I was really in the Civ mood as you may have guessed seeing this and Beyond Earth in my played this month. I’ll cover what I thought on that one below, but while it quickly brought that trademark one more turn back to me, I much preferred the more familiar setting and famous world leaders instead it all being so… alien. According to the last Steam event Civ 5 was the first game in my library and became one of my most played games, I absolutely loved it, so I was always interested in what new ideas they had thought up. Having played a bit of Endless Legend I already had some experience dealing with districts, which add an extra level of strategy to your city planning being a lot more involved than just placing every building and wonder on the same tile, you now need to think about terrain and free space, as well as adjacency bonuses for what should be built next to each other, in order to get the best out of your cities to get the edge on your rivals. The art style and new look to the leaders took a bit of getting used to, but it’s undeniably an improvement, seeing how expressive the leaders are adds to the diplomacy and makes them feel more real. I’ve had a couple of victories and feel like I’ve got the basics down, but there’s still a lot I can improve on, I’ll keep it installed for a quick 20-30 hour match in between playing other games whenever I get that urge.

Like so many I post about, I feel like I should have played this way sooner. Although the warm sunlit forest you arrive in gives you a sense of peacefulness, you soon come across a trail of blood and a dismembered body. I was intrigued from the start, you become familiar with the group of people involved and I wanted to solve this mystery, the ending doesn't disappoint either. It has a great creepy atmosphere at times, while a lot of it takes place in daylight when you’re exploring, and during that time walking around it’s easy to admire the lakes and mountains in the background, the graphics look great, yet while doing your detective work the game switches to night time as you see how past events unfolded and suddenly the forest becomes a lot less inviting. I do want to try out more in this genre, LA Noire had some interesting cases, Murdered: Soul Suspect was enjoyable apart from the scary demons, Alan Wake kind of counts? The newish Sherlock Holmes games look like they might be fun.

This only took me almost 200 hours to finish so it's going to be a nice easy write-up going over everything I loved about it, right. As much as I liked the first and second in the series, which are both absolutely worth playing, they only improve with each entry and this was easily my favourite, the open world suits Geralt's monster hunting like the two swords on his back. I've never played a game with so much detail before, the city of Novigrad is simply breathtaking when you first see it in the distance, and then when you realise how much of it you can actually walk around, as well as all buildings you can go inside... I can't emphasise enough how much of a city it really feels like. You spend a lot of the game prior to this roaming around countryside and visiting peasant villages, so going through those city gates for the first time really does have a much better impact than if you'd have just started there. I can't leave out Oxenfurt either, while smaller it's even prettier, I wished there had been more quests to do there and was delighted when I found one of the DLCs has you return there. The quest quality stays consistently high throughout, and that includes the side quests, while Dragon Age Inquisition had an excellent main quest it was all the filler content designed to pad it out and fill the huge maps that stopped it from coming close to Origins' level, Witcher 3 managed to have the huge maps and tons of extras yet pulled off a miracle of making them worth doing more than just for the XP, they were actually interesting. It's rare I feel so much from games but I really got so immersed in the world and the main characters that I cared when the big moments happened and had tears in my eyes at other points, from laughing at the drunk Witchers at Kaer Morhen (best quest ever) or from the more emotional moments.

It's Witcher 3 so I'm going to have to use paragraphs here. It is the best RPG, and because I like RPGs, the best game I've ever played. But I can still find a few minor things to pick out, although Skellige is absolutely beautiful and I liked the sailing, I definitely didn't like those islands enough to get all those loot stashes out at sea. The horseriding worked fine most of the time using the roads, but taking shortcuts often leads you getting stuck in trees and rocks that make exploration a bit of a pain and sometimes meant I was running around on foot. Maybe there were too many detective missions, there was nothing you could really do wrong with these other than follow glowing red directions and have Geralt tell you what you need to know, although I'm not sure how they could have improved that. I played on the hardest difficulty but didn't find the combat too difficult, yet it was still more engaging than most I've played and it did mean I was consulting the bestiary and upgrading my oils and potions to have an easier time, fitting with the character to be prepared to make a tough fight with a monster easier.

To get the most out of the last expansion Blood and Wine I took a couple of weeks break after finishing Hearts of Stone as I often feel burnt out when it comes to DLC taking place after you're done with the story, but I enjoyed them both just as much as the main quest, if not more. I've mentioned how impressed I was with Novigrad and Oxenfurt, well Beauclair is perhaps the best of the three. A fresh new area to explore and quest in, and most importantly a new Gwent tournment and cards to collect, Toussaint was distinct enough to set it apart and keep things interesting, it was the perfect way to end.

With Anno 1800 out which I really liked the look of, I thought I'd try what's considered the best in the series to see if it's for me. It is. I really enjoyed playing through the campaign until the land combat mission, but the city building and trading is great, acquiring new exotic resources like spices and silks from the orient to meet the needs of your growing population with increasingly fussy tastes as they want more than just bread and fur coats was a fun challenge. It was satisfying to see your cities grow, with more buildings unlocked as your population hit milestones and higher class citizens moved in. Managing production was enjoyable, with the late game resources required to be produced with different industries working together to create the necessary goods. So I'm really excited to play 1800, and might look to give the futuristic ones a try even if I think I'll have the same opinion of them as I do Civ VI and Beyond Earth.

Reading the novel beforehand felt like I'd just read a 1000 page walkthrough. But it was still very enjoyable playing this, in particular looking out for changes to the story, which there were and meant there were some surprises in store. The art style was a real highlight, I took a lot of screenshots and liked revisiting the same locations after a number of years had passed to look out for new detail over time, like the construction of a cathedral. I haven't watched the TV series yet so this was my first time seeing all these characters visualised and thought they matched up well, the voice acting was great too, although in comparison the game didn't portray a certain villain as evil as he is, some of the more cruel and violent scenes are omitted which is understandable. It's a point and click so there's a lot of walking around, inspecting objects and picking things up, there's so much detail to look at in each chapter and your character can provide their opinion on most of it, but unlike most I've played it's all very straightforward and doable without a guide which is always welcome. If you've read the book you should like this, if you've enjoyed this you should read the book, they're both great!

If I'm honest I only decided to try out Beyond Earth because it didn't feel right to just skip from V to VI. I think it's a fair criticism to say there's not much different aside from the sci-fi setting with the game released four years before it, but that still means it's just as addictive even if finding rare resources with a name that looks like a cat walked over a keyboard doesn't have the same impact as having a rich deposit of uranium, or having some bland corporate named neighbour instead of warmongering Gandhi. The tech tree is also nightmare fuel when you first open it up, I had no idea where to start and what might be useful as it was so overwhelmingly unfamiliar what anything meant, it wasn't the same as seeing you've got some stone nearby and deciding to research mining early. Becoming more familiar as I played it became less of an issue and I imagine if I put as many hours as I did in V I'd figure out some good strategies, but I already feel like I've seen enough of it to know I'll never enjoy it as much, and having later played VI I much preferred that.

Somehow I managed to avoid most of the spoilers regarding this third person shooter since it came out in 2012, apart from it being a game that made you feel like a terrible person. Well it certainly delivered that, this is another one with a great story that should be experienced. I do think the cover based shooting brought it down a level though, as in the actual gameplay, it wasn’t bad but even on the normal difficulty I thought it was too punishing, maybe I need to play more in this genre. I wasn’t running around like an idiot out in the open, but you need to move in order to avoid getting flanked, as well as getting better aim on your targets, and in those sprints your health drops rapidly with their pin point accuracy. The juggernauts were the biggest nuisance, these human tanks with all their armour made for a menacing sight as they slowly waddled their way towards you absorbing every bullet you shot at them, until eventually they topple over. Unlike Bulletstorm I didn’t hate the characters in this one, there was no face palming dialogue every time the fighting stopped which I was grateful for, and as well as your squad being worthwhile additions to the story, their usefulness in combat as you direct them to take out key enemies was a huge help. The graphics looked a bit dated but not enough to make the environments look ugly, the interiors were also nice which you often find yourself in while taking shelter from the sandstorms outside. Overall I’d definitely recommend it, the combat can be a pain at times but it’s worth it for the memorable story.

I think Lego games are fantastic but this is easily the weakest one I've played. I've always felt that finishing story mode only counts as an intro and you miss out on the real game when you've got the maps opened up to explore, trying to unlock all the characters and find every secret. But while I would recommend it, I'd have been happy to have just beaten this. Everything about it simply feels inferior to Lego Marvel Superheroes, it was several years ago I played that one but I never remember getting tired going backwards and forwards doing quests around Manhattan. Finding what character to use was often a challenge given that I'm unfamiliar with most of the comic book characters, it would have been handy to have a way of telling who could do what. The voice lines of the main cast are pulled straight from the films and often sound very awkward, you'll hear a lot of the same lines enough times to make you want to mute them, except for some reason there's only audio options for music and sound effects, yes I checked!!!!! I thought it was the perfect time for it with Endgame out, but it was disappointing.

This may have been better suited on phones but I don't play mobile games, I quickly lost interest in Reigns. It’s a game about getting balances right between four different factions by swiping left or right, making decisions while ruling your kingdom and trying to avoid those faction bars reaching the top and bottom to avoid a game over, the best part is getting all these funny deaths as a result of making one group too happy or angry and feeling deceived when you misjudge a decision for the first time. Having achieved an ending, the worst one, I looked up what I needed to do to actually properly beat it, and found solutions I doubt I'd have stumbled across even if I spent hours playing it, maybe I'd have got there by mistake. It was kind of enjoyable but it didn’t take long before I’d seen most of the cards and it lost its charm as soon as it started to feel repetitive. I might have felt like I was having a good reign, and then a couple of bad decision cards and I’d die and need to start again, it was sometimes frustrating when it felt out of your hands no matter what you chose.