Gaming During Lockdown

50 Cent: rapper, actor, businessman and television producer. However nowhere in his Wikipedia bio does it say that he is the eponymous hero of two games. Now I had seen both of these games on shelves for years as a kid but never gave them a second glance. Gangsta rap was never really my thing in my youth and I’d much rather have played the Mass Effect trilogy again for the thousandth time. But whilst scanning over YouTube I noticed a number of videos claiming the second game Blood on the Sand (which will be referred to at points in this review as BotS for my own sanity) was a cult classic. Now as an adult I’m probably more into rap now than I have ever been before so after looking up the game on Ebay and finding a copy at a good price (some copies sell for upwards of £40), I decided to play the game in one night and I’m very glad that I did. 50 Cent: BotS is primarily a Third-Person Cover Shooter that plays similarly to the Gears of War games. You duck in and out of cover using a varie...

  After beating Max Payne back in June of last year I was dying to get my hands on the sequel. Unfortunately, this was easier said than done though as getting my hands on an OG Xbox copy proved to be a challenge. Eventually though I did manage to find myself a copy but by this point I had lost my desire to play the sequel at all, relegating it to a slot in the ever-expanding backlog. It was only recently that upon completing Saints Row IV, I decided I wanted to play something short, sweet and to the point. Now I’ve heard many good things over the years about The Fall of Max Payne but one criticism I've seen thrown at it is its length. In this instance though, the game’s brevity would serve me well as I was looking for a short palette cleanser I could quickly beat before embarking on my next big platinum adventure. What I got instead though was an experience that I have not been able to stop thinking about since. I like Max Payne, but I love Max Payne 2. On the surface, Max Payne ...

  The Xbox Live Arcade was full to the brim with high quality independent titles that were made on a miniscule budget. Some of my personal favourites were State of Decay, Far Cry: Blood Dragon and Plants vs Zombies, games that perhaps lacked polish but had a satisfying core gameplay loop and some originality. One of the more famous XBLA games though was Castle Crashers, a hack and slash made by The Behemoth developers previously known for their work on Newgrounds. Now I played the demo of Castle Crashers a lot back in the day but never actually got round to purchasing the game myself, only briefly playing a few chapters whilst round at a cousin’s house. So when notified that a remastered version was available on the PlayStation store, I decided to pick the game up along with two friends and finally complete a game I last played over a decade ago. Castle Crashers is a game best experienced with at least one buddy. Playing through the game in singleplayer is fine but the game thrives...

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is a classic and considered by many to be one of the greatest RPGs of all time and even though I have only completed one playthrough of the game I completely understand why. The story and characters are brilliant and I recommend giving the game a chance if you've never played it. The sequel however comes up very little and my research into it suggests that a rushed development left the game feeling unchanged. There are those though who seem to revere the sequel quite highly, focusing on the more morally grey tone and improvements to combat. Knowing little about the sequel then I decided to purchase a copy from Ebay and give the game a shot. Full disclosure, I’m playing KOTOR II on my Xbox One using an OG Xbox copy for convenience sake. I know it's the inferior version and is frankly unfinished but I wanted to have the experience be as compatible as possible to how I played the first game which I also played on Xbox.  KOTOR 2’s story picks ...

  If you were to put a gun to my head and say play a Call of Duty game I would absolutely have no problem. I really like Modern Warfare, World at War and Black Ops and their campaigns are very enjoyable. Unfortunately, after 2010 I believe the series got a little too ridiculous, losing the focus on realism that had me playing previously mentioned games. The Science Fiction settings of the 8th gen titles made this worse and the series’ identity was sorely lost when it started pretending to be a knock off Titanfall. However, in 2019 a grittier game was marketed brandishing the iconic “Modern Warfare” title. Although no explanation was given at the time as to whether this was a reboot or a sequel, one thing was clear and that was Captain Price was back and Call of Duty would be heading in a darker direction than ever before. The campaign in Modern Warfare tries desperately to offer a morally grey story that blurs the lines between good and evil. These blurred lines do fade rather quic...