2. Actual Games - The Bad
What about the games? After all, it's the reason I go to these events, the reason 64,999 other people head to Earls Court every year, and the reason you are reading these words. It's the games that bring us all together. Well, to be completely honest, some video games...are...well...starting to lose me. I played the best part of 15 games over the 15 hours I was roaming the show floor. Very few of them peaked my interest. I feel like I've played almost all of it before. Aside from a couple of exceptions, when I sat or stood at a booth or demo station, on this generation of consoles or next, I quickly went from excited to curious to bored to jaded and generally underwhelmed. I'm twenty three years old, can I really be an aged cynic already? Actually, don't answer that, I'm not sure I want to know. Anyway, after sitting down with Wolfenstien: The New Order, Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag, The Crew, Call Of Duty: Ghosts, Ryse: Son Of Rome among others, I felt a genuine sadness. As I walked toward the exit of the Expo for some fresh air that was sans nerd sweat, I sighed. I felt as though I had played it all before. One way or another each game was disappointingly generic in its own awful way. Sure games running on the Xbox One or Playstation 4 look really, really pretty. No hyperbole here the jump in detail including physics, lighting, shadows and draw distance is incredibly impressive. The foliage in Black Flag dances in virtual wind creating amazing shadows as the sun splinters through the leaves. Blood sprays super-satisfyingly across the sand when in gladiatorial battles in Son Of Rome. But and it's a Beyonce sized one as soon as controller is placed in palm you begin to feel like it's 2009 all over again. Assassins Creed just plays, well, like you would expect an Assassins Creed game to play. Pull the trigger to sprint through the environment, block, block, block, parry, stab, sprint, swan dive into a conveniently placed bale of hay. While Ryse: Son Of Rome is a brand new intellectual property, it still manages to feel strangely familiar. You mash a finger contorting combination of buttons to mutilate some dopey AI controlled characters. Like God Of War, but more gritty (and by gritty I mean more average). Dying Light is another one of those games that made me weep with melancholic sadness. In typical developed-by-Techland fashion, it looks a rough as old boots with flat textures, weird psychics and strange looking character modelling. To evade the incoming zombie horde, you press upon the right bumper to freerun across the environment which, to its credit, it really fun. However, the combat is very much like Techland's previous franchise Dead Island, meaning it's floaty and rubbish. So really you want to avoid the combat all together which means, in essence, you will only want to play half the game. Not so great.