To many, myself included, the Darksiders series is a cherished part of their gaming life and one that was sadly cut down in its prime when the original THQ publisher closed down and was surprisingly not bought out by another publisher during the final fire sale of THQ IPs before it closed. It has been a staggering six years six Darksiders II and though both the first games have been remastered leading into the announcement of Darksiders III, it really has been a very long time to return to the world of the Horsemen. Delving back into the series with a brand-new Horseman in Fury and a new playing style had me excited but ultimately left me with very mixed feelings about the new entry.

Just like Darksiders II, this game happens at the same time as the first game which saw War accused of breaking the 7^th Seal and triggering the apocalypse which saw the destruction of the world of man and plunging the sides of heaven and hell against each other. With War chained, Fury is summoned before the Chard Council and sent on the mission to track down and recapture the seven deadly sins, which had previously taken all four Horseman to imprison. Fury demanding that on completion of this task that she be made leader of the Horsemen, sets off to find the seven sins.  Right away I absolutely loved the character of Fury, a very confident and powerful Horseman who knows just how powerful she is and truly views herself as the strongest one. Fury also longs for battle and starts off by hoping that she has been summoned to take on a planet of demons and has no problem with barking and demanding things from the all-powerful Chard Council even when she can see her brother War in Chains rendered powerful by them.

Each entry in the series has been very different to each other but always keeping the same amazing visual art style. The first Darksiders was with War and was a fun hack and slash title where as Darksiders 2 was more of an RPG with Death being able to change and upgrade both weapons and armour throughout the game. Both would see their Horsemen visit varied locations as they set out to complete their task with War wanting to prove his innocence and Death looking for a way to undo the apocalypse and free War. Darksiders III however changes from both of them and it is not just the gameplay that changes this time but also the world itself as the hub locations are gone and instead Fury simply goes on a continuous journey to track down the deadly sins. It is very strange to not have a map for the very first time or to be sent to grand locations to complete quest objectives. Instead Fury is very much centred on finding the next sin which puts her on a very linear path even though it will take you back to previously visited locations. The lack of hub areas makes this feel smaller than both previous games, which is a shame.

The combat itself has also taken a swift change from the previous games and for the most part you can definitely tell that it has been inspired by the Dark Souls style of games which will see any enemy you encounter capable of killing Fury and all enemies really scale to your current power levels. This does make this a more difficult game this time around which can offer some fun challenges but quite often can be equally frustrating as the game will often use the numbers game against Fury so more often then not, Fury is always outnumbered in combat. This is somewhat based upon Fury’s weapon of choice which is a whip capable of reaching attacks and hitting multiple enemies around her. Sadly, I found the new combat system fairly clumsy, lacking the precision of both earlier games and with a more focused on Fury dodging attacks in order to trigger her counter ability. The enemy lock on camera can be a real hindrance as well when taking on multiple enemies at once and the version of the “health vial” which in this case takes the form of crystal shards that Fury can break to buff her attacks, replenish her havoc form and wrath attacks but also health. The issue with this is that the time it takes to break a crystal leaves Fury far too vulnerable in situations so even if you do crack a health shard you can still be killed during the animation of her breaking it which is beyond infuriating, if you pardon the pun. In trying to mimic the Souls style combat and health system, Darksiders III loses the finesse of the previous games.

Now the combat does change up a little once Fury starts collecting the Hollow Powers, which once obtained can be used to grant Fury new elemental powers and abilities but also a new weapon which can then be used to create combination attacks along with her whip. These are given to Fury at key moments through the story and are there to really give Fury a new way of traversing through the world. Weapons can also be given enhancement charms which will add buffs to her abilities and attacks which can then be upgraded along the Angelic or Demonic stages which will improve one of the two buffs that enhancement can give. Weapons can also be upgraded to become stronger by collecting materials through exploration and given to the Maker forge to improve the weapons.  I am hoping that with quality of life improvement updates the clumsiness of combat can be improved, just speeding up the animation of breaking a shard will help greatly in fights for a start.

I love that the visuals and art style have remained what fans of the series have come to know and love but it is a shame that for Darksiders III everything feels just a little uglier because of the lack of hub locations such as The Forge Lands in Darksiders 2. What is also surprising is this is after both remasters of the original games looked absolutely fantastic but Darksiders 3 fails to match the same shine that they had. I really also hated the constant in level loading pauses when entering a new section which is just unacceptable for a game on Xbox One in 2018 for a playing world that feels smaller than the other games. Just running to a new section and then having the game freeze randomly breaks the immersion for me but then so does having the area around you finish loading also is perplexing. This can also happen in the cut-scenes with character model details appearing normal then vanishing a second later just reminds you that something is not quite right with the visuals for this game.

I really do love the story though and the voice cast and characters are brilliantly performed and written. The Seven Deadly sins are all wonderfully brought to life and the dialogue between them and Fury is the highlight of the game for me. Like the previous games, the story of why everything is happening will unfold throughout which as a fan of Darksiders is what I really wanted to enjoy most of all with this new entry as the stories of War and Death all  swirling around finding out how and why everything around them is happening now sees Fury trying to piece together how the Sins managed to escape and whilst she begins caring little for why War was being punished, she soon starts to suspect that something sinister is at work. It is this grand story which binds all the games together that I have been longing to see continued and here it does not disappoint. Knowing that a good number of the developer team for Darksiders III are from the original Vigil Games who created the series and first two games helps a lot, but the buggy nature and lack of polish in this finished release is truly heartbreaking as a fan.

All that said, this is still a very playable and enjoyable entry which I am hoping leads to more games in the series as we still have the final Horseman Strife that could feature in his own game next hopefully. The niggles and issues this game currently have, can be fixed with patches and updates and with two DLC’s in the future for Darksiders III, there is certainly more in this universe to explore. I still love the music and art style for the series and Fury is such a great character by herself that getting to the moment where all Four Horsemen can be playable in a story is so tantalisingly possible now.

Darksiders III does not quite live up to the hype I had for it since it was announced and to get the released version having bugs as well as a clumsy combat system compared with the rest of the series is a real shame when for me the RPG style of Darksiders II and the use of hub areas to bring the universe alive should be reconsidered for future games if they are planned. But I did enjoy this albeit for the occasional rage quit when the combat became too annoying and Fury is just the kind of badass a Horseman should be.

I am left hoping that one of the DLC’s will tell the story of when Fury spent a year sharing a room with Death just because I have to know what that was like!

Oh Bethesda, when you announced Fallout 76 at your briefing during E3 2018 I along with many others shared the same reactions of “really?” and “why?”. Multiplayer Fallout was never something I expected to hear mostly because it was something I never wanted or needed from the series and so whilst curious about it, I was never really hyped up. After managing to spend some time in the beta at the ungodly hours it was held for the US players, I had concerns about it, but with Bethesda bigging up how they were listening to player feedback with changes incoming ahead of launch, I at least hoped that Fallout 76 would release in an OK state. But this is Bethesda at the end of the day, and the one thing I can take from the Fallout series is to expect bugs….sadly these were not the ‘smash over the head till they pop rad-roaches’ kinda bugs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9FGaan35s0

By now if you are reading this then you will already know just how bad a state Fallout 76 is currently in, and that is even after a 51gb launch day patch and another 47gb patch just a week after launch. 100gb of patching in 7 days of its launch and it is still full of bugs, glitches and issues that any launch game in 2018 from a massive AAA publisher like Bethesda should be ashamed to release to market. This is a game that highlights everything that is wrong with Bethesda and how is uses its most iconic gaming series with such recklessness that it is no wonder fans on every platform Fallout 76 is on are angry and review scores have been just terrible. I very rarely start a review by warning readers to immediately avoid the game but in this case, I have to begin by saying DO NOT BUY THIS GAME RIGHT NOW.

Fallout 76 is a game that belongs in early access and only early access right now, that is just how broken and unfinished this game is. Bethesda have simply taken elements from Fallout 4, stripped away just about everything that made Fallout 4 remotely fun, and believe me when I say that I found Fallout 4 an average experience at best, and decided to make their own “Sea of Thieves” game for fans to make their own adventures in. So many promises were made about players being to do anything and everything they wanted to do in their own Fallout world but this sadly fails to deliver on most of them. Every time I fire this game up I encounter issues and bugs almost immediately such as when I spawn at my camp, I arrive in the game before my camp is loaded into the game and more often then not, if I fail to move out the way fast enough, the camp will actually spawn right on top of me, trapping me underneath it and I kid you not, within the first few minutes of being in the world I am having to fast travel to my camp from the game map which is just crazy terrible after two HUGE patch updates.

So just where has Fallout 76 gone so wrong, well for me it all starts with the moment you leave Vault 76 after you create your own Vault dweller and then leave the vault because you wake up to discover you are the only person remaining in the vault because everyone else has already celebrated reclamation day and have left. One you collect your bits and pieces for what you need to start life in “Appalachia” which is the Fallout representation of West Virginia in the US. The very first thing that hits you are the visuals which are exactly the same as Fallout 4, which released in 2015 making it a three-year-old game. It really hits you just how average the graphics engine is right now in 2018 so the very fact they have stuck with it is annoying. It becomes more annoying when you get visual issues such as the world around you not only looking rather ugly but when details on buildings fail to load correctly which happens constantly not to mention the screen tearing and right away, the reality that this is still a work in progress game hits you.

The next thing is that the game has zero NPCs in it, which Bethesda said as part of the reveal of the game was so every person you met in the game, would be a human player. The problem this has in reality is that in this world of Appalachia which is four times the size of the world in Fallout 4, is that it forever feels empty of life. Now you do come across enemies and missions can be found to do, but not having NPC Characters to tell you their story, to team up with or to visit where they live just removes the kind of experience you expect to have in a Fallout game and it is just weird. It also means that every radio signal you hear will never lead to meeting an NPC and that every settlement, farm and town you go to will not have anyone that you can engage with unless it is a human player or one of the boring enemies that you encounter in the game.

When I mean boring, I mean tragically boring such as the Scorched, which are the Fallout 76’s version of the Walkers from the Walking Dead who are just zombie level enemies that can be armed and will swarm you till you wipe them all out. Their animation is just as woeful as the AI behind them and they are never threatening and instead are just annoying things on screen that do nothing more then highlight how bad the AI is and how god-awful combat is in the game but will come to that next. Exploring the world feels shallow and is not helped by probably the worst quests and missions in a Fallout game yet which boil down to either fetch quests such as finding and collecting ten beer bottles (not kidding) or going to place B to grab something to then return to place A for very little rewards. The quests end up being so mundane at the beginning that just wish there was an NPC you could at least talk to so that you can learn their story. Instead you just keep finding letters and holo tapes of people long since gone or dead to find the lore of this land.

The combat is so bad, I mean from using guns to melee weapons, they all just feel so terrible to use in combat. Hit detection can be so hit and miss even at close range it just feels so clumsy and awkward which is not made any better by the enemy’s AI also being terrible as they just flail their arms if they are the scorched who also have worse aim then any Storm Trooper in Star Wars or enemy in the A Team. It is just so uninspired that the only hope of real combat comes from the PvP with other players but this has been so nerfed to avoid griefing that PvP is rendered redundant form the off. In order for players to engage in PVP battle, both players must fire so for example, if I were to happen across you in my game and I fire at you, the damage would be so low it would barely register even if I had a weapon that was 20 levels higher then you. Now as long as you don’t return fire, it will stay that way, I couldn’t kill you no matter what weapon or explosive I used but should you return fire then “COMBAT” mode begins and normal damage will be taken. Killing other players will result in you having a ‘Wanted’ status which will mark you on the map for other players to hunt you down for a reward in caps. The whole system is so handicapped in trying to avoid players griefing or trolling each other that it just nullifies any point in taken part in PvP which just leaves the teaming up option for public events which are also so dull and uninteresting to complete that I just stopped bothering to take part in them.

Another system that is also made pointless is the whole survival where you can get hungry and thirsty if you do not eat or drink, you can even become sick and take damage if you fail to take any medicine to cure yourself. The reason why this is all pointless is because you always find food and something to drink along with medicine to cure disease or to remove radiation almost everywhere you go exploring so it never becomes something you need to greatly worry about so negates the entire point of having a survival element to the game. This is all before you being crafting your own medication at the chemistry table or crafting your own weapons and armour and cooking your own food. Now before you can craft you will need to discover and then learn the plans or recipes for items and food before you can craft them but again, these are pretty much found everywhere you look so you can learn all the basics you need and then more as you level up further.

My pain of crafting really comes in the form of the C.A.M.P. base building system, which was first brought into Fallout 4 via DLC but in Fallout 76 is a big part of the game itself. The whole idea is that wherever you are in the world you can use a portable C.A.M.P. unit to enter build mode which allows you to build a camp. Unlike Fallout 4 however, this is a really limited base building mode at the start and its rather problematic. I spent an hour building my first camp, finding materials needed to put something I thought would make quite a cool home base. I really liked my three-floor structure which was defended by turrets and even had a whole garden area plotted out with Corn and wild berries for food. But the next day, when I loaded the game back up to carry on, I found my camp was gone, just wiped from the world with nothing I built even stored in the inventory of my C.A.M.P. so basically everything I built and scavenged for was just gone. This happened to me twice and this was after the second game update was released. This is on top of the issue I first described of launching into the game only to have my camp spawn after I had spawned into the world and often right on top of me if I failed to move out the way. It is just such a clumsy base building that almost nothing has been learned from the one added to Fallout 4 and its bothers me greatly that they took a system that is two years old at best and actually made it worse.

Before when I said that Fallout 76 was the ‘Sea of Thieves’ of Bethesda I absolutely meant it. What Bethesda has done is create a massive world size playground and expects players to either team up with friends or with random players in order to make their own adventures in this world. As a solo experience this is not worth your time because so much of it is locked out until you reach a high level such as power armour which you can find very early in the game by exploring the area around Vault 76 but only to be told you are too low a level to wear that power armour. You can wear the power armour chassis though and as someone who now has five sitting in my Stash box, the grind to get to a level to actually make a complete set of power armour in a world that is so boring and broken just adds to the disappointment of it all. But like Sea of Thieves, when you do and can group up with friends it does become remotely fun because everything is better with friends, the world can be broken and boring but playing alongside your friends and seeking out the big events in the game such as the fall out areas and the large flying scorch beasts, which are just larger re-skinned Skyrim dragons btw, but the big difference is that this is a fully priced AAA game and Sea of Thieves is free to play with the Xbox Games Pass. The price has already dropped both here in the UK and the US but it is still a full price game for something that only deserves to be in early access/preview programme.

Fallout 76 is easily the biggest disappointment of 2018 and the lowest point for Bethesda for quite some time. The marketing for this game in no way does justice to just how poor a state the release version is in right now. At the time of writing this, Bethesda has set out their plans for the next two game updates but that will make four updates since it released and the majority of those updates are to fix broken elements in the game world for a game that was in beta for almost a whole month based on parts of the last Fallout game from three years ago. There is no silver lining with Fallout 76 at the moment, the gameplay tedious, the world is a broken mess and if you really want to have a Fallout game experience you are better off just buying Fallout 4 GOTY and working through that instead.

Avoid Fallout 76 right now, Bethesda could well fix and add more elements to the game that will make it more fun to play but right now, avoid this mess because its not finished, for the asking price and even if it drops below £30 for the holiday season, it is not a completed game and just the very fact is has a micro-transactions system called the Atom shop where you can buy cosmetic items to craft in the game for anything from £5 to £15 just for cosmetics just highlights how wrong Bethesda have gotten Fallout 76 and the fans of the series.

Fallout 76 made me sad and angry at the same time and for it to be one of the final big-name titles of 2018 is a very sorry state of affairs. Bethesda has let everybody down with this, and they have a lot of work to do to make it right and until they do, avoid it.