pier (with working funfair) and the massive Los Santos International Airport. And around it all, a picture-postcard body of water that, for the first time in the series, is fully explorable.

And what water. Hop on a dinghy or a jetski and you’ll be flung about by a delightful physics model, ice-white surf spurting out from beneath your craft as you jump off the crest of a wave and crash back down onto the surface. Dive down below and you’ll find sealife and sunken treasures. There’s a whole world down here, yet it’s only used in a single story mission. You have to want to explore this new-look San Andreas, but the visual rewards for doing so are rarely less than stunning, and there are gameplay benefits too. Play tennis to increase your strength stat; ride a bike to up your stamina; visit a firing range to improve your aim.

Yet while the world has always played the starring role in 3D GTAs, here it’s just a setting, with the focus squarely on the game’s three protagonists. Franklin is the most traditional GTA antihero, brought up in poverty and working to escape it, ideally by honest means but knowing the reality will likely be different. Michael, the retired bank robber living in Los Santos under a new identity after faking his death at the climax of the opening flashback, is, by contrast, a character who could never anchor a GTA game by himself. His story – a faded hoodlum in therapy, whose wife cheats on him, whose kids hate him and who finds himself increasingly irrelevant in a city that prizes youth and beauty more than anywhere else on the planet – simply doesn’t fit the traditional GTA mission template. Yet his inclusion enriches the story and its setting, adding in modern Californian themes like therapy, infidelity, the emptiness of wealth and young America’s unquenchable yet unfussy thirst for fame. You can’t shoot your way round those. His story can be cutscene-heavy, but is so vividly realised and finely delivered that you won’t even notice, much less complain. And even if you do, there’s enough bombast elsewhere to make up for it.

Most of that bluster comes from Trevor. He’s brilliant, blessed with most of the best lines, an unstoppable ball of aggression, hate and pathological violence. He’s the sort of person who’d pick up a hooker then run her over and take his money back, or uppercut a hiker off the top of a mountain. The kind of guy who’d bring an RPG to a knife fight, and who’d wake up on a beach wearing only his underwear and spend a couple of days doing missions in his pants. If Franklin is the lens through which we have traditionally seen Grand Theft Auto and Michael is the story its creator has long wanted to tell, Trevor is the character who best embodies the way tens of millions of GTA fans actually play the game.

The trio doesn’t just solve GTA’s thematic niggles but some of its pacing problems, too. Press and hold down on the D-pad and you can switch between the three at will. Traditionally, if a mission ended with you out in the sticks, you’d have to make the trek back to civilisation. Now, you’re a button press away from warping back into the thick of things. Rockstar uses it to gracefully nudge you towards this vast world’s many activities, too – Michael, for instance, might be parked up outside a tennis court, or stuck in traffic near his shrink’s office. You’ll find yourself naturally switching every few missions, and playing the game in character, choosing vehicles, activities and radio stations based on who’s under your control. You soon realise that, rather than the gangster flicks of GTAs past, you’re now playing an episodic TV show. It’s a construct that’s as well suited to lost Los Santos weekends as it is the sporadic two-hour sessions of the time-poor, one that doesn’t just keep up the pace during downtime but also drives the best set of missions the series has ever seen.

The heists are the focal point. The promise of choice may have been overstated, with Lester, the crew’s tech wizard, giving you two options that rarely stray from a decision between being smart or going in loud. But each is so much more than just a binary choice affecting a single mission. Take the smart option in the opening heist on a jewellery store and it sets in motion a series of preparatory tasks in which you case the joint, find an alternative entry point at the opposite end of the block, steal a van and uniforms from a pest control firm, then a truck carrying nerve gas. The heists only become more intricate from there, their complexity rising in proportion to payouts, with the prep work alone for one heist halfway through the game taking us four hours to complete – although we’ll admit to being distracted along the way. This is GTA, after all.

The Strangers & Freaks side missions, meanwhile, are character-specific but make up for the absence of switching by filling out the richness of the world with a supporting cast that typifies modern California in all its vapidity. In town you’ll find paparazzi, celeb stalkers, fitness freaks and adrenaline junkies; out in the sticks lie Minutemen, and rednecks shooting critters for kicks. All are shot through with Rockstar’s signature dry wit, and introduce you to locations and distractions you might otherwise miss – a triathlon across Vespucci Beach, perhaps, or a BMX race down Mount Chiliad.

There are wrinkles, but none so serious as to prove ruinous. The game’s treatment of women – every female in the game exists solely to be sneered, leered or laughed at – is a real concern until you realise that it applies to the male characters as well. As Trevor, there’s a forced torture scene that will make you thoroughly uncomfortable until five minutes later when, back on the road, you misjudge a corner, kill a handful of pedestrians and laugh out loud, and it becomes apparent that Rockstar has made quite a powerful point, one that will later be acknowledged by one of the protagonists. We are all despicable people.

These issues fade into insignificance not only in the context of the scale and coherence of Grand Theft Auto V’s world, but also the way in which Rockstar has acknowledged criticisms of the series and fixed them one by one. Checkpoints are frequent. You can save anywhere. You can still hang out with friends, but it’s always your decision: if the phone rings it’s because the story requires it. No longer do we have to forgive a colossal open-world’s mechanical shortcomings as we wrestle with cumbersome controls: this is Max Payne’s weighty gunplay, Midnight Club’s vehicle handling and Red Dead’s animation. LA Noire’s facial tech hasn’t made it in, but that game might just have had the most powerful influence of all. Fail an action sequence three times and alongside Retry and Quit appears a new option: Skip. How many of those tens of millions of GTAs sold have been put away unfinished because of a seemingly unassailable difficulty spike?

No one makes worlds like Rockstar, but at last it has produced one without compromise. Everything works. It has mechanics good enough to anchor games of their own, and a story that is not only what GTA has always wanted to tell but also fits the way people have always played it. It’s a remarkable achievement, a peerless marriage of world design, storytelling and mechanics that pushes these ageing consoles to the limit and makes it all look easy. As we stand on the brink of a new generation, GTAV sends an intimidating message to the rest of the industry. Beat that.

Assassin's Creed IV

Count me among Assassin's Creed III's passionate detractors. I realize the last entry in the Assassin's Creedfranchise has its fans, but I personally found Ubisoft's wrap-up of its core Desmond-focused AC trilogy too languid in pace, and peculiarly dull for an entry in a series so thoroughly predicated upon swift and creative methods of murdering people. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag would, at first glance, seem to be cut from similar cloth to III. Though it takes place several decades prior to the Revolutionary War events of the last release, many of the same systems from that game have found their way into this sequel. However, where Black Flag sets itself apart is where AC III fell apart for me. Taking its setting into the pirate-filled waters of the early 18th century Caribbean, Black Flag crafts a surprisingly and wonderfully vibrant world to explore, both at sea and by land. And while its story isn't all that much more interesting than anything in the last few entries in this series, Assassin's Creed IV has so much to do, and so much of it is genuinely entertaining, that you'll be far too busy to care about its periodic missteps.

Surprising as it may sound, Black Flag's high seas adventure is one of the most enjoyable entries in the franchise.

It helps that Assassin's Creed IV doesn't waste much time getting you into the thick of things--or, well, comparatively speaking, anyway. As this series is often wont to do, Black Flag takes a few hours to guide you through its many systems, side-ventures, and mechanics (sometimes tutoring you on things you've already done several times.) Much of this stuff you'll probably already recognize if you're a series regular, though the ways in which Black Flag molds its existing gameplay into a heretofore unfamiliar open world design is where it's at its best.

The biggest change by far is the new open-world sailing. The boating from AC III is back in roughly the form you may remember, but now sailing the open waters has been expanded to act as your primary method of getting from place to place. The major cities of Havana, Nassau, and Kingston are joined by a large smattering of smaller isles, ports, and deserted specks of land. Even in the open waters, numerous activities will present themselves, including simple ship-to-ship combat and plunder, underwater diving missions, and enemy fort capturing.

None of this stuff would work if the ship controls weren't up to snuff. Thankfully, sailing the open seas is largely a joy. Though the boat controls certainly take a bit of getting used to--especially early on, before you've been able to upgrade your ship sufficiently to survive anything but the most basic combat scenarios--but once you manage to grasp them, the sea becomes an inviting, and even thrilling place. Ship combat can, at times, certainly be a chore, especially in zones where enemies lay claim to the territory, in which case you will often have to avoid going anywhere near them to avoid a protracted combat scenario. The game also does maybe the dumbest thing imaginable in having you engage in ship-based stealth in a couple of story missions. This is not a small, easily maneuverable boat, mind you, and trying to move it stealthily between enemies while avoiding even the slightest collision or infraction is a deeply irritating process. Fortunately, these situations only arise a couple of times, and represent just a fraction of the far more interesting endeavors you'll embark upon while on the water.

Many of the Caribbean's most famous pirates make appearances in Black Flag, often as friends, betrayers, or both.

The rest of the time you'll be on land, engaging in the usual types of story-based assassination missions, while often veering off the main path to do assassination contracts, fight off random enemy encounters, chase down couriers, purchase various businesses, climb to synchronization points, hunt animals, and collect any number of different things, ranging from the usual Animus fragments to sea chanties, which your crew will immediately add to their repertoire once you climb back aboard your ship.

That last bit represents a welcome shift toward usefulness in Black Flag's side missions. Whereas AC III's side stuff often felt kind of pointless, many of Black Flag's other missions actually have a bit of impact on your main game. Apart from just those chanties, now rescuing pirates from attacks by soldiers awards you new men for your ship's crew. Synchronization points now allow you to fast travel to those locations when necessary. Hunting gives you the necessary skins required to craft upgraded pistol holsters, ammunition bags, and the like. The completionist player will opt to do as much of this stuff as they can anyway, but those less geared toward hitting 100% completion now at least have more intrinsic use for these activities.

Of course, you could skip a lot of these missions, just stick to the story stuff, and still wring quite a few good hours out of Black Flag. The historical character you play, a swashbuckling privateer named Edward Kenway(grandfather of AC III's bland protagonist Connor), is a dashing fellow more in the tradition of Ezio than any other Assassin's Creed hero. Interestingly, Edward's affiliation with the Assassins guild is far more tenuous than other characters in the series. He begins the game by assuming the identity of a traitor Assassin, whom Edward ran across during the course of a naval battle. This Assassin had been working with the Templars to try and locate the Observatory, a mysterious First Civilization structure that houses a technology both the Assassins and Templars have a particular interest in.

Unsurprisingly, Edward finds himself caught between both the Assassins and Templars as they track a sage--a reincarnated being who has specific knowledge of the Observatory and its location--and try to prevent the opposing side from getting their hands on the Observatory's revelatory technology. However, Edward's interests are far more base at the outset. Being a pirate of minimal renown early on, Edward sees this Observatory as an epic treasure to plunder. All he wants is money and status, which is certainly in keeping with the game's piratical themes. However, he seeks these riches primarily in the hopes of winning back his estranged wife, who he left back in England when he began his privateering career.

Each land area features the many different synch points, side missions, and other hidden treasure you'd expect, but they're spread out across a huge chunk of oceanic territory, and finding everything will take quite a lot of doing.

Over the course of Edward's adventure, you'll meet numerous rogues of pirate history, including the fearsome Blackbeard, the pirate-turned-pirate hunter Benjamin Hornigold, the "Gentleman Pirate" Stede Bonnet, and two of the most famous female pirates of the era inMary Read and Anne Bonny. Each of these real historical figures brushes up against Edward's adventure in one chapter or another, and the story is filled with lots of great character moments from each. In that very Assassin's Creed way, Edward ends up acting more as a cipher to experience the camaraderies and cozenages that take place between these characters. And that ends up being just fine, honestly. Edward has enough of a character arc to keep him interesting on his own merits, and the interactions he has with those great names of the high seas--especially Blackbeard and Read--are nicely done. There are definitely moments where the script ends up leaping around in time more than you'd perhaps prefer, especially when it skips over what seems like key character moments for the sake of getting you to the next major moment in the Observatory hunt. But what is there works about as well as you could hope for.

You might be wondering at this point how Black Flag inserts itself into the modern-day element of the Assassin's Creed franchise. How it chooses to occupy the space left behind by previous present-day protagonist Desmond Miles is interesting, if a bit slight. Hilariously, you play as a sort of personality-less developer hired to work at Abstergo Entertainment, the video game development arm of the Templars' all-purpose evil corporation. Your job is to enter the Animus to plug away at Edward's memories in order to find the location of the Observatory. In between all the Animusing, you'll find yourself in the company of both an overly upbeat project manager whose niceness barely masks a total disinterest in your wellbeing, and a shady IT director who cajoles you into running illicit errands that often involve hacking various Abstergo computers. Essentially, this whole section of the game is a series of hacking minigames followed by storyline infodumps you get from the files you acquire via the aforementioned hacking. Some of the revelations that come from those files fill in a few of the blanks about what's been going on since the end of AC III, but the actual story beats of that section don't offer much beyond a moderately interesting "aha!" twist at the end. Fortunately, this stuff makes up only a small fraction of the actual time you spend playing Assassin's Creed IV, and even at their worst, these sections are just a bit dull.

Once you have finished Edward's quest, you can of course simply return to the high seas to take care of any lingering objectives, or you can delve into the multiplayer suite, which is largely what you've come to expect from an Assassin's Creed game. In fact, apart from a few variances, there isn't really too much new here beyond what was included in Assassin's Creed III. Fortunately, it all seemed to work pretty well in the matches I played. The PlayStation 4 also has an "exclusive" additional mission section (that will apparently also be released for PC) featuring Assassin's Creed III: Liberation heroine Aveline. Here, she's tasked with tracking down a captured slave in a short story that, sadly, doesn't do much of anything to further the character. I liked Aveline in Liberation, despite the fact that the game seemed to almost purposely skimp on fleshing out her backstory and motivations. Here you don't even get any significant character moments at all, and the content ends up just being a few more sneak-and-stab missions among the many you'll already play in the main game, albeit with a different character.

Assassin's Creed IV looks amazing on the PlayStation 4 hardware.

I played through Assassin's Creed IV entirely on the PlayStation 4, so while I can't directly compare it to the other versions out there, I can say that this version looks pretty spectacular. Both on land and at sea, the game's artists have crafted some pretty awesome looking scenery. Crashing your boat into a rogue wave and watching the water sweep over the deck of your boat, seeing ships in the distance explode after you deliver a well-placed cannon shot, and simply taking in the gorgeous vistas as you perch atop the many synch points spread throughout the game, are just a few of the many visual highlights I can recall. The animation quality is top-notch too. Occasionally you'll see the kinds of weird quirks inherent to this series, like downed enemies glitching out due to wonky ragdoll physics, or the occasional character lifting a weapon that appears not to have actually loaded in their hands. But where the most detail and work has clearly gone--namely into Edward, his cohorts, and their various combat animations--the game looks terrific. It all runs great too, with only minimal frame rate dips in rare instances.

In some respects, it's perhaps reasonable to say that Assassin's Creed IV is the game that Assassin's Creed III should have been. Which is not to say that a game set in the Revolutionary War should have featured pirates and extended sailing sequences, but rather to acknowledge that the many game systems featured in AC III feel more fleshed out here, and appear better-suited to Black Flag's campaign. Its larger open world setting certainly helps, but an open world is only as good as the stories, characters, and activities you populate it with, and Black Flag's world is one I found myself coming back to again and again not just out of editorial requirement. That Black Flag's association with the Assassin's Creed franchise at times feels kind of tangential should really only be distressing to hardcore franchise fans desperate to see where the ongoing strife between Assassins and Templars is headed. For those who just like the idea of a game in which sailing and stabbing exist in harmony across a vast ocean of entertaining objectives, Black Flag most definitely delivers the goods.

Minimum PC System Requirements :Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8 (both 32/64bit versions) 
Intel Core2Quad Q8400 @ 2.6 GHz or AMD Athlon II X4 620 @ 2.6 GHz 
2 GB RAM 
Nvidia Geforce GTX 260 or AMD Radeon HD 4870 (512MB VRAM with shader Model 4.0 or higher) DirectX 11
30 GB available space