Category Archives: Xbox series S/X

Halo Infinite review – old-school blasting in sci-fi ‘Dad’ game

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PC, Xbox Series, Xbox One; Microsoft; 343 Industries
The engrossing flagship Xbox shooter returns with its fabled craggy supersoldier and plenty of style but not quite enough bang

Twenty years since Halo: Combat Evolved, Master Chief is still “finishing the fight”. Made infamous by Halo 2’s premature cliffhanger ending, the line is uttered with zero irony at Halo Infinite’s conclusion: it’s become the catchphrase for a series that is travelling in circles, always defaulting to something like the original fable of a craggy supersoldier fighting alien zealots for control of universe-ending Forerunner relics.

Infinite takes place on yet another gorgeous ringworld, where Master Chief teams up with a nervy pilot and a chirpy new AI buddy to battle a renegade group called the Banished. It’s the same old story with the same rousing musical motifs, but the geography has changed: main missions are now threaded through a lush open expanse comparable to that of a Far Cry game, where you’ll tackle sidequests such as hostage rescue, and claim bases that let you fast-travel and rearm. The extra space amplifies Halo’s existing brilliance as a martial playground, defined less by reflexes and accuracy than giddy improvisation, but it’s not quite enough to make this backward-glancing game unmissable.

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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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Xbox’s Phil Spencer: ‘We’re not driven by how many consoles we sell’

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As the Xbox Series X and Series S are released, Microsoft gaming chief Phil Spencer says the next games generation is all about how many players you have, not how many consoles you shift

The launch of the Xbox Series X this week marked the start of a new video game console generation – historically a super-exciting time for players, as better technology unlocks new dimensions for games. But despite the usual competitive crowing about teraflops, frame rates and resolutions, there’s a different dimension to the console wars this time around. The looming Netflix-ification of video games threatens to upend the whole idea of video game consoles. Amazon and Google are both working on game streaming services that let people play cutting-edge games without paying for a box that sits under the TV. And Microsoft has spent the past five years spending billions on game developers to shore up its star service: Xbox Game Pass, a monthly subscription that lets you play hundreds of games for a monthly fee.

It’s been clear for a while that Microsoft sees the future of gaming in subscriptions, streaming and services. Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox since 2014, is known to players as the guy who shows up on stage at press conferences in video-game T-shirts. Under his leadership, Microsoft has massively broadened its stable of game developers, started selling Xbox games on PC, and engineered its own streaming service to let people play on any screen, known in prototype as Project xCloud. Subs and streaming have already transformed other creative industries, with varying effects on artists – Spotify has been a disaster for musicians, where Netflix has arguably been good news for TV producers. With Microsoft already clearly committed to this direction of travel, what will its effect be on the games industry?

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Xbox Series X and Series S review: no-nonsense, next-generation gaming

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They’re superfast, they’re frictionless and you get access to Xbox Game Pass. But not much else, from the controller to the interface, has changed – and launching without a single new game is just bizarre

The world was a different place in 2013, when Microsoft launched the Xbox One. Back then, the company was pitching consoles as living-room entertainment centres, with picture-in-picture display and built-in Skype and TV integration. The new Xbox models – the Series X and Series S – are comparatively no-nonsense. They’re powerful, fast, home to the good-value Xbox Game Pass subscription, and make playing games as frictionless as possible. Rather than making a statement, the new Xboxes want to get out of your way.

The Series X, the more powerful model, is a black monolith with green detailing on the top vent. (It won’t win any design awards.) The more eye-catching Series S is a slimmer white machine with a contrasting round black vent. The X has a disc drive, 1TB of storage for downloaded games and the ability to output in true 4K resolution on cutting-edge TVs; the S has no disc drive, 512GB of storage and is optimised for 1440p resolution. You would need a cutting edge 4K television to benefit from the X’s superior visual prowess. On the TVs that most people own, there won’t be much of a difference in what you see on screen.

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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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