Hard to believe that the Forza Motorsport series is 12 years old now, the flagship driving series for the Xbox Console has changed much over those years. There are so many racing games right now fighting to claim the crown of best looking and best performing that the benchmark Forza set for such games is a crazy high standard and right now with Xbox gearing up for the release of their first 4K gaming console in the Xbox One X, a lot is riding on this latest entry to the series to be the best yet. Time to rev up the engine and see how this performs on the race track!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QITXLdS3eW0

Forza Motorsport 7 is the more series side to the Forza series with the spin off Forza Horizon more focused on arcade style fun and presentation which for me, is just how I like my racing games. Forza 7 is simply stunning, it is a beautiful game that wants to showcase the world’s most stunning looking cars and put players in the driving seat of them but at the same time it wants to be more simulator than arcade racer. Focus shifts to how you tune your cars to get the best performance from them and to become the best driver ever. Unlike Forza Horizon 3 however, this process feels far more rigid and by the books with less freedom to just pick a car and go tear it up on the streets and race tracks and as a result definitely fits in the more business style I have always viewed this side of the franchise to be.

Starting off we have the Forza Driver’s Cup mode which is the career mode for the game. This is broken down into six brackets starting with the Seeker Championship and moving on to Breakout, Evolution, Domination, Masters and finally the Forza Drivers Cup bracket itself. In order to unlock the next bracket you must earn enough Forza driving points from racing and hopefully winning races in the previous brackets. This style of forced progression is a natural part of racers but after the huge freedom in the world of Forza Horizon 3 this year, it just felt rather cold. Each bracket has races that focus on a particular car type and race tracks with a top 3 podium finish giving you points and credits to help you progress through the mode. I really enjoyed the special one off Showcase races which put you in the seat of a special car for a single victory race in which you get that car added to your collection. Showcase races help break up the normal races you take on.

Progression is not just about winning on the track, but now you have two other aspects that you have to work on outside of racing cars, Driver Milestones and Car Collector. Driver Milestones are essentially rewards for earning XP as a driver and leveling up with each new Milestone giving players the options to select one of three rewards be it in game credits, Driver Gear or a new car. But keeping in tone of the rigid linear progression comes the Car Collection which adds Car Tiers to the mix. Forza 7 really wants players to care about the cars they desire to own so it makes players earn the right to be able to have them by locking away car classes in Tiers. Only when your own collection has a certain value will the next Tier of cars become available and there are 5 Tiers to unlock and broken down into Common Cars, Uncommon, Rare, Super Rare and Legendary cars. This adds a really annoying grinding element to Forza 7 as some of the races you find in the campaign mode will be locked out until you have unlocked one of these Tiers and own a car in there. Making it worse is the pitiful amount of credits you actually earn from winning or doing well in the races themselves when you then see how much the cars cost and what value they bring to your collection in order to improve your Tier worth.

This grind is painful and even with the credit boost of Milestone rewards, it can feel like an unreachable goal at times as a player when you see how much it costs to get a better car or knowing that the car you really want to drive around is locked in a car Tier three away from where you are. This then brings me to the most annoying and disappointing aspect to Forza 7…Prize Crates. Oh how this not only angered me but is definitely a backwards step for the series that brings in micro-transactions to the series in a very obvious and ugly way. Well I say micro-transactions, but currently you cannot spend real world money to buy these Prize Crates but Turn 10 Studios has confirmed that the plan is indeed to bring that element into the game down the road and it is a repugnant money grabbing plan this series and Xbox can certainly do without. Prize Crates are basically loot boxes, with different quality ones that promise the chance of getting new cars, new Driving gears and the other newest addition to Forza 7 in Mod Cards. Mod Cards at first you would imagine to be something used to modify the cars themselves but no, with the need to earn as much credits as you can when you can, Mod Cards modify the races you take on by adding ‘side challenges’ such as performing a certain action in a race like making ‘Two good passes” or overtakes in a race to changing how your car performs by taking out the driver assists for that race. Three mod cards can be applied at a time and again, they have a tier system of gold legendary mod cards, to purple rare and then green common. Green mods tend to have a single use where gold mods can run for a number of races. All designed to give the player extra credits at the end of the race for their completion.

The game itself will even push you or suggest to you to go try out the prize crates in order to collect more mods or to get better cars right before the game suggest you actually just buy a new car. The more expensive prize crates give the player a chance to gamble on the result, buy a crate for 300,000 credits in the hope you get some nice mods to help out or a really cool car to add to your collection but here I found that whilst at times I did get a new car of high worth, it was a car I would not pick to drive in so its just put in the collection to improve the tier and will just gather dust in the garage. The grind is now very obvious and clearly put there to entice players to use the Prize Crate system to bypass that gind and I do not like it. I am all for the normal progression of doing well to earn money to buy or get better cars in order to progress further but I am certainly not a fan of being held back so a loot box can be dangled in my face with the game’s own narrator suggesting I use them to get a head in my career mode.

Which is a real shame because Forza 7 is so much fun to play and is probably the most accessible entry into the more serious side to the series to date. The game wants everyone to give it ago whether you are a racing game fan or not and it is fully possible to just pick up a controller and race thanks to the driver assists which kick in on the lower difficulties but can be manually turned off if you want. This all brings the player into the world easier than ever before with the free play mode in the single player menu that allows you to set up any type of race on any track with as many AI opponents as you want. AI drivers feel more believable now which has less of having one AI driver in a really powerful car just blasting away never to be caught up with but now the AI controlled cars will pack together much like in a real race and slowly take their places in the race as they look to overtake each other as you the player to the same. I do find that at times the AI can be a little too aggressive in that there is a racing line to follow on each track and the AI will doggedly stick to this even if it means them just ramming into you knocking you aside or hitting you from behind just to let you know that you are in their way. It would be nice to have them maybe show a little more realism is say trying to avoid collisions instead of just happily tanking their way through but it does make it all the more sweeter then you overtake them cheekily on the inside of a bend or blast past them on a straight. I love how the driving feels in this game and it is just so beautiful with the best visuals seen yet in the series which is only going to be more mouth watering in 4K on the Xbox One X in a month’s time.

Cars can be customised and when you buy a new car you will automatically be offered the chance to had a visual style to it from the Forza community who again have and do come up with some amazing designs for each car, I particularly enjoyed the Batman theme I gave my first racing truck to give it a ‘Bat-van’ look. This aspect continues from previous Forza games and it is something that will only get better with the tremendously talented Forza community coming up with new designs daily which you can add your own designs to.  Multiplayer was smooth and solid for the most part but having so many great cars locked out until you add them to your collection can make racing options limited at first.

So right now Forza Motorsport 7 is a very mixed bag for me with the gameplay and stunning visuals being hugely impressive once again only for the new loot box and forced grinding tarnishing it so far for me. That and seeing how several modes are currently in the “coming soon” meaning the full game has yet to even launch now a couple of weeks after release. Multiplayer will be getting online Leagues and something called the Forzathon mode could offer something very interesting. For those in the community who like to share their own designs or just want to sell those cars in your collection you may never drive, an auction house is also coming soon, probably once the Xbox One X launches.

Forza 7 right now is quite a mess where you have the gameplay side sadly colliding with the business money making side of video games creating a culture clash instead of the game itself just being celebrated. The grinding makes this a slow paced game and each time I get it suggested to me to try out a prize crate I just want to fire up Forza Horizon 3, grab a cool car and stick on a good song and go tear up the Australian countryside instead of playing Forza 7. The developers have already responded to player criticism regarding the VIP part of the more expensive game editions or those who pick up the VIP Pass and hopefully more changes will help improve some of my criticisms along the way to the Xbox One X console release but right now, the accountants have gotten into the mix with this game and it just doesn’t feel like the Forza game experience I expected or wanted from this and fortunately I can go back to Forza Horizon 3. Some strange and horrible decisions were made in an office somewhere in Xbox Tower and it has cost this game a lot.

Forza Motorsports 7 is a visually stunning and satisfying game once you have the controller in your hand and you are in a race. But the shenanigans around the Prize Crates and the additional grinding put in place to unlock the best of this game just takes the shine of what could have been the best racing game on Xbox in years.

By now there can only be a handful of gamers who have not heard of Cuphead. The screams of rage and broken controllers and keyboards have filled the channels of Twitch and most living rooms since this released with more saltiness than an ocean. It has taken a few years for this game to finally release and especially on Xbox One where exclusives are thin to say the least, Cuphead is here and oh boy is it one glorious barsteward of a gaming experience!

Studio MDHR have created one of the most unique gaming experiences of 2017, there is simply no better way to say it. I normally avoid games that simply do everything they can to just troll players with cheap deaths and AI designed to just kick your butt to the point of cheating to do it and going into Cuphead, this was indeed a fear for me. But Cuphead is very different; it is old school style difficult and a kind of difficulty that reminds you why you fell in love with gaming back in the day whilst it also teaches this modern gaming generation that sometimes you have to work for that victory screen!

So Cuphead is the story of two brothers; Cuphead and Mugman (greatest character name this year btw) who lead a fairly normal happy life by following the rules and being good lads. One day they stumble across the tracks and find themselves in a Casino, as you do, and begin having a really good run at the craps table. This luck soon grabs the attention of the Casino owner, the Devil himself who makes the lads one final offer and should they get one more winning roll of the dice then the Devil will give all the riches of the Casino to them but should they lose then he will claim their souls. Well of course this is an obvious “nah we’re good mate but cheers” kind of moment but much to the horror of Mugman (Still the greatest character name this year) Cuphead greedily grabs the dice and rolls….snake-eyes! They have lost and now begging for their very souls and lives the Devil agrees to do one last deal. He sends the boys out into the world to retrieve all the souls of the debtors he has, failing to do so means he will collect theirs. So off the lads go to save themselves on an adventure filled with danger and peril.

I must begin by talking about the incredible art style and visuals to Cuphead which truly take animation in gaming to a new level. Inspired by the early animation of the 1930’s, Cuphead is a stunning tribute to that art style and deceptively simple use of retro cartoon visuals. Everything is so beautiful to see on screen from simple movement animation to the levels themselves and finally the boss battles themselves. What is staggering to know is that it all hand drawn by a very small team of just two developers although I believe their wives also helped out in the final run to launch but even so, all this animation and art being hand drawn is mind blowing. There is literally thousands of frames of animation per boss fight and when you consider that no two boss fights are the same, that is a huge amount of animation work per fight. You just have to appreciate that dedication and amount of work and it shows through in everything Cuphead is as a game.

Cuphead is all about the boss fights as Cuphead goes about collecting the souls from the names on the Devil’s list, joined by Mugman if you have a co-op partner next to you on the sofa but I will come to that later. I did go in expecting platforming levels that lead to boss fights but nope, it is all about finding those on the list and boy each fight will make you work for it. The fights are multistage battles which will test your skill, patience and ability to adapt and learn on the fly as the boss’s strategy can change on a dime. The AI of the boss characters is one of the best designed adversarial systems I have encountered in a good many years. So yes Cuphead is just as hard as you have heard, it can be very unforgiving as it starts difficult and only gets harder the further in your progress as you work your way through the Devil’s list. Boss’s will change their attack patterns so just when you think you have it down it will suddenly switch to catch you of guard.

So yes Cuphead is very hard, it is completely designed to test player in their skill and patience but for the majority of the time when you fail it is your fault that you failed. Maybe you didn’t jump at the right time for failed to notice that one enemy or bullet heading your way. The fact that enemies do not have health bars means you never know how well you are doing until the next stage of the boss fight kicks in just adds that little extra edge to the fights. It blends the action of a side scrolling shooter with bullet hell so effortlessly that it all comes down to player skill to be victorious, something I really relish and like about Cuphead. Adapting to each boss fight means there is a lot of trial and error here and should you die you have to replay the entire fight again, no hand holding checkpoints here so there can be some frustration to battle your way to what feels like the final stages only to make a mistake and have to redo it all again. To make it worse, when you die a cheeky progress bar will show you just how close to the end of the fight you were which at least gives you some indication of how well you were doing.

There is a lot I really love about this game but it does also have one of the most annoying things that has surfaced this year in games for me, a co-op game without online co-op. Cuphead just screams at you to grab a friend and play this game, hell I would love the chance to be a Mugman in a friend’s game. But sadly the co-op is local only and as a result really sticks up an unnecessary boundary to really unlock the potential of this game. I want to share this game with friends or to be more honest, to share the pain of failure in truly wondrous rage outbursts. I really am fed up now with the sudden push to have local co-op after it had been put aside for many years in gaming to now have it but at the expense of losing online co-op, just have both and believe me, players will be far happier for it.

Also some of the boss battles can feel a little unfair at times, with AI that will just outright overwhelm you randomly. This does make each attempt feel different but after fighting the same boss five times in a row only for the 6^th time the boss whips out an attack you haven’t seen before just makes you all the more Hulk Smash type of rage. That random sudden change up in difficulty just for the sake of not letting you win no matter how well you are doing can stop you in your tracks for a while and I found myself moving to a different fight to come back later if I felt the game had just decided to stick me on the naughty step and not let me have a real chance of defeating that boss.

But niggles aside, for the asking price of just under £17, Cuphead is amazing value for money if you want to be truly challenged and a fan of side shooters. Every boss fight felt personal and I have yet to finish the game because right now, I am just not good enough but like all good personal crusades, I will beat this game and all the rage-fest angry saltiness moments are balanced against amazing joyful moments of success and admiration for this game that on the surface looks like a friendly little cartoon game but is arguably one of the top shooters this year.

Being honest, this game had sat on my pile of games for three weeks now after picking it up just one week after it released. Despite the fact I loved Uncharted 4 and truly adored playing the Uncharted for the very first time with the Nathan Drake Collection, there was just something about this spin-off that failed to entice me to instantly install and play. Not really sure why that was, perhaps it was the fact it was originally planned as DLC before being made a standalone spin off close to full game price or maybe it was just the fact that it would be the first Uncharted outing without Nathan Drake as the lead hero. Whatever my subconscious reasoning was, I finally fired the game up this past weekend and happily I can report, not only did it blow my mind with how good it actually was but it also never made me wonder why Nathan was not in the game. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is indeed a treasure worthy of discovery.

Now I never had any doubts about the choice to have Chloe Frazer as the main character, I really liked her presence in Uncharted 2 and 3, serving as both a love interest and a superb character for Nathan to bounce off. Chloe is a strong female character, a thief and treasure hunter and more than a match for Nathan in terms of skill, knowledge and sharp wits. Voiced by the excellent Claudia Black, Chloe Frazer is the perfect character to focus a potential spin off series on and The Lost Legacy if nothing else, is truly a great test run to see how the fan-base of Uncharted or possible new fans would take to having the series come very close to the Lara Croft of Tomb Raider more than ever before.

So where do we find Chloe in The Lost Legacy? Well unsurprisingly, we find Chloe up to no good and causing mischief in her homeland of India, keeping tabs on some mercenary soldiers in an Indian marketplace in a city overrun with soldiers. Her goal in this opening section is to track down a Disc currently in the possession of a nasty piece of work called Asav. Of course the ultimate goal for Chloe is a rare ancient artefact called ‘The Tusk of Ganesh’ and naturally it is all for profit but Chloe is wise enough to know that this is not a one woman job and has hired the services of Nadine Ross, world renowned mercenary and fan of punching the Drake brothers in the face multiple times. With the collapse of Shoreline, her company of soldiers for hire, Nadine is looking to rebuild and reclaim her former position which will require money. So the unlikely partnership of a treasure hunter and soldier for hire is born and the adventure begins.

So if you have played Uncharted 4 then you are going to recognise some very familiar game mechanics at work here in Lost Legacy. Combat blends both fisticuffs and gunplay with the same tag team fighting style for Chloe and Nadine that Nathan and Sam Drake used in Uncharted 4 which means that in a fight, the AI controlled Nadine will offer assistance if the enemy get to close especially when in a fist fight. Gunplay works the same way with Chloe being able to tag enemies and Nadine will also take out enemies as well though this is something I will come back to a little later on in terms of the partner AI quality.

Stealth is also back with the ability to take cover and to hide in tall grass to allow both Chloe and Nadine to move around a location and take enemies out without alerting others but with the nice touch that if you take out an enemy in a way that will leave their body in open view, other enemies can spot the body and be alerted to something going on. The problem for me is that should you fail or just break from stealth and the enemy does become fully alerted to your presence then all hell will break loose and all the enemy will come searching for you, which can be rather annoying to be in a fire fight with multiple soldiers only for one cheeky shotgun wielding git to get the drop on you. Gunplay is fun with different weapons plus Chloe’s ability to pick locks allowing her to loot enemy weapon crates to find some very powerful guns indeed when needed.

Vehicle use also returns in some very nice set-pieces when the action really ramps up towards the finale to the game. The middle chapter in the story also features Chloe and Nadine using a jeep to explore a region reusing the winch to tear down doors mechanic from Uncharted 4 with the highlight being the in car conversations between Nadine and Chloe as they just shoot the breeze between stops and they do have some very witty dialogue exchanges throughout the game and not just in the car sequences but overall you really get the sense just from their chats that both women are on equal terms even if their ultimate desires for the Tusk sometimes do not align.

The story is great fun and players get to learn more about the past of both characters but especially Chloe who has a very similar upbringing to Lara Croft, albeit without the money and titles. Chloe constantly refers back to her own father, a treasure hunter in his own right which cost Chloe her childhood with his own obsession to find the Tusk of Ganesh costing him his life and forcing her and her mother to flee to Australia, something which Chloe tries to dismiss but it clearly still has a hold on her emotionally. The greatest strength for me is in the voice acting here, Claudia Black delivers an outstanding performance as Chloe bringing so many sides to her character to the surface so that if indeed she is to become the new main character for an Uncharted spin off, something that the Lost Legacy completely sets up by the way, it would not be a horrible thing. The writing and story telling is so well handled for this mini spin off that at no time did it feel strange to not be in control of Nathan Drake and nor did I dare say, miss Nathan.

Visually I would even say that Lost Legacy is slightly better looking than Uncharted 4, with some obvious refinements to the lighting engine that make the locations found in the game simply stunning to experience. I literally found myself stopping just to take in all the imagery of each new location it was that beautiful to see on my TV that making use of the Photo Mode became second nature. The design of each location is spot on for puzzle solving which can be head scratching to begin with but most of the puzzles simply require a little bit of time and common sense to solve without being a complete walk in the park. Complimented by a beautiful soundtrack and audio effects, just everything so far showcases how effortlessly the team up of Chloe and Nadine could transfer into their own fully fledged out series going forward.

But it certainly has some niggles such as the partner AI which at times is just ridiculous and even game breaking at moments. When in stealth and Chloe in a nice hiding spot, the partner AI will often just start moving about to find a spot near you even if it means being in complete view of the enemy. In the section where you are using the jeep to explore, when approaching a location full of enemies and leaving the jeep in a secure spot, as soon as I got into a good cover spot as Chloe I would come to hear the guards spotting the jeep because Nadine had decided to drive it to a new location right in the view of the enemy raising the alarm and triggering a fire fight then and there. In the later stages of the game this almost become comical as my AI partner would literally creep alongside an enemy soldier at times without the enemy spotting it but to literally have your AI controlled partner just going off and running about is funny but very annoying when it blows your cover.

Next is the length which from starting menu to very end of the credits played on Moderate difficulty came in at 7hrs 30 minutes. This length is not criminal by any means but it does bring me back to my original hesitation about this being a stand alone release instead of the originally planned just DLC for Uncharted 4.  Now there is some replay value with trying to find all the collectibles and higher difficulties and it also has all the MP modes from Uncharted 4 including the Survival mode, but for the asking price of £30, what there is of The Lost Legacy probably doesn’t make it acceptable at that price point for me unless you enjoyed the UC4 MP modes.

I thoroughly enjoyed Uncharted: The Lost Legacy far more than I had expected too and do kind of wish I had broken the seal on the box and played it sooner. The story is spot on with some terrific moments with the voice cast just phenomenal which is to be expected from Naughty Dog and their choice of actors. The gameplay has much of what made me fall in love with this gaming series to begin with but also does the extra mile to make sure it is not just a copy and paste or reskinned version of Nathan Drake in action. Chloe is an outstanding main hero and very well complimented by Nadine that as I said above, they could easily be the focus of a full blown game and a true spin off series which I hope Naughty Dog follow up with once they have finished that little unknown game ‘The Last of Us Two’.

I am sure the world has plenty of ancient treasures to find and enemies to defeat and right now, I cannot think of two better heroes to go on that adventure than Chloe and Nadine.