Super Mario Wonder

(available for Nintendo Switch only)

Super Mario Wonder is the newest 2D Mario game, offering a new take on the 2D Mario formula whilst still keeping its familiarity.

If you’ve played a 2D Mario, you know what to expect; this time Bowser has taken a Wonder Flower from the Prince of the Flower Kingdom and is wreaking havoc across the kingdom, Mario and friends have to stop him. The difference is that this time, you’re collecting Wonder Seeds, and there are two in each level- one for completing a special section of the game after finding a Wonder Flower, and the other for reaching the flag.

If you’ve also played the new Super Mario Brothers games and enjoyed them, you’ll be happy to know that 4-player co-op has returned, but now with a wider selection of characters. There’s Mario, Luigi, and Peach, but you also have Daisy, Toadette, several Yoshis, and Nabbit.

Personally, I wasn’t a huge fan of the New Super Mario Brothers Games. I liked them, but they weren’t very ambitious, and by the time the 4th one came out, it definitely felt like they were oversaturating the market. I found it very interesting that when the Wii U version was ported to the Switch, there was very little fanfare for it.

Mario Wonder, on the other hand, really does succeed. It is a very different game compared to the new Super Mario Brothers games, and I think that it is maybe the most ambitious 2D Mario game in a long time.

PROS

• Gameplay

It’s 2D Mario, of course, the gameplay is good. If you’ve played any Mario games before, you know what to expect. The powerups return, you have items like the Fire Flowers and the Stars, but there are a few new items as well. There’s the Bubble Flower, which certainly came in handy on a few occasions, the Drill Power Up, which took me a bit of time to get used to but worked pretty well, and most noticeably, the Elephant Fruit, which turns your characters into an Elephant so you can absorb water to fire at enemies and use your trunk as a weapon. It’s definitely my favourite of the new powerups and I made a beeline for it every time it was available.

The fact of the matter is, that there is a lot of innovation here. The major innovation comes in with the level design, but I won’t go into that too much in this section. But the gameplay really is phenomenal.

The saying is true, if it isn’t broke don’t fix it.

• Level Design

While there aren’t as many hidden secrets in other Mario games, there are still a bunch of excellent levels. It feels like there was more of a focus on theming, and it helps that this game looks excellent and doesn’t feel overly plastic like the New Super Mario Brothers games did, by the end of their lifespan. The world feels brighter and more organic and less generic. Granted, the level themes aren’t anything we haven’t seen before- there’s beach, autumn, etc. But there are some cool ideas here and it felt like each level had its own challenges.

Each level has several collectables, there are badges that you can equip for new abilities, plus the coins that are used to buy things from the item shop, and each level contains 3 high-value coins to collect. If you’re struggling to find them, there is an item you can get later, that acts as a radar.

There’s also the Wonder Flower, which gives the game its own identity. The whole world changes and the level will provide you with a whole new challenge- and what’s amazing is that no two are alike, and they really challenge your thinking.

The problem for many people is that it is very unpredictable, but that’s what I like about it. For example, one of the levels that showed up in the trailers was where the pipes started moving and you had to work with it. I won’t go into too much detail because some of the best parts of the game are when you collect those Wonder Flowers. In my opinion, they’re the best part of the game.

• Graphics

I already kind of spoke about this, but Mario Wonder is the best 2D Mario in terms of graphics and art style, and I would argue it’s one of the better-looking Switch games. It also runs at a very good framerate, I rarely noticed framerate drops or any issues that were affected by the hardware. If there’s a patch for the next console, I would love to play this in 4K.

MIXED

• Multiplayer

I played multiplayer in various aspects of the game. Some of it is great, and some of it isn’t so great, and your enjoyment depends on what you want out of this game.

The big issue for me is with its online multiplayer with friends. If you want to play co-op with your friends, there is no online multiplayer or wireless communication between switches. You can create a room with people, but you can’t play co-op in those levels, you instead are put through obstacle courses. It’s good fun for a bit but not amazingly so.

I don’t understand how to this day we still haven’t had a Mario that we can play co-op online!

Now, online multiplayer does offer you to play with the ghost of people playing live at that time. When you start a level, the game will partner you with 3 other players playing as different characters. The co-op works in several ways, you can leave items for people to pick up if they’re running low and you can place signs for people to interact with. When they do this, you become sort of a floating ghost, and if you hit the sign, you can be brought back without a life loss, and you can also bump into other players and that will revive you. If you’re part of saving someone or giving them an item, that gives you points towards your player score which shows you’ve been a good player online.

That being said, they cannot interact with your world- the ghosts will be interacting with their own version of the game. However, you can pick up tips on where hidden extras are by watching them play.

That’s where some people didn’t like this, as they feel like it takes away from some of the mystery of the game, but I personally like the cooperative nature of it, and that’s where I played most of the game. It felt good to reach the flag at the same time and celebrate together. I personally enjoyed this, but I know some people didn’t, so you can turn off this feature.

The final thing to talk about is the local co-op. I had a chance to play 2-player and 3-player multiplayer, but I haven’t had the chance to play as 4 just yet. What I will say is that it’s a much better multiplayer than the New Super Mario Brothers games. It can get a bit chaotic with more players, but the levels feel more like they’re designed with the multiplayer in mind. It was really good fun to work together. 2-player was definitely the best aspect of the game, and I would argue that it’s probably the best way to play the game overall.

CONS

• A Bit Too Easy

I know it’s weird to say considering the target demographic for the game, but I found this incredibly easy. I’d compare it to Mario 3D World in this regard since that relies a lot on multiplayer too, but it felt like it was challenging me a bit more. In the more challenging parts of the game, it didn’t really feel like I was pushed to my limits. I will stress that there were some difficult levels, and I’m not saying I never died, but I think people who thought this game would be more challenging will be disappointed.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I struggle to find any faults with this game. Mario Wonder, in my opinion, is the best 2D Mario since Super Mario World. I’m not willing to rank it amongst the other Mario games at this point in time, since I want to leave time to settle on it and come back to it at a later date. But at this moment, this game is great, and I really enjoyed my time with it, and I highly recommend picking it up. This is a great game and is a bit bittersweet since it’s probably the last major game from Nintendo before we move onto the next console.

SCORE: 9.5/10

Sonic Superstars

(available for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S and X, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Nintendo Switch version used for this review.)

Sonic Superstars is the latest 2D Sonic game, having been revealed at Summer Games Fest back in June, that showed off the game as a brand new 2D entry with some 2.5D elements thrown into the level design and co-op multiplayer, with the option to play as one of four characters: Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy.

This comes at a rather interesting time, as Sonic Mania was the last 2D Sonic game that was very well received and is considered not only one of the best 2D Sonics but one of the best Sonic games overall. I agree with that, but I think it also ties in with Sonic Generations, and I go back and forth constantly on which one I think is best. You can understand that not only am I a big Sonic fan in general, but those games are where my interest lies.

I don’t think it helped that this game came out the same week as Spiderman 2 and Super Mario Wonder. Plus, the fact that for what is a short game to reach the credits, it is a full-price release. I won’t go into whether 2D games can be worth a full-price release (personally I think that if they’re of top quality, then they should, but I also understand why some people would disagree), but I would say that Sonic Superstars is an interesting game as a whole.

It’s a very simple 2D Sonic, there are 2 acts in every stage, with some extra acts for finding collectables. You have several special stages to collect the Chaos Emeralds, but this time each of the emeralds has a different purpose. In the older games, you have to get all 7 emeralds to unlock the super forms of the characters, but this time around, it unlocks one of 7 Chaos Powers, which was highlighted a bit in the marketing campaign.

The other fact is that this game has the co-op multiplayer, which allows local players to play one of the four characters at once. Sadly, this game does not have online co-op, which is a shame, because I wanted to use some of my Good Vibes gaming Patron perks to play some games with people who are better Sonic players than me. While it is an interesting idea, I think the fact that it has no online multiplayer for playing co-op is a mistake. I simply can’t guarantee a player 2 that can join me at any time, let alone a group of 3 or 4.

So, I approached most of this game from the perspective of it being a single-player experience, and that’s where I think that a lot of the issues come from with Sonic Superstars. It doesn’t have that much of an identity; other than the fact it brings back Fang the Sniper as a secondary villain and introduces one new character. You might have seen them briefly if you watched the Sonic animated short that was put on YouTube prior to the game’s release.

As a whole, I feel like Sonic Superstars kind of lacks an identity, which is really an issue. It feels like a basic 2D Sonic, and it confirms a lot of worries the audience had when we found out who was developing the game. While Sonic Team is involved in the game, the bulk of it was done by Studio Arzest, and if you haven’t heard of them, you will have definitely heard of their previous projects, mainly the Nintendo DS game Yoshi’s New Island and most infamously the terrible Yujinaka Project, Balan Wonderworld. Personally, I wasn’t too worried about Arzest being on this project since I don’t really hate Yoshi’s New Island, though I will admit it doesn’t have much in terms of innovation, and if we go by what a lot of reports are suggesting, the reason why Balan Wonderworld turned out as bad as it did was because there was no real leadership and Square Enix were very hands-off with the project.

I went in with some hope for Sonic Superstars, but I will say that at this point it’s an okay game. It has a lot to talk about and does have some good highs, but it also has some really big lows.

PROS

• Physics

I can’t fault the game for replicating the physics of a 2D Sonic. If you were ever unfortunate enough to play Sonic the Hedgehog 4, that was a game that really failed at being a 2D Sonic game. precisely because it failed at the physics-based gameplay that subtly makes 2D Sonic games so enjoyable.

I could also compare it to the brilliant 2D gameplay of Sonic Generations, to the terrible gameplay in Sonic Forces. If you mess with the physics too much you will ruin this. Fortunately, Sonic Superstars feels like it was directly taken from Sonic Mania.

In conversation with another Sonic fan, they also agreed with this point. I think that the team definitely knew why Mania was so popular. While this game doesn’t look like Mania, it certainly has an interesting image, I daresay it even looks good on the Switch, which had to make some visual sacrifices. It does still really give a small bit of the feeling of Sonic Mania, at least in terms of the gameplay aspect of it.

Also, yes, despite what some people have been saying about the Switch version, my experience was actually fairly good! I did experience some slowdown, mostly in the boss fights (believe me, we’ll talk about that later), but the game did run at a stable 60FPS for most of the game. Apart from a few instances, I never experienced a slowdown that actively ruined the game.

• Level Design

I do have a slight negative on this one, which is that I think that most of the really creative level designs are reserved for the very beginning and very end of the game. While this game could be accused of playing it safe with its level design, it’s still really good and does encourage some replay value, particularly if you get some of the Chaos Powers. Not that I felt like it warranted gameplay.

The fact of the matter is that in terms of the levels, they are very well designed. Particularly the way that the game goes about the final level, which I felt was almost a stroke of genius. Some levels do have a few issues, but it’s fun to go back and try them with different characters, particularly if you want to play in co-op.

MIXED

• Co-op Multiplayer

I haven’t played the game in four-player multiplayer, but from what I can tell from the footage, it looks like it has the exact same problem that the New Super Mario Brothers has when you try to play in co-op. It’s too insane and too difficult to coordinate everyone. Two-player co-op is actually a pretty decent time and does work, you can also play with any combination of characters. There’s no bonus for playing with certain combinations of characters, but it is fun to mix and match them depending on their strengths and weaknesses. For example, Tail’s flight can take you to certain areas, and Knuckles’s ability to climb walls can come in very handy for some levels too.

The biggest problem is that everyone shares one screen, and they have to be teleported to wherever the first player is, meaning that a lot of the time you can’t take full advantage of Sonic’s speed. This is a big problem with one of the levels that is completely covered in mist and you have to use a firefly to move around- which is really bad in a game where you have to move really fast, and even worse when you’re playing in co-op and only one of your players has this firefly. If you want to see this in action, I recommend Jeff Grubb’s video, his playthrough of that level really highlights this point.

CONS

• Chaos Powers

The Chaos Powers are fine, and this might be just a me thing, but I really didn’t like them. For a start, you have to get them in the special stages, which does the whole Sonic 3 method of several rings in the stages. Small problem here: You can only get 1 per level on a playthrough. If you get it in Act 1, you can’t then get another one in the same Act or in Act 2, which is very annoying.

The other fact is that getting them is terrible! You’re sort of doing this in a space vine-swinging mini-game, which was just impossible to navigate. I’ll freely admit that I didn’t get all of the Chaos Powers before doing this review, so I haven’t had the ability to try them all out, but that’s because this was such a nightmare trying to get them! I really hated these stages, they’re some of the worst in Sonic history, and I’m including some of the really bad ones from Sonic the Hedgehog 4 in this list.

Fortunately, the special stages that you get for getting 50 rings whilst reaching a checkpoint, are much better and are a great homage to Sonic 1, with a few puzzle elements added into the mix. You don’t get Chaos Emeralds for this, but you do get points to spend in the shop, for cosmetics for your multiplayer battle character, which considering how much I didn’t like the battle multiplayer meant that every time I went into one I was saying to myself, ‘Why am I doing this? I don’t want to spend my coins on anything!’.

The Chaos Powers themselves come in several varieties. There’s one for a rocket launch, there’s one that creates loads of dummy copies of your character, there’s one that highlights different hidden paths, one that lets you go through water and so on. The problem is that they’re very cumbersome to get. You often have to get trigger buttons or move the right analogue stick to a certain location, which is quite hard to do when you’re trying to speed through platforms. If you want to be precise about it, you have to grind to a halt.

The biggest problem I have with them is that they’re so situational. The first level has a bunch of opportunities to use them, but even then, I kind of found that they were grinding my game to a halt, they were almost useless! They really don’t feel like they improve the gameplay at all, they feel like an extra thing that was tacked on, in place of something like the Wisp powers from Sonic Colours.

In short, I don’t find them very good, and I haven’t found many people who like the game talking about them.

• Boss Fights

This is the absolute worst part of the game. With a few exceptions, the boss fights suck. Sonic bosses have a lot of issues with having cheap hit detection and putting you in situations where you’re bound to lose almost all of your rings, but they don’t pose as much of an issue because they are often very short, so it doesn’t feel like as much of a pain each time you die.

Sonic Superstars has all of the same issues, but the boss fights are pretty damn long! I dreaded getting to the end of a level because I knew I was in for a long boss fight with really cheap mechanics, and every time I was proven right. It doesn’t help that a lot of these boss designs are recycled from other Sonic games with minimal innovation.

There are two bosses that are the crown jewel of rubbish: mainly the second fight you get with Fang the Sniper, it took me over thirty minutes to beat, with how cheap it was and how much it changed up the gameplay in the worst way possible, but the final boss which has to be one of the most infuriating experiences I’ve ever had in a Sonic game. This took me over an hour and was rage-inducing… I won’t spoil it for people who are curious, but this thing will drive you mad with some of the cheapest mechanics in a Sonic game. This might be a contender for one of the worst Sonic bosses in any of the games.

• Battle Multiplayer

I don’t know who designed this thing, but if the only reason you’re collecting coins is for this, then you’re wasting your time collecting the coins. I absolutely hated it.

The battle multiplayer comes in several varieties, you can battle with up to 8 people on your friend list because of course, you’re not allowed to play with random people. But it’s also the fact that I wouldn’t want to play it! It sucks. The mechanics are all over the place, the level design doesn’t work, and most of the time I have no idea what’s going on. You can play with CPU opponents, but that sucks too. This is really poorly designed.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Sonic Superstars is a perfectly okay Sonic game. I did enjoy going from start to finish on each of the levels, minus the terrible boss fights, and the physics and gameplay are certainly there. I wouldn’t mind SEGA going further down this path, since I think that the 2D Sonic games can complement the 3D ones- they just need to have better online multiplayer and let me play with random people online whenever I want!

I will say that this game at least looked and played well, and there was some fun with the co-op. I’ve not been able to play the 4-player co-op, so I can’t say for certain that it’s bad, but most people who have played this way have said it’s a bit of a nightmare.

Despite how negative I’ve been, this isn’t a terrible Sonic game. It’s perfectly okay, and in terms of the modern 2D Sonic games, I’d say that it is much better than Sonic the Hedgehog 4 which was awful to get through, but Sonic Superstars is nowhere near the heights of Sonic Mania.

I would say that I recommend this game if it was on a discount, but I can’t in good conscience say that you’d be better off getting this than just getting Sonic Mania Plus.

FINAL SCORE: 7.5/10

Forza Motorsport

(Available on Xbox Series X & S, and PC. Xbox Series X version used for this review)

Forza Motorsport has been a game that Turn 10 Studios has worked on for quite some time. Despite being the eighth game in the series, the number has been dropped for this new release, almost signifying a new beginning for this series. We have been seeing that for quite some time, it was first shown off during the Xbox showcase all the way back in 2020 and obviously the pandemic caused huge delays. Despite the fact that the game seemed like it was constantly getting delayed, it is now available on Xbox and PC. It is also a part of your Xbox Game Pass subscription if you have one, with early access going to people who have the Premium edition, which is how I was able to play the game early.

The Premium Deluxe edition (if you are interested) is still worth it even after the wide release, due to the fact that the game gives you a few cars to help you get started with your game. It also came in handy for me, which meant that I was not hampered buying a lot of new cars for events in the Campaign Mode. Full disclosure, I have not finished the campaign, but I have a lot of reviews to get out in October and I made sure that I got as much of the game in as possible.

This is a fairly simple game, it’s a basic driving simulator that acts as Xbox’s answer to Gran Turismo, and so obviously I will be comparing it to Gran Turismo 7 a lot. I will stress that I don’t believe that these games are in direct competition to each other- they might influence people’s console preference, but most people (especially with rising costs) don’t have both PS5 and an Xbox X or S- even with S coming in as one of the cheaper consoles on the market. That being said, the comparisons are still going to be there and are unavoidable. Forza is very similar to Gran Turismo in many ways, but recently they both have very different game structures.

This is another driving sim, but they have added a few elements that I like. They tried to turn it into a Car RPG, which they are calling a CaRPG. This basically means that you won’t be doing loads of races to grind for money- you will be gaining money through levelling up your driving, but you won’t need to spend it to upgrade your car, which comes from prizes from winning, as well as experience points you earn during races. I do think that this aspect is a decent shake-up that will adhere to the audience that would not necessarily pick this game up, especially since it goes away from the wacky nature of Forza Horizon 5.

PROS

• Graphics

Much like Gran Turismo 7, Forza Motorsport is a powerhouse to demonstrate what the console is capable of. We have been told a lot that the Xbox Series X is the most powerful console on the market, and this is one of the games that proves it. Forza Motorsport looks amazing. It is not just the tracks and the cars, but the environments as well. I would also like to compliment the sound design, which does a brilliant job as well.

If I did have one complaint about the environments, it is that there is not as much of a variety of tracks as there is in games like Gran Turismo, because it is trying to be realistic to the motorsport experience. As a result, I think some people might get tired of these environments. I looked up a lot of the comparisons between this and Gran Turismo, and I kept going back and forth between what game I thought looked better. I consulted with my colleague Reece, who wrote the review on the site for Gran Turismo 7, and his response was that he felt that GT7 had better and more realistic lighting, he thought that Forza was better to look at since it made all of the instruments a lot clearer to read.

I also posted in my family WhatsApp group a picture of two of the tracks side by side, and the majority of them said that Forza looked better but that there was very little difference between them.

The game comes with several modes, Performance Mode, Performance Ray Tracing, and Visual Fidelity. I would say to take the recommendation that they give you at the start of the game and play Performance Mode. You get excellent 4K 60FPS, which means that you get brilliant visuals, and the framerate is at a consistent level that you need for a game like this. I do not think that the Ray Tracing is necessary for enjoying this game.

• Gameplay

Gran Turismo 7 did not really excite me too much since it has a slow build-up and burn. Forza does not really have that because you are constantly seeing new tracks and driving with new cars. The Campaign Mode is excellent in that regard.

It also lets you move between different campaigns; you are allowed to stop a series partway through and keep your progress and try another one if you are getting bored of a certain car. I was able to bounce between doing the event for Muscle Cars and the event for Sudan.

As for the RPG aspect, you are not earning all of your experience points after the race, but instead during the race. For example, when you do your mandatory practice laps (because it wants you to learn the track and how your car will handle on there, which is another aspect that adds to the realism), the game will give you several sections of the track and if you can beat your time on another lap, you’ll earn more experience points. You get points for overtaking, for performing parts of the track well, and you can level up mid-race. You will not be able to spend your points until after the race is done, but it does capture what good RPGs will do- it is fun to see the number go up!

The driving also feels very good, I’m not so good without Driver Assist, but if you don’t want to have your hand held completely, the settings will let you customise how many assists features you use, and the accessibility features are excellent too. I did not want the cars to break for me, so I turned that off, Partially Assisted in fixing that for me without being completely handholding.

It is also realistic for cars to go wrong. You cannot just do a bunch of collisions, because you will feel a visible performance fail in your car. You could also incur penalties for that and for going off course, and the game will be more or less lenient depending on what your difficulty level is, which is also customisable.

I thought early on that it did not create the same feeling of speed as something like Forza Horizon 5 did, but later on in the game when I was upgrading my cars, it really did feel like I was going way faster.

CONS

• Length of Races

This only applies to some of the races, but I found that this game does not have the same play feel that the Horizon games have. I found that there was one race that I did where including the practice laps, it took me 20 minutes- and that was just one race! If you only have a few hours a night to play this game, you will not get much done. It made it a bit of a slob to get through certain cups.

Fortunately, you don’t have to make sure that the auto-save is going off every single moment since the Xbox’s feature of holding your place in 8 games simultaneously means that if you’re getting bored, you can just use the instant return feature to go and play a different game and then come back to where you left off. While this feature has lost my progress in a couple of games, I found that the Xbox was consistent with this game.

• No Music During Races

I wish that there were an option to have some music in these scenes but considering how many Forza games Xbox had to delist from their shop due to licensing issues, I can see why they didn’t. But I would like something other than engine noises during races to be an option at least.

• Multiplayer

Multiplayer itself is just as good in terms of gameplay. My problem with it comes with the fact that it is limited to certain times of the day. If I missed the feature which meant I could play at any time with random people, I apologise, but I could not find it. This was the one feature from Gran Turismo that I did not want them to bring over.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Forza Motorsport definitely does a good job at bringing people who don’t normally play driving simulators into the genre, but I would say that in order to keep the people who do like them, they haven’t quite got enough as Horizons. It is a good entry which is a little light on content at launch, but it has more planned down the launch in updates, and I think they did an admirable job.

The RPG mechanics work out well and it controls really nicely, with a consistent framerate.

My major issue is the fact that the multiplayer feels very limited, and I just felt like some of the race went on too long, and it should have been cut down by a couple of laps.

If you have a Game Pass, it will not cost you anything to try this out, I personally think that it is a really good game, but I liked the Forza Horizon games a lot more since I felt like they had more personality. I would say that if you like the Horizon games, Motorsport will be easy to jump into since it uses the same user interfaces, but it possibly won’t give you the same enjoyment.

FINAL SCORE: 8/10

Starfield

(available for Xbox Series X & S and PC. Xbox Series X version used for this review)

I want to state right now that I probably haven’t done as much content as some people would like. I did get as much done as possible, I even paid for early access to the game, so as a result I got it 5 days ahead of the standard edition going onto Game Pass and have played this game for around 52 hours over 23 days. I did the entire main story, a small amount of New Game Plus, and quite a few of the side missions including the missions based on the various factions, which are some of the most substantial side content.

Starfield is the most ambitious Xbox Game Studio game in years. It’s very important for them considering some of the struggles that they had this year (need I remind you of how bad Redfall was) But, Xbox has also had strengths this year, I really enjoyed Hi-Fi Rush and Starfield was something that I was really looking forward to. It seemed like that great space exploration game that people have wanted for ages. A sort of No Man’s Sky with more content. Of course, this is the first new IP from Bethesda in a very long time. Hoping to be the third pillar alongside Fallout and Elder Scrolls.

I can report that Starfield isn’t just Fallout in space, it does have its own identity and its own feel. There are 1000+ planets. You can’t necessarily land on all of the planets, the gas planets for example aren’t explorable, but you can land on several of their moons. For example, (this isn’t a spoiler) you get access to our universe in one of the tutorial missions, and once I got more freedom I decided to go to one of Saturn’s moons. A slight mistake on my part since I got involved in a museum tour that went on for ages and the guide wouldn’t shut up or stop asking me questions… But it is interesting to just explore the planets. Early on I was just landing wherever I could and exploring! If you survey a planet 100% you will gain experience points and survey data, too.

But there’s also a lot else going on in the game. Spaceship design, combat, and several storylines going on. There’s one around a group of space cops, there’s an organisation in a cyberpunk setting, and there are all sorts going here, as you would expect. You will unlock a lot of side missions just by overhearing conversations.

As for the gameplay itself, while the combat does bear some resemblance to Fallout, it does have its own flair and uniqueness to it, You don’t have the targeting limbs mechanic that you have from, Fallout 3 onwards. The wide variety of weapons was really enjoyable to use.

Majority of the game you will be working for the characters in the main storyline, who represent a group called Constellation, whose job it is to explore the unknown galaxy for information vital to humanity. You’re going to be looking for several artefacts, the first of which you discovered in the tutorial mission.

While this does have its own uniqueness to it, it still feels like a Bethesda game. The dialogue boxes look the same, the mechanics feel fairly similar, and you can tell this game has been made in the creation engine.

My review won’t do this game justice. While I tried to construct an Outpost, I wasn’t great at it, so I didn’t do it again, and I found that with a great ship you don’t really need an outpost.

As a whole, I did enjoy this game, and I’ll go into detail about the positives and negatives.

PROS

• Graphics

In my opinion, the Creation engine was beginning to show its age, but I’ll give it to Bethesda: they have made a really great-looking game. One of the best experiences was going into the moons from gas giant planets and seeing the planets in an extraordinary way. The engine makes space look amazing.

The planets have a great variety of them. You can get a Wild West type city, there’s a neon city, and one of my favourites was the Holiday Planet which had the resort Paradiso. There was a really good variety available, and the environments were really interesting, especially considering that Bethesda had done a lot of research on astronomical data, they even used NASA’s own data to give a sense of realism to how each planet’s environment would go depending on their relation to the stars. It seems like they took our Solar System and built upon that to design their own.

You won’t come across ones with alien life each time, but you will come across interesting environments and if the game is lacking in alien life, it wasn’t noticeable to me because I went to a ton of planets with life forms.

You’ll need to change up your suits based on the environments though, otherwise, you’ll be afflicted by various elements- I shouldn’t have gone to Pluto as soon as I did, because the environment was incredibly cold, and my suit didn’t have great thermal regulation. So, I had to fast-travel back to New Atlantis to see the doctor. That may be your main capital, but you won’t be there that often. It seems to be the city that has the most effort put into it, but who knows, I might have missed something in a side mission.

What I found amazing was that it didn’t feel like any planet was half-arsed. Granted, many of the planets do receive procedural generation if you don’t land in a pre-selected area, but I still thought that there was no planet where little effort had been put in.

• Gameplay and Combat

I wanted to highlight the combat particularly because I thought that it was pretty good. It does have that Bethesda issue of putting you in environments with way too many enemies, but if you do the main story up to a certain point, you gain an extra element to combat which can alleviate some of those issues.

I would suggest doing a good chunk of the main story before going off and doing your own thing. When you get the new element of combat, that’s when you should go off and do the side stuff. I didn’t and it made a lot of the missions much more difficult. But because I followed some advice and got some of the best suits and ships that you can get early on in the game, it alleviated a couple of my big issues. That being said, I wish I saved a little bit longer because having it earlier on would have helped. The game still provides good customisation in terms of how you want to do combat. You get several perks, for example, when you do your character creation and you pick Diplomat, you will gain extra persuasion benefits at the beginning of the game. If you level that one up to the max, you can pretty much talk yourself out of several fights and even some harder story mission moments. I personally used that one since I like talking my way out of things in Bethesda games.

The levelling-up system is quite clever. When you level up, you get a skill point that you can use to level up skills you already have, but you cannot do so unless you meet the criteria. If you want to be good with shotguns, you have to kill a certain number of enemies with shotguns, then you’ll get the upgrade to increase your damage. If you want my advice on two that you should do no matter what, I think you should level up Ship Piloting. If you want to steal other people’s ships, do better customisation, or just level up your own ship, that one will come in handy. The absolute must is weightlifting, which allows you to carry more stuff- I’ll get into my issues with that down the line. That is one you should Max out very quickly since you’ll be able to rely less on your ship’s cargo hold that way.

I haven’t even gotten into space combat yet, which I would deem to be okay if you’re playing the game in the third person. Do not do ship combat in first person! For one thing, nothing looks that good from the cockpit vs. full view in space. Also, combat is way easier to figure out what you’re doing that way. It works for the most part, but I found it really difficult to get the hang of when there were a lot of enemies. Trust me, a lot of space combat will be mandatory so level up that piloting skill so you can get better ships.

MIXED

• Story

This will depend on which storyline you do. Some of the side quests really vary in quality and some of the storylines don’t really do that great of a job. I feel like I should have cared way more about the mission when I was essentially a space cop, but that one didn’t really keep my interest towards the end, and it was kind of all over the place.

I think my favourite one was when I had to go undercover in the Crimson Fleet. You might want to hold off on finishing that one because not having pirates attack you in space or when you’re visiting planets can actually be of some benefit. That one had an ending where I was questioning what exactly I was going to do.

I think that your side companions have great stories and personalities. Often the dialogue and dialogue options can change depending on what companion you take to certain missions.

The ending is really interesting, and it leads to a very interesting conclusion which did make me want to play the game a bit longer. I’ll let you discover it for yourself, but many were recommending completing the main story, but unless you do a bit of side content including some of those big side missions that involve multiple missions, I don’t think that the impact of it will hit. You’ll know what missions I mean because they have a special logo next to them.

• Customisation

While I didn’t really enjoy the outpost, I did enjoy customising my ship up to a point. It is cool to design your spaceship to have everything in there, like a good workshop for crafting because tons of people were telling me that that’s what I should have, but then it turned out that that was meaningless because I was barely crafting or cooking anything because I couldn’t find any ingredients…

The customisation does have its limits. If you pick certain ways to customise your ship you can end up doing things that you don’t realise- if you pick a certain company’s habitat environment, you can end up altering another habitat you already had! If you do it in the worst way you can even alter a bed, which can mess up your sleep and therefore your health.

It also comes with the fact that this ship has to be able to mechanically fly, which I didn’t think would be an issue until I tried to make this thing work. I got into several issues where the game would tell me the ship wouldn’t be able to fly… Again… And again! Eventually, I would just give up and wait until I had enough money to buy a new ship or just do different missions and hope I could nick a ship that would suit my needs better.

Obviously, my experience isn’t the same as everyone else’s. I’ve seen so many elaborate creations online, like the person who created the Titanic. Because I don’t even know how you began to do that. I would advise that you don’t really need to do much customisation. You will need to have a fleet of spaceships for certain parts of the game.

• Travel

The fast travel is fine in this game and if you upgrade your ability to do Gravity Jumps, you can go further distances without having to jump between planets. I did appreciate the fact that the game didn’t let you jump into an undiscovered galaxy, and you had to discover certain routes, but it started to bother me when fast travel would just be between galaxies, and you couldn’t go between planets seamlessly. Well, you can kind of do that, but it takes hours (and I do mean hours!) It’s been tested on other people’s live streams, don’t make the mistake I did where I left the game going for 40 minutes before I realised I could just fast-travel from the Pause menu. I do think that this is one of the aspects of the game that Bethesda oversold. You won’t really be exploring space, but you will be fast travelling a lot. It won’t be like No Man’s Sky where you can take off and immediately be in space, there are a lot of loading screens in this game.

That being said, there isn’t anything majorly wrong with the travel in this game.

CONS

• Incumbency Mechanics

I have no idea why Bethesda has kept this in. This made things miserable a lot of the time. I can’t just pick up anything I want because if I go over my weight limit it will stop me from fast travelling and if I do anything more than a slight walk, I will lose oxygen. I never liked incumbency in Elder Scrolls or Fallout, and I don’t like it here. There are other ways to give your players a limited inventory that are better than this, and I hope they remove this in future games.

• Framerate Issues

This might be because I was playing on Xbox Series X where the framerate is locked to 30FPS and I haven’t played the PC version, but for the most part, the framerate didn’t bother me because it seemed like the game was built around that framerate. That being said, there were moments where the framerate would freeze entirely, or the game would struggle to load things in. It’s certainly an issue predominantly towards the final few hours of the story.

• Bugs

I haven’t encountered some of the really weird bugs, and I will say to Bethesda’s credit, this is probably one of the most polished launches to come from them in a while. While I didn’t get some of the usual Bethesda ones like the lively corpses, the game did crash on me on numerous occasions, seemingly sometimes at random. I had a crash happen to me in one of the bigger cities for simply jetpacking over a fountain. I would say that on the whole, while I do think the game works well at launch, it does have a major issue with crashes, and I would like to see them sort it out in future updates.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Starfield is a great game if you go into it hoping for another good Bethesda game. I wouldn’t describe this as a genre-defining title, but with all of the content in this, you’ll be playing it for years. I wish incumbency wasn’t a thing, and if you want a way to alleviate it other than the weightlifting perk, read everyone’s note documents on the tutorial mission in the space station near Neptune, once you read all of the enemy’s documents, you’ll get a mission called Mantis. It’s a hard mission to do early on, but the perks you get for it is worth it and will help.

As a whole, I think that this plays well, and I found it really enjoyable. While I don’t think it does too much to separate itself, I think that it was still an enjoyable experience. It has some issues that it needs to work out, but I will be really interested to see what Bethesda will do in regard to a sequel to this. It might not have given us the definitive space exploration game that everyone has been waiting for, but it was a really good stab at it and it’s a really good Bethesda RPG.

FINAL SCORE: 8.5/10

Samba De Amigo: Party Central

(currently available for Nintendo Switch only, VR version for MetaQuest in development)

Samba De Amigo, for those who don’t know, is an old Sega franchise for the Dreamcast era, which had also seen some release in arcades. The game is actually a pioneer for motion control, since you had maraca controls. This new entry keeps up that motion control tradition, but except for new maraca controls, you’ll be using the Joycon. It’s similar to those touch dance games that you see in Japanese arcades- there are six different panels to hit and you’re trying to get the right motion to the beat of the song.

Samba De Amigo also has a few instances where if you hit a certain note, it will shake things up: you could start a mini game of trying to hit a baseball for a home run to the beat of the song, or it could speed up or slow down the song for a short amount of time.

The game also comes with several customisation options for your Amigo as well as other online and offline multiplayer. You can also play the game with traditional controls, which comes in handy if you want to play it portably- which I don’t recommend playing it in portable mode whilst handheld, since I couldn’t really see where I needed to aim my controller. Also, if you try to do that on public transport, you’re going to look ridiculous.

I do give credit that the gameplay from the Dreamcast era is still there and that the online multiplayer options are expansive, particularly one that I’ll be talking about in the pros section. But Samba De Amigo doesn’t really nail it in several regards for me, and I think that it’s going to fall to the wayside compared to other similar titles on the market.

For one thing, there’s not that much single player content. There are a few mission structures but they’re not a huge part of the game and really acted as a time distracter.

PROS

● Battle Royale

Samba De Amigo comes with Battle Royale mode, and they also have a traditional multiplayer mode, but you can’t actually see them playing with you at the same time, and as a result I didn’t find that much fun.

The Battle Royale mode, however, was very enjoyable., You get weapons to fire at other players and you can see everyone at the same time. They can fire weapons that knock your character out so the motion controls won’t work for a second, or ones that eliminate two of the spots to hit, so you might want to aim for the top left one, but it’s gone missing.

The problem I have with this mode is that you can’t choose the song that you want as it’s chosen at random. It doesn’t matter how much you don’t want to play Macarena by Los Del Rio; it’s coming on and you have to play it! I wouldn’t mind if there was an update that allowed for a vote of songs, similar to what we got with Mario Kart 8 on the track selection.

● Graphics

I actually think that this is a very good-looking game. It does a good job of updating the original but maintains a lot of the Dreamcast original era quality it had. Samba De Amigo has a very distinctive art style so I’m happy they didn’t mess with it too much, you can even unlock one of the classic outfits from the Dreamcast era, which I would really recommend since that character design is amazing.

Some of the environments also look great but you’re mostly going to be so focused on hitting the notes that you won’t get much time to appreciate it. I did appreciate that for the Sonic music content that they recreated City Escape in a really cool way.

MIXED

● Soundtrack

I put this in the Mixed section since it will vary based on your own personal taste, but in my opinion, I thought that the soundtrack was a really mixed bag, and I found myself only playing the same songs over and over again.

I bought the Deluxe version which meant that I got access to the extra Sonic songs, and there are a few extras from the Sonic games (mostly ones from Adventure onwards, even some from Sonic Frontiers). While these are the best songs of the game, they don’t really match the Party theme that the game is going for. I think they went a bit too far; the old games have a lot of Latin music mixed in with the pop songs, and I was expecting that to be the same here, but they went completely the other way, most of these are club anthems!

Some of them aren’t too bad of a choice, I completely understand why they would put a song like Just Dance by Lady Gaga in the mix, but under no circumstances would I be playing Tik Tok by Kesha. The Latin songs aren’t really a great selection, they can be quite predictable. I don’t mind the song La Bamba, but that and Macarena were really predictable choices, and it just kind of baffles me that they would steer away from the roots of the game so much.

The soundtrack will obviously depend on your own taste. If you enjoy those kinds of songs then there will be a lot there for you, but I think that they needed a better variety. Now, there are more songs coming to the game in the future, I know a K-pop selection featuring artists like BTS. But at this stage, they’ll need a really good music pack (probably including more from Sega’s past) to really get me into the soundtrack.

CONS

● Very Inconsistent Controls

I say inconsistent because of one particular motion. I will stress that the controls for the most part worked pretty well in most circumstances, but the Down motion on the other hand was inconsistent about whether I was going to hit it or not. Most times I felt like I was hitting it perfectly, only to find I missed it completely. A lot of people have the opinion that the Joycon doesn’t have motion controls fit for purpose and aren’t precise enough- it isn’t a Wii controller!

Obviously, this can be fixed in further updates, but I find it so annoying that I have to move my arm almost down to my hip in order to do a down motion. The up and side motion seem to not have as much issue!

You can overcome this by doing the Button controls with the analogue sticks. But man, it’s a boring way to play! It’s a good way to play the game on the move and at least that way if you’re playing it on the train, you won’t accidentally end up hitting someone! But I found that playing that way was really boring and missed the point. It’s not as good as playing the Button controls in games like Theatre Rhythm or Taiko No Tatsujin.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I won’t lie, Samba De Amigo is a fine game, and you can get some enjoyment out of it, but I personally didn’t feel like there was enough there to warrant the price tag, particularly in the Deluxe Edition. There is some cool stuff, but the soundtrack is rather mixed, and the controls leave a lot to be desired. It’s a fine enough game, particularly if you want to use it as an exercise game, and I think it does capture its Dreamcast past, but in a lot of ways it doesn’t live up to it.

FINAL SCORE: 6.5/10