Review On GTA 5

It’s brilliant, of course.

Given the pedigree and almost brutish levels of hype surrounding Grand Theft Auto V, it would have been a surprise if this wasn’t the five-star humdinger that you expected. But here we are: Grand Theft Auto V is the pinnacle of open-world video game design and a colossal feat of technical engineering. It takes a template laid down by its predecessors and expands upon it, improving on and streamlining some of its rougher aspects. It doesn’t break out of that template and can be brash, nasty and nihilistic. But for all its more unsavoury aspects, this is a game built with skilled mechanical expertise and creative artistry.


And money. Lots of it. If the reported cost of £170m is to be taken at face value, GTA V is the most expensive video game ever assembled. If nothing else, that lavishness seeps from every pore of Los Santos, Rockstar’s twisted facsimile of Los Angeles and the grand stage for our crime caper. It is a virtual world of such tremendous scale and fine detail that it continues to baffle how the developers have managed to squeeze it all onto current generation hardware.

Travel north and the city disperses into countryside, reach Blaine County and you find a brush land littered with trailer parks and filthy hick bars under the shadow of the County’s mountain range.

It is enormous. And while the broad strokes of GTA V’s map are impressive enough, the finer details are lavished with the same care. Boxes piled carelessly in a player’s safe-house. The crude sign for a Chinese restaurant daubed on sheet metal fencing. The evening sun dappling an orange sheen across the landscape as it glints over the Los Santos highways. Hell, I was even impressed that my character’s flip-flops actually flip-flopped. There is no expense spared on any inch of its colossal mass.

To put it another way, Los Santos feels like a city that people live in, rather than a virtual playground built for your enjoyment. The danger of this approach is that real cities might not be as much fun as a bespoke urban-Americana theme park, but Rockstar make it work. My admiration for video game designers knows no bounds, but it befuddles as to how a mass of land as huge as Los Santos is so tightly crafted and densely interactive. There’s a natural openness, diversity and cogency to the design of the map that makes it a pleasure to explore. And it’s a place in which the game’s missions can slot into in a way that leads to emergent and unexpected thrills.

I’m in Downtown, and after stealing some precious weaponry for a jewellery store heist from a moving van, I find myself under the attention of local constabulary. Sirens blaring behind me, I gun my car through the latticework roads before finding a freeway. Thundering into oncoming traffic, cars scatter and smash into the partition. It’s not long before I’m in countryside. I slide off the freeway into the brush land, sweeping round dusty trails and leaping over grass hills. Losing sight of the cops, I dump my vehicle behind a bar, walk into a discount store, change my clothes and find another car. I’m miles away from where the chase started, in a completely different area, purely due to the natural course of my actions. Now I’m out in the sticks, free of the law and with a scenic trip back to the city ahead.

Review On Destiny

Great expectations have followed Destiny since its announcement. As the latest brainchild from the Halo creators at Bungie, the game has garnered a level of anticipation only exceeded by the massive hype machine that declares its not-to-be-missed potential. Bungie’s new game is not as gigantic or revolutionary as that hype may have led some to believe. In fact, it has several features that feel like missteps or problems. But that doesn’t change the fact that the more I play it, the more I love it.

A benevolent alien intelligence arrives on Earth to gift humanity with its wisdom, and leads us into an unprecedented period of expansion and advancement. When our benefactor’s ancient enemy arrives, humanity is beaten back to near extinction. Hundreds of years later, you stand as a guardian of humanity, finally ready to push back against the tide of darkness. Destiny has the seeds of a thoughtfully imagined universe, characterised by a humanistic and idealised vision of mankind’s heroism and potential. The universe is supported by gorgeous art and one of the best soundtracks in years. Unfortunately, the story set within that backdrop is anaemic. With little to no character development, a disconnected plot thread about alien attackers, and uneven narrative pacing, it seems that many of the fundamental staples of storytelling have been abandoned in the name of continuous action and discrete, standalone missions. Encyclopaedic grimoire entries unlock with a modicum of additional story explanation, but the odd decision to include those only on the game’s website means few will ever see these tidbits.

Thankfully, the story-sparse missions are a blast, offering a mix of activities for solo, cooperative, and competitive play. Destiny excels at providing activities for different moods and moments, from short planetary patrols to lengthy three-person instanced dungeons. These tasks often take you to interesting corners of the game world, but it’s too bad that so many missions start in the same places, leading to a needless sense of repetition. That sense of repetition extends to mission objectives, which too often fall back on the same setup of your AI companion needing time to hack something while you fight off attackers; thankfully, the stage layouts and enemies help the battles feel distinct.

Destiny’s design is particularly well suited to team play. Solo play is an ideal choice for players looking for a challenge, but any given mode is more fun (and easier) with a friend or two at your side. The potential for seamless flow between missions is halted by the regular need to return home to a central social hub to receive mission awards and gear up. That wouldn’t be so bad, except that Destiny suffers from lengthy load times that stunt the momentum of a session. Bungie also needs to find more solutions to let players of differing levels play together; as it is, a mismatched team-up is doomed to either be too easy for one or too hard for another.

Review On FIFA 15

Ardent fans of the Fifa football games know two things to be true whenever the latest instalment arrives. It will be mostly the same game as before, and it will also be the best football simulation ever. EA Sports, much like Apple with its iDevices, has found a winning formula, and it is reluctant to do more than drip feed us tiny changes every year.

That said, it has long been believed that this year’s instalment would be the big one. After all, developers have had almost a year since the launch of the Xbox One and Playstation 4 last November to really get to know the possibilities and limitations of these machines.


Well, the graphical improvements are by no means dramatic, but they are noticeable. Faces are more expressive, and EA claims that there are 600 emotional reactions that could potentially be seen during the game; players from opposing teams push, shove and bark at each other after having engaged in a series of aggressive physical battles over the course of the match. Strikers look pleased with themselves after scoring a belter and assistant referees … twitch their noses when making an offside call. Unnecessary perhaps, but it’s a tiny detail that adds yet another layer of realism to the most realistic football sim on the planet.


Indeed, EA Sports is all about the small things this year. Blades of grass (and, if it’s raining, water) go flying into the air in slow motion when the ball is struck during replays, the pitch develops physical signs of wear and tear over the course of the match, shirts are visibly pulled by defenders chasing a zippy winger and the PA system at Selhurst Park warns fans in the stadium that the Northern line isn’t running (hats off to EA, they’ve clearly done their research on that one).


The game now has disallowed goals, rather than laser-accurate robotic linesmen that will instantly stop play for offside the moment the ball goes anywhere near an offending player. That roller coaster of jubilation followed by disappointment when your team is stripped of a winning goal in the dying moments of injury time is, to borrow a phrase from EA Sports, “in the game”.

Review On Call Of Duty Advanced Warfare

You can finally say it that The Call Of Duty comeback starts here. People might argue that the world's best FPS (First Person Shooter) never went away,but last year's Call Of Duty: Ghosts saw records go down and a lot of bad reviews on the internet. Where as the instalments before Ghosts was Modern Warfare 3 and Black Ops 2 saw a huge progress. Black Ops 2 was the best FPS series for the Esports Community.
Call Of Duty Advanced Warfare compared to Call Of Duty: Ghosts is very different. In terms of sales and gameplay. Advanced Warfare wont change that entirely. It is still Call Of Duty, and everything the Hipsters like to mock about the series- it's linearity, its migraine-including bombast, its woefully thin plot lines, its follow the objective marker approach- still has to be mocked. But if you liked Call Of Duty 2 and 3, and loved Modern Warfare and its first sequel and enjoyed being dragged along from one action sequence to the next, then Call Of Duty Advanced Warfare is your game. 
Sledgehammer Games crafted an opening that does everything a great first chapter is meant to do: it welcomes you with big-budget bravado, offers control tips without excessive hand-holding, and establishes the tone of the campaign. “Welcome back to Call of Duty,” the first chapter seems to say. “Let's show the other games how to make a proper entrance. And while we're at it, let's test your subwoofer with the bass of an explosion and the vibrations of slow-motion melodrama.” This is an introduction that kicks off the wartime journey of protagonist Jack Mitchell, played by Troy Baker. He begins as a U.S. Marine, but after a catastrophic event during his first mission, he joins Atlas, a private military corporation run by the generically named Jonathan Irons, who is played by a realistically-rendered Kevin Spacey.It's never been easier for a Call of Duty campaign to justify the series' traditional chapter-by-chapter globetrotting. When the services of the Atlas Corporation are sold to the highest bidder, every country is fair game. That said, Mitchell's story isn't as clear-cut as it seems; he isn’t simply a Marine-turned-mercenary who travels where Irons tells him to. His tours offer a smattering of memorable missions, including a fast-paced intra-city manhunt through Santorini and several pulse-quickening escape sequences. Even Kevin Spacey’s boastful tour of an Atlas facility is a pleasurable golf-cart ride on rails that wouldn’t feel out of place as an EPCOT Center attraction, albeit one with a lot of killing machines in the background.