Category Archives: PlayStation 4

Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One review – a gripping interactive detective drama

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PC, Xbox One/Series X/S, PlayStation 4/5; Frogwares
The detective returns to his childhood island home to solve an elegant series of cases in this lively open-world story

Developer Frogwares has been making games about the world’s most famous detective for a long time now, but Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One is the most personal. A 21-year-old Sherlock has returned to the fictional island of Cordona, where he spent his childhood, kicking off a chain of events that leads him to uncover a missing element of his past: how his mother died. Cordona draws inspiration from real-world places that have changed hands many times, and different districts of the island display a melange of cultures. I once heard the athaan, or call to prayer, from a nearby mosque. Shortly after the prologue, the whole island opens up, and you can fast-travel around it in seconds as you dig into Sherlock’s cases.

These setpiece mysteries are varied in both tone and theme, and the solutions are almost always elegant. I won’t easily forget the case of the murderous elephant, or the siren serial killer. Crime scenes are where both the game and the protagonist himself are most at home. Evidence litters the scene; Sherlock surveys every piece, linking them to accounts given by suspects and witnesses, and pieces together what happened. You can manipulate the ghostly outlines of suspects’ positions and actions at particular junctures – a clever way to convey Sherlock’s thinking. Even after solving a case, the grand unveil always revealed some element that I’d overlooked.

Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One is out now; £39.99

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Resident Evil Village review – nerve-shredding descent into horror

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PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X; Capcom
The action careers superbly through spooky gothic castles and underground complexes where monsters and a bloodsucking femme fatale lie in wait

It has been four years since Resident Evil 7 rescued the series from its action-heavy nadir and returned to the roots of survival horror: jump scares, and elaborate puzzles involving unattractive oil paintings. Now, Village seeks to bring back some of the gunplay introduced in Resident Evil 4 without losing the tension and dread. The result is a delightfully schlocky survival horror adventure that makes constant references to earlier games – and will bring much joy to fans.

Things start on an eerily domestic note, with Resident Evil 7 protagonist Ethan Winters and his wife Mia attempting to recover from their horrific experiences in isolated rural Louisiana by moving to … isolated rural eastern Europe. After a gruesome opening, in which Mia is shot and their baby kidnapped, Ethan must set out to discover what fresh hell he has landed in this time. You start out exploring the village of the title, a squalid, diseased little place, all cackling crones and mad-eyed yokels with shotguns, like some nightmarish Borat remake directed by Eli Roth. Most of the inhabitants have been slaughtered by four monstrous local lords at the behest of a cruel demigod. To save his daughter, Ethan must track these bizarre aristocratic sociopaths down to their lairs and kill them.

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Eat, drink, play: the recipe for memorable food in video games

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You can’t taste it or smell it, but food and drink play a big role in video games, providing everything from sustenance to secret weaponry

Food has always played a vital role in video games. From Pac-Man’s bonus fruits to Mario’s magical mushrooms, it has provided everything from sustenance to supernatural abilities – and in games such as Cooking Mama and Overcooked, food preparation became a genre in its own right. Game developers, like the creators of cooking programmes and recipe books, have discovered that well-presented food is irresistible – even when we can’t eat it.

In the modern games industry, where detail and authenticity are paramount, the depiction of food has become an art form. Kaname Fujioka, executive director on Capcom’s fantasy adventure, Monster Hunter: World, says: “We design the ingredients and recipes based around the grade of the food, as well as any seasonal events it may be tied to. Since we’re unable to showcase the most important elements of food (taste and smell), we have to alter, exaggerate or potentially deform the visuals in a way that conveys that as best as possible. In order for players to believe that the visuals look ‘delicious’, a lot of fine-tuning is done on details like the colour, lighting and softness.”

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Assassin’s Creed Valhalla review: cloudy with a chance of mead halls

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PS4 and PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, PC; Ubisoft
The weather’s as bad as ever, but this smart, inventive and witty open-world game is a veritable Viking feast of adventure

It’s been a wild ride this year, but you can always rely on Assassin’s Creed to lighten the mood. Let’s see what those zany historians at Ubisoft have cooked up for us in the excitingly named Assassin’s Creed Valhalla … Peterborough, is it? Norwich in the dark ages?

I have nothing against our beautiful cathedral cities, rolling plains and park-and-ride services, but after 12 months of Brexit, Covid-19 and forest fires, plus the cancellation of the Eurovision song contest, I was hoping for something a little less Tough Mudder from this giddy, quasi-historical, action-adventure series, which previously had us gallivanting around Atlantis.

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PlayStation 5 review – Sony’s new console makes a splashy entrance

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This enormous spaceship of a console comes with enough flagship features – from fast SSD and frame rate to 4K resolution – that you might overlook the hefty price tag

With more than 110m PlayStation 4s sold, Sony is coming into the next console generation with nothing to prove. But the company has squandered goodwill before: it followed up the beloved PlayStation 2 with an awkward-looking, difficult-to-develop-for console that cost the equivalent of £600 in today’s money. It took PlayStation 3 almost a decade and several remodels to make up the ground it had lost. The PlayStation 5 certainly looks wild next to the modernist oblong that is PS4, but this is no conceptual experiment in hardware design. It is a console that wants to make you feel good, to celebrate the time, money and passion we expend on video games.

The console itself is a statement object. Standing vertically, its white casing tapers to a V around the shiny black body of the machine. It is enormous and looks like a futuristic spaceship. The new DualSense controller is white with black accents, a slightly different shape from the PS4 pad that feels equally comfortable in the hands. The texturing on the grips comes in the form of tiny circle-square-triangle-cross symbols that you can see only if you zoom in on a high-res photo – a cool hidden design secret indicative of the thought that has gone into the PS5’s appearance.

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Watch Dogs Legion review – fight fascism in a futuristic London

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PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5 (forthcoming), Xbox Series X/S (forthcoming); Ubisoft
This ambitious, imperfect and unashamedly weird game attempts to simulate an entire population

Video games have become extraordinarily adept at simulating geography, from Assassin’s Creed’s detailed, architecturally accurate takes on ancient Egypt or 18th-century Paris to Microsoft Flight Simulator’s virtual simulacrum of the Earth’s surface. But they are still no good at simulating people, and their cities are populated with reactive automatons who forget you tried to run them over two seconds ago. This makes Watch Dogs Legion’s attempt to simulate the entire population of a futuristic, technocratic London one of the most ambitious things a game has tried in years. Walk from Camden to Nine Elms and every person you see has a name, a cluster of attributes (gambler, fashion expert, paramedic, low mobility) and a custom-generated voice and appearance. You can recruit any of them to your hacker resistance movement and step into their shoes.

I played most of Watch Dogs Legion as a construction worker named Hassan. He has no particular special skills; he can summon a cargo drone and ride it up to rooftops, but he hasn’t got any useful weapons or technical expertise. I picked him because he was nearby, and I liked his haircut and accent: not too EastEnders, not too plummy. But then I accidentally took Hassan into the bowels of one of Watch Dogs Legion’s autocratic tech giants, on a mission that I thought would be easy but turned out to involve hiding in a vent from heavily armed private security guards while using a spiderbot to steal encrypted information. Hassan barely escaped with his life. I became rather attached to him after that.

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