Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas (Xbox One) - Review

Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas is available now on the Xbox One and is priced at £11.99.

The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker is my favourite Zelda game, by far. So I guess it's easy to see why Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas piqued my interest when I first saw it on the Xbox One store, this game bares more than just a passing resemblance to Wind Waker, it also appeared to play like Wind Waker from what we could see.

Now this had me extremely excited, but I know that there are a number of gamers that hated Wind Waker and saw it as a complete removal from the Zelda series. I'm guessing they were as turned off by this game as I was excited, but hey, you can't please everyone right?!

Now if you're here hoping to hear that although this game looks like Wind Waker it is in fact a polar opposite then I'm afraid you should probably just stop reading now. There are so many factors to this game that are borrowed from Wind Waker. You play as a young boy (check) whose parents aren't around (check) and you're going to go sail the seas to find someone (check). You even have to find an old sword and shield on the island to help you on your quest and all of this happens in the first ten minutes.

The thing is you can draw similarities between most games, very few games are truly original these days. There is nothing wrong with drawing inspiration from other games as long as it is done well and Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas has that down pat. This game is so close to perfection that it makes the problems I have with it seem so much worse. The graphics are absolutely stunning, the music is enchanting (but obviously we were expecting that seeing as it's Nobuo Uematsu and Kenji Ito at the helm) and the game is incredibly polished. But yeah, I have a few gripes.

First off I was incredibly disappointed with the sailing, at first at least. I've made my peace with it now, but have to admit to feeling completely disappointed when instead of being able to steer my vessel through these uncharted waters I just had to set a path to an island I'd heard of and automatically make my way there. The first few journeys are the worst because literally nothing happens, but eventually you unlock a cannon and can shoot monsters and boxes on your way to the next island. When I think back to how many hours I whiled away just sailing in Wind Waker this is probably a good thing to be honest, otherwise I might have been attempting to write this review based purely on how many mini games I had found whilst sailing.

The menu is a little bit pointless in all honesty. You level up automatically, the new skills and items you find map themselves to the face buttons (and are interchanged with a quick press of the d-pad which is brill) and there is NO REAL QUEST LOG OR MAP. This was by far my biggest gripe with the game, something that still annoys me now. There is a log, I guess, but it also keeps track of every conversation you have had so it is pretty impossible to find the snippet of information you need about where you need to go. It'd have just been nice to have a clear quest log with even small details of what you were meant to be doing. I found that after turning it off for the night, I had completely forgotten what I was supposed to be doing by the time I had turned it back on in the morning. But I have a really rubbish memory so maybe that's my problem. The desire for a proper map is probably down to my crap memory too, see as you continue you unlock new items and skills that allow you to explore more of each island. And I can always remember that there was somewhere that this new skill would come in handy but I can never remember where. A world map where you could then look closer at a map of each island would be invaluable for me. You do have a minimap when you're on an island, that colours in as you walk around, which is nice, but I'd like to be able to see a birds eye view.

Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas is a fantastic game. Even considering the quibbles I have it with I am completely in love with it and I know I will spend many more hours playing it. At £11.99 it's a complete steal. Go get it guys.

9/10 BUY IT!

A code was provided for the purpose of this review.

Slime Rancher (Xbox One) - Preview

Slime Rancher is available now through the Xbox One Game Preview Program and is priced at £15.99.

I quickly used the one hour trial for this game during the summer holidays, it looked like the perfect game to enjoy with my kids and I really wasn't wrong! Don't be fooled by its bright and colourful appearance though, this game offers a rich enough experience for the adults to enjoy too.

Slime Rancher takes you to a faraway planet inhabited by different slimes. These slimes happen to have valuable shit. Literally, you are now going to make a living selling poo. Congratulations on your lucrative new career.

It's an extremely simplistic concept that has been executed perfectly in my opinion. You have a gun of sorts which allows you to suck up the slimes, food, poo, water and chickens and deposit them somewhere else. You buy different enclosures on your ranch like corrals for keeping your slimes safe, gardens to grow crops and coops for your chickens. There are different slimes to be found in the various areas, all of which have a different colour poo which all vary differently in their worth. And whatever you do don't put all of your slimes in one corral. It ends badly. See my recent Twitter pic if you don't believe me (https://twitter.com/danniekitten). Why can you not save some space? Because slimes are disgusting creatures that will eat each others poo. They then become "Largos" and if they eat another different poo they become Tar and you can wave bye bye to your lovely ranch. Don't say I didn't warn you. There are a few other tips I could give you for when you start your ranch but I don't want to ruin it for the purists out there who like to go in knowing nothing. If you ever want advice, shout at me on Twitter.

The money you make from selling your slimes offerings can go towards upgrading your ranch or extending it. There are also upgrades for your gun, that later especially will prove invaluable. There are new areas to explore and areas that have little builders signs up, which show that there are plans for more spaces as the game progresses.

Slime Rancher is a game I have no qualms recommending now, even in its unfinished state. I've had a few crash problems, but honestly that's probably down to how much I was trying to do at once. This game is just so fun! And I've heard a whisper that any achievements you unlock in game will unlock on your Xbox One when the game does get fully released. Win win.

The Great Whale Road (Steam) - Preview

The Great Whale Road is available now on Steam and is priced at £10.99.

The Great Whale Road has released into Early Access, meaning the game is still in development and may change over time. The devs have said "We have been working on The Great Whale Road for over a year now, and we don't want to complete the game without your feedback" on the Steam Store page for the game.

I am a big fan of the Early Access/Game Preview programs, as it allows us to watch a game progress. The problem with these sometimes is that if you're a really early adopter there isn't always much of a game to play. This was my experience with The Great Whale Road (so far!) I played it for a number of hours over a few days but it ultimately felt like a very empty, unfinished experience. It certainly has potential but at the moment it is very barebones. There are a lot of areas in this game that you can't help but compare to others and The Great Whale Road never comes off favourably. The game shows a lot of promise as long as they listen to their fans advice on how they can improve certain features.

The Great Whale road is basically a text based story which sees you set off on an adventure to find out what happened to your people. You play the game through the seasons, so have different concerns for each one and times that are better for growing food etc. This sounds more involved than it actually turns out to be, but I'm sure it will be made better before the full release. You get given focus points to place into certain training or attributed for your people, like diplomacy, husbandry and warriors etc. Putting all of your points into diplomacy didn't seem to make much difference if I'm honest, but again maybe that's something that will be finetuned before the game is fully released. The art style is the biggest stand out for this game at the minute - it is truly beautiful to look at. I encountered a lot of bugs, some that completely crashed my game, resulting in an entire season being lost. Other bugs included my advisors details not being loaded so I could see none of the text - even the choices I could make.

Battling in The Great Whale Road is via a RNG card system. I have to admit to often finding RNG incredibly frustrating, as I'm sure many do. In this game it was incredibly frustrating as the only person who needs to be killed for a battle to be won is the leader of either side. They enter the board first and from there it is completely random whether you ever get another one of your men onto the battlefield. This meant that there were a number of occasions where the enemy team had four men on the board and I just had my leader, cornered. I find it difficult to accept losing battles just because I had such crappy luck, I like to lose because I wasn't good enough,  not because luck wasn't on my side!

Overall, I think The Great Whale Road shows a lot of promise. If you want to support the dev from the off go grab it now, but honestly I'd advise waiting for maybe the next update when hopefully the game will have fixed some of these issues.

This is the Police (Steam) - Review

This is the Police is available now on Steam and is priced at £13.99 (though there is a 10% discount at the minute making the game £12.59).

I don't know what I was imagining when I read the description for This is the Police on Steam, but it wasn't quite what I got. That's not necessarily a bad thing; I have LOVED my time with This is the Police, it's just...different to how I imagined and when I read it back now, after I've played hours upon hours of it I don't even know why I expected anything different.

Anyway now I've confused you all with my silly ramblings let's get into the review, eh?

You play as Police Chief Jack Boyd and you are thrust into the role immediately, playing as him in a press conference. You are told you will be out of a job in 180 days, so Jack makes it his goal to earn $500000 by then for his retirement, because obviously every game needs a goal. I can't really see any other cohesive reason for this, but never mind,

So you must take on the role of Chief of Freeburg PD and all it entails. You are given two shifts of investigators and cops to control and you must answer various calls across the map. These will range from mass shoot-outs where you will need to send a SWAT team, a Paddy Wagon and the majority of your cops, to calls concerning "suspicious characters" which can sometimes end up just being an innocent man walking his dog. You will never have enough cops on shift to send the maximum amount of cops to every call, so you have to learn which calls are more important and will need more than two of your cops. If you don't get this balance right, your cops will die.

The first time this happened to me I was aghast. I was already struggling to go to every call and just couldn't afford to lose a member of the force. You can't hire a new person immediately either, and this is where my Jack Boyd started to show just how corrupt he could be*. Because when a member of your force dies you are posed with a question at the end of the shift. You can either hand the body in and declare them dead, or you can hide them and carry on getting their wages. And with the $500000 in the back of my mind, I'm ashamed to say I chose to stuff the body in the morgue and collect the dead cops pay check for myself.

This was the start of an incredibly slippery slope. I hid that body for a week before I realised that another cop would be way more beneficial to me, thanks to my new found "friendship" with Freeburg's mob boss. He wanted my cops at his deals and it was always a set number he wanted, you couldn't short change him. So I declared them dead and hired someone new, only to get an email the next day from the Mayor telling me I had to fire all the black cops on my team. Yikes.

Now you can refuse any of these things. You can refuse to get in bed with the mob and you can refuse to heed the mayors warnings, but this will make your life as Jack Boyd much more difficult. As ever I don't want to go into story spoilers, but trust me it's much harder than you'd imagine to stay straight. I went into This is the Police naively thinking that I'd play it as the good guy, all the way through and prove that good guys can win. Haha. Isn't that a nice idea?

I really enjoyed my time with This is the Police and it is a game I will be returning to. The voice acting is amazing, and the steak art style really suits the game. The story is interesting and the UI is slick and simple to use. It's a fairly simple idea, executed brilliantly and in my opinion well worth the money. Though I have heard rumours of a console release, so if you'd rather play on an XB1 or PS4 it may be worth waiting to see if that happens.

8/10 BUY IT!

*It was me. All me. I'd make a terrible cop. 

A code was provided for the purpose of this review.

Overcooked! (Xbox One) - Review

Overcooked! is available now on the Xbox One and is priced at £11.99.

I have always loved a good cooking game, there's something about them that just draws me in and keeps me interested. I used to really enjoy time management games too (though interest in them has waned slightly in recent years) so much so that I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who bought Diner Dash on the Xbox 360. Man that game was tough.

I was excited when I read about Overcooked! I think it's been long enough since I've played a dash game that I felt ready for the challenge again. Plus it's the beginning of the school holidays and I thought this game might be fun to dive into with my two little angels*. Hahaha, more fool me right?!

Overcooked! sees you take on the role of a chef in a series of awfully designed kitchens. Your performance during the level affects how many stars you earn and these stars are important because you'll need to have unlocked a certain amount for each level. You can play the game solo, but damn it is hard. You use your bumper to switch between your two chefs, so you can have one cutting the salad and the other frying the burgers, or washing the dishes for example. I found playing the game solo really difficult, but switching between coop and solo is seamless, you can continue your previously solo save with a friend and vice versa without changing any settings or losing any progress, so that's nice.

Overcooked! really shines when you play it cooperatively. Unfortunately there is no online functionality thus far and I'm not sure whether the developers ever hope to patch it in. While it'd be nice to be able to play online, the couch coop in this game is pretty perfect. For one it allows four players to use the same screen at once, which is becoming more an more unusual. Hell, trying to find a game that allows two players to use the same screen is pretty hard these days. Overcooked! delivers a lot of fun and is a perfect game to throw on when you have a few friends round and fancy spicing things up with an argument.

Yes, Overcooked! is infuriating. No matter how hard you try you will end up having a little tiff. The game is set up for it, from the way you can push the other chefs off the moving van to the controls that are sometimes slightly off meaning you put your freshly coked soup straight into the bin rather than the plate. But as infuriating as it is you will keep coming back for more, this game is the most addictive game I've played on my console for ages.

The graphics are all really cute, if a little mobile game-esque. The map you trundle through as you make your way through the various levels is gorgeous and full of little details like the trees moving as you drive through them. It's adorable.

And if you're worrying that you want in on the sweet coop action but haven't got four controllers, FRET NOT! Overcooked! has thought of every possibility and come up with a way for two people to share one controller. Yeah, prepare for waaaayyyy more arguments if you play it that way.

Overcooked! is frantic fun that you will keep going back to. Pin it to your home and attempt a level whenever you have five minutes to spare. It'll either have you laughing or crying by the end.

8/10 BUY IT!

*devils in disguise
A code was provided for the purpose of this review.

Mighty No. 9 (Xbox One) - Review

Mighty No. 9 is available now on the Xbox One and is priced at £15.99.

I have to admit this game was never on my radar. Well until that Kickstarter and all of the issues it ran into. I couldn't scroll down my Twitter page for ages without seeing someone raging about the delays this game had faced and problems receiving their codes.

Now I have never actually played a Mega Man game and apparently this is a "spiritual successor" from the same guy. I don't know, I mean the character you play as - Beck - looks enough like Mega Man to me that it could have been Mega Man 10 or whatever number they're on. Don't hate me for not knowing this, I can't even give you a good reason as to why I haven't played a Mega Man game, I guess I've just never gotten around to it. I'm sorry :(

Anyway let's get to talking about the actual game, eh?

From the off this game felt like it was trying to capture the old magic. Everything feels like it is supposed to make you feel nostalgic, but unfortunately it just didn't work for me. The music is good, but the menus felt cheap and the fact it screams "Mighty Number 9" every time you press a button on the menu quickly caused me a headache. It's infuriating. Which is strange cos I could listen to the little "Segaaa" voice all day. I still have to do it every time I play on the Mega Drive with my son.

Mighty No. 9 isn't very welcoming to newcomers in my opinion. There's no real back story, instead you are told that all of the robots in the world have been infected with a virus and you and the other Mighty's are the only ones that can save them because for some reasons you haven't been infected. The story isn't going to win anything, but does it really need to?! It's a platformer first and foremost and sometimes story sections just get in the way of a game don't they?

So obviously there are the usual buttons for a platformer, but I found that some of the tutorial tips were given too late to be of any use in that life and there were a couple of times I died before I could read the tip that had popped up on the side of the screen. This mostly happened when I had unlocked a new skill and hadn't yet been told how to use that skill.

I think the graphics in this game are a bit lacking. The backgrounds are drab and there are massive portions of the game that just feel empty and if you die a lot (you will) you end up running through these barren screens far too often. The enemies are pretty cutesy, they remind me a lot of the character design in the 3D Sonic games to be honest. The ones you meet throughout the levels offer very little in the way of challenge for the most part, although you will still find yourself having to retread the same areas when they're placed in particularly awkward positions. The bosses are where the real challenge - and anger - lie. Be prepared to hear there annoying one liners a fair few times.

I don't know, maybe it is that I'm just really, really shit at this game, but I found it to be incredibly difficult. A game being difficult isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as they are fun, but unfortunately Mighty No. 9 falls down in that regard too. Mighty No. 9 is just a long hard slog through a lot of lacking backgrounds. Skip this one guys.

3/10 SKIP IT!

A code was provided for the purpose of this review.

TMNT: Mutants in Manhattan (Xbox One) - Review

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan is available now on Xbox One and is priced at £39.99.

I always put the Xbox (or PSN) store price in at the top of my reviews, as it doesn't change as often as instore or online prices do. The Xbox Store price will usually be the most expensive way to get the game and this is especially true with games like this. A quick Google search shows copies for £10 less already and this is sure to drop lower soon. With that in mind let's get to the review!

We're a household of Turtle fans here and we have been dying to play a good Turtles game. Every time one comes out we get ourselves all psyched up for it, buy it straight away and then sit back and wait for the feeling of utterly crushing disappointment to set in. Unfortunately none of them have ever managed to capture the magic and fun that a Turtles game should be. Luckily TMNT: Mutants in Manhattan changes that, well, slightly anyway.

Platinum haven't reinvented the wheel, but they have put together a really fun brawler. The cel-shaded graphics are amazing and the music in the game is perfect. The controls are responsive and the ability to switch between the turtles with the tap of a button (in single player anyway) is brilliant. It can fall into the slightly more button-masher-y category at times but for the most part I found it to be a fairly deep experience. No, I've not lost my mind, I know a brawler isn't deep, but I found myself having to think about tactics by pretty much the second boss fight when I was playing in single player.

I have to admit to being disappointed that it wasn't truly an open world setup. Instead you get a bunch of open levels that all revolve around one particular baddie from TMNT. Each of these big bads have numerous life bars you have to deplete before you can finish them off and a number of tricks up their sleeves to make sure you don't do that. I breezed through the first one (Bebop) with ease in single player and worried a little about how easy the game seemed to be but Rocksteady soon shown me the error of my ways. It looks me an hour to beat him...*hangs head in shame*

In single player mode though you do have the chance to play as each of the heroes in a half shell. I started off as Leo (duh) but as my son was watching my play I was soon switching between them faster than I'd have liked. The great thing about being able to switch between the turtles is that you are then in control of all of they special moves, and when used correctly these will literally mean the difference between winning or losing. All of the turtles have four abilities, which can be changed as you unlock more and upgraded as you level up. Getting the right combination of abilities is key to a successful boss mission. I found the Pizza Power one and the Cheerleader one to be of particular use in my many battles against Rocksteady (Pizza Power gives all of the turtles some health and Cheerleader speeds up the recharge time on all of the turtles abilities. They are a GODSEND).

The co-op mode is brilliant but unfortunately I found the lobbies to be pretty dead already. luckily I have two XB1's and a digital copy so we fired it up and played it together. Make sure you choose your favourite turtle at the beginning of the level because there is no swapping when playing multiplayer, which makes sense really as obviously they were hoping for teams of our to play. I don;t know why the lobbies were so quiet, I can only hope that once the game gets cheaper more people will jump on board.

The price is really the only crux of this game. It is a really fun game, which honestly did surprise me. But as fun as it is it, I can't imagine that it would have been anymore than £17.99 on the previous get, it'd have been one of the "premium" arcade games in my opinion. The price is what has scared people of, and who can blame them?! For £40 (and less) now you can get hundreds upon hundreds of hours with a game and this would really not keep anyone interested for that long. But honestly guys, when it drops to £20 JUMP on it, because it really is a right laugh to play.

7/10 TRY IT!

A code was provided for the purpose of this review.