I tried NTE. There's really lots to like about it, characters are appealing and the world is beautiful, but the UI is so clunky and unintuitive that I had to give up.

Tales Of Arise easily the pick of this month's bunch.

@ShogunRok nice review, thank you

Absolute shocker of a month. Sony speedrunning towards oblivion this year.

Can't wait to play it. For me Crimson Desert's biggest strength is its amazing exploration, the action and story are almost secondary to just roaming around and discovering new things.

Seen better quality items in a Happy Meal, no lie. This is an absolute embarrassment and if you can't see what Rockstar/T2 are pulling, there is no hope. The humiliation ritual continues.

The humiliation ritual continues - £350 for a collector's edition with some Happy Meal toys and not even a copy of the game. Add that to the cost of the £90 digital game rental, this magazine, a Netflix subscription, and who knows what else Rockstar's planning to extract from their followers.

As a movie, it's never more than a 6/10, mid in every sense of the word, and I watch nearly every horror movie that comes out. Weapons and Barbarian were hyped up to the skies but also very average. The best comparison to Resident Evil would be films like The Sadness or Train To Busan, both vastly superior and more entertaining. That all said, I disagree that the film has little to do with the Resident Evil universe, some of the games themselves veered way off the path.

@UnlimitedSevens agree! he's probably the best and most honest reviewer out there, far more articulate, conscientious and trustworthy than most of the so-called industry sites and professional reviewers.

Even IGN couldn't give this terrible Wolverine 'game' more than a 6/10, there's more gameplay and less yellow paint in Mixtape than in this £70 'experience'. Insomniac, what happened?

@get2sammyb really?! looked exactly like RDR2 or GTAV with a bit of extra rendering polish to me, not to mention that 80% of the 'gameplay' demo was essentially pre-rendered cutscenes and evident framerate issues - on the plus side, the soundtrack fantastic as usual

@get2sammyb More stuff like this, Sammy! Will check this one out for sure.

@get2sammyb Thanks for the preview, Sammy, game looks fab!

This is the best month I can remember. Did try Helldivers 2 but got bored during the tutorial training section and deleted it, Vampire Survivors is an incredibly addictive time sink. All the others look well worth checking out too.

@Almost_Ghostly except, ummmmm, you do have to sub to Netflix to see it before everyone else - nice try at carrying water for Rockstar though! actually, I'd be interested to see how much money exchanged hands for this privilege

@rjejr same here - you wonder what would be the critical point where people would stop and say this is one humiliation too far, for me Rockstar's now climbed above EA and Ubisoft in the scummy corporations charts

This is just becoming a humiliation ritual now for would-be GTA VI players. Netflix subscription to watch an advert for a game nobody's seen that millions are willing to lay down 80 quid for, a digital-only game that still doesn't come out for months. From a developer that has done nothing worthy since 2018's RDR2.

Who in their right mind is going to lay down 90 squid for a digital-only game months before release and without seeing any gameplay? The times we live in.

@Pat_trick spot on! all those types of comments I interpret as "it's not fair, they didn't make the game for ME!!"

@get2sammyb absolutely cannot wait for this to come to PS5 - even the main HSR is pretty much an autochess game if you have the setting on 'auto' like I do!

This issue isn't about share prices or sales charts really though, is it? The problem for Sony is the potentially irreparable damage to the Sony brand since their clumsy announcement of digital only coming off the back of several other disastrous PR events. Once your brand starts taking big hits, that's when things start to go pear-shaped. As in the hospitality business, it's customers who no longer appear at your restaurant who know the answer to your problem, not the ones who do still come.

@get2sammyb Firstly, the 6.7% figure is heavily skewed by including PC sales where physical is effectively nonexistent - therefore doing the maths means the physical share of console sales is around 20%.
Secondly, for some reason Capcom treats Nintendo Switch 2 Game Cards as digital rather than physical.
Thirdly, limited print-runs and stock shortages for new titles suppress physical numbers independently of demand (in addition to Pragmata, also widely reported as true for say Crimson Desert and Expedition 33). I recall reading also of some countries where digital is already the sole option available.
Put this all together and it all points to the opposite conclusion to that inferred. I applaud yours personally and PS's balanced coverage of this issue up to now but this article with its leading tagline are not up to that standard, in my opinion.

@get2sammyb hi Sammy, respectfully, this article is a complete misrepresentation of the data and I'm not sure what motives for that there would be but the actual evidence points in completely the opposite direction to what is being erroneously inferred

Ubisoft? Yeah, I'll pass. Far Cry 2 was the last good one and that was a long time ago.

Tried but could never get into this game - it's pretty but the game loop is too long for a roguelike and ultimately samey, nor could I relate to the main protagonist/story.

Sony just keeps stepping on turds. This is an abysmal selection, maybe even a new low.

Another line in Sony's long suicide letter. This is just slop. Terrible month.

Mafia: Definitive Edition is an absolute steal at just a fiver while Borderlands 4 is not even worth that much, let alone full price.

Not the worst month, not the best. FF XVI feels like it should be a bigger deal than it actually is. Will give Blades a shot.

Let's be honest, this does not augur well for the rest of the line-up.

@UltimateOtaku91 yeah, this is the kind of month when accusations of multiplayer slop actually hit hard, fortunately there was enough in last month's offerings to keep us going

@Balaam_ 'tiny indie team'! nearly spat my tea out at that one, well played! only funded by the free-spending daughter of a centibillionaire with added top-ups from the Australian government, perpetual music licences and custom assets - yep, this one is as AAA as it gets!

It's a great line-up and I'd go so far as to say that the two AAA games, Outlaws and RDR2, are the least interesting.

This is exactly the same kind of moral panic that kicked off when drum machines and synthesisers in music became a thing.

Ahem, I think you mean 'cock-up' rather than 'cock up'.

The principle reason that people believe all kinds of nonsense on social media sites is due to the complete collapse of trust in legacy outlets, who are equally inclined to spread misinformation.

This minor revised 'corrected' version of the story is arguably even worse than the one doing the rounds on Twitter and YouTube! It's definitely not helping sell the game, if that's the idea. Mystery why it merited an entire article on PushSquare, much more interesting and fun things to be talking about.

@twitchtvpat Shadows was an absolute disaster for Ubisoft, it was their last big roll of the dice and really should have been massive - the company's stock has tanked 90% in 5 years.

'Charismatic' isn't what I'd describe this new young Bond character as, guy looks about as milquetoast as it's possible to be. What seems clearer by the day is that this is a kind of reskinned Hitman, maybe with a bit more running around shooting things. And that may very well not be a bad thing.

Fantastic review, thanks, Sammy! After 25 hours or so, my thoughts: art and overall aesthetic is top-notch, beautiful settings and character animations, game runs very well on base PS5, generous amount of free stuff so perfectly playable as F2P, HOWEVER, menus/UI are horrendously user-unfriendly (actually much like their previous game) and need a complete redesign, far too much yapping, and finally not sure if it's got the USPs to be able to stand out from the fiercely competitive pack once Ananta lands.

It's hard to argue against new options but am not sold on options to re-fight bosses and re-blockades (outside of NG+), didn't like the introduction of difficulty sliders either when difficulty level is already built into the game design - much prefer the Dark Souls way of doing things.
On a side note finally managed to take down my nemesis the dreaded Antumbra Staff boss!

Is this Hitman Reskinned? Was hoping this would be more like Goldeneye, or at least focused on less stealth and more all-out action.

@THEBrew My suspicion is that it'll actually in some ways be worse than the original! The trailer doesn't look that promising and the changes introduced are ones nobody asked for. The og Black Flag looks and runs amazingly well despite its age and costs next to nothing.

@For-Kier The og Black Flag, which still looks and plays amazing despite its age, is arguably Ubisoft's finest moment but I am actually apprehensive about this 'resync' - at this stage I simply don't trust them not to to ruin it with 'resynced' visuals and new game mechanics that nobody asked for.

Nice game though Saros might be, reading all that was a bit of a slog to be honest!

Nothing much to mourn here. Mortal Shell was a promising soulslike but the balance and variety was just not quite there.

@Jacko11 I think an old garden gnome could do better than Slot at this stage!

@KundaliniRising333 Well said, this is by far the best, most rational well-articulated comment here amongst all so much false equivalence if not outright bias.

@DennisReynolds These so-called 'bog-standard' features like hide helmet/shield, that were included soon after release, never had any significant impact on the game's playability or can be claimed to render the game 'unfinished', the framing that is being used to rationalise the silly review.