So I've had an Xbox One for about a week now, and most of my time on it has been spent either grinding through ridiculously difficult side-scrolling platformers or expressing my disbelief that they actually bothered with a campaign mode in Titanfall. Anyway, I think I week is long enough to have bought all the good games (short of Watch Dogs with its extravagant £60 price tag or anything which involves a sport and is not affiliated with the Kinect) and to have time to review the console itself. So here are my thoughts on the Xbox One.
I should say for a start that I got the Titanfall bundle because I work at Tesco and sometimes they give you really good deals. Thanks to worker discounts and all sorts of things I got it for around £290, but it's currently retailing at around £400 (the lowest I've seen is £370) although it comes with Titanfall and a month's free Gold membership to Xbox Live so that might actually be a pretty good deal for a next-gen (current-gen? I don't know where we're at with the console-naming thing anymore) console. Along with the game and the membership, it's got the Kinect sensor and a gaming headset which makes it feel like an essentials package for FPS gaming.
So let's get to set-up. It doesn't come with any instructions, but then it doesn't really need any because all of the slots on the back are clearly labelled. The only remotely confusing thing is the two HDMI slots, but even they're handily labelled "HDMI in" and "HDMI out" with helpful examples so even a complete technophobe can set it up with no trouble. I also found setting up my player profile quick and painless, although if you haven't already got an Xbox Live account you might find it a bit tedious going to and from your laptop to verify your email address. You may have heard of the parents whose children had bought thousands of pounds worth of stuff on video games but I found that to be a non-problem with the security features you can choose on start-up. You can choose to have it log you in as soon as it recognises you through Kinect and give everyone who uses your profile full access to your card details, or you can enter all manner of passcodes to prevent people buying stuff without your express permission. And the parental controls are comprehensive and clearly explained, so there really isn't a problem with security.
The games are a bit of a problem, not because they're terrible (except some of them are) but because there's such a small selection. I get that it's a relatively new console, but there needs to be some more variety than the big franchise games hastily thrown together in the "Hey Look! It's a New Thing!" parade. Sure, there are a couple of smaller entries - Strider is one of the best games I've played, and it costs less than most of the other games on offer - but most of them look terrible and it's hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. Sure, there are demos, but there are only about five of those and not for the games which need demos. I want to see how Watch Dogs and Need For Speed Rivals play and feel before I buy them but all they can offer me is Kinect Sport and Zoo Tycoon. Anyway, the games.
First off, the opener: Titanfall. I got it free with the XBone, so it's already up there in my opinion as a "good game", if only because the only stuff better than stuff you have is stuff you get for free. I've already hit at the campaign mode, but it really can't be emphasised enough: THIS GAME DID NOT NEED A CAMPAIGN MODE. If it did, they could've at least given it a single player offline option, and perhaps with some dedicated missions and narrative which explained the story rather than "we're fighting those guys, oh hey, here's a battle". That being said it's a fun game, the parkour feels light and fast, if sometimes a little iffy on where exactly it wants to send you, and the weapons are all varied and specifically designed, although I keep comparing it to Brink with the movement style and the terrible campaign, something Brink did quite well in my opinion. It's almost like an antithesis to the 360's parkour run-and-gun: the movement may be similar, yes, but in Titanfall the weapons are thinned out and specialised, rather than simply a multitude of SMG's and a shotgun or a rifle. And rather than having Brink's objective-driven campaign missions you have the general multiplayer mess. The play styles are different too; in Brink I was getting up close and personal to the enemy bots (I never had Xbox Live on the 360) but I much prefer sniping in Titanfall, which is a shame because I'm so bad at it. But the maps all seem to call for it, with tall rooftops you can stand on and shoot from, getting easier once you reach that level where you unlock the sniper rifle and Hemlock burst rifle - so appropriately named because whenever I use it I die. Quickly.
I should probably do separate reviews for all the games because, despite all their lack of story, they do contain rather a lot. Titanfall, as well as its nice parkour mechanic and trimmed weapon selection, has the titans, enormous mechs which you can pilot or control remotely, having them guard a particular point or else follow you around like a stray dog you found and now it won't leave you alone. I've found I'm much more comfortable killing titans than their pilots, because I'm frankly not good enough to kill most of the players (to the YouTuber who proclaimed it's not a game you can snipe in: my awful K:D ratio begs to differ) and because it's easier to grab an SMG and play brain surgeon with a ten-foot-tall mech than it is a five-seven MLG with a souped-up carbine. On top of that I find the burn card mechanic incredibly useful, giving you one-time bonuses which can help you immensely in battle. If you're not killed before they can take effect. But you get three card slots for each battle, which you can try to use at tactical moment, or you can do what I do and go "hey, that looks like fun, let's use... awww, I'm dead." But aside from my own ineptitude, I found it a really good game - the moments when you're in a titan and facing down another is really exciting and surprisingly fast-paced, and even when it's been destroyed you can rodeo them as your pilot or leap to the rooftops and blast them with your anti-titan weapon. The gameplay is really balanced and even when you're defeated you can still get out alive if you make it to the dropship.
The next game I got was Strider. It's a remake of an old arcade game for games consoles, and one I've played on my computer for a few months, although the lag really does mean my old machine can't do it justice. Compared to the Xbox One, it's tripe. The game is beautiful, full of neon and bright colours, and it's so fast-paced. It takes a lot of skill or a lot of luck to defeat the bosses, but throughout it all you have a ton of powerups to collect and all sorts of hidden areas where you can find concept art, challenges and information about other Striders. There's a plot, somewhere, but the cutscenes just get in the way of the action so I skip those and all you really need to know about the boss fights is they're pretty damn cool; right now I'm stuck at a giant mecha-gorilla and before that I had to defeat the ultimate bounty hunter who uses all sorts of nearly-impossible-to-dodge laser weapons. It's fast, furious, infuriatingly difficult at times and good, retro fun.
The third game I got was Just Dance 2014, which may seem an odd choice but Just Dance is one of those games I always have fun with. The Kinect sensor does a good job of following your movements, too, and while it doesn't have the classic disco tunes of early Just Dance games the songs are good and there are more you can buy with the points you earn just by dancing. It's a good game for exercising and waking yourself up, and it's always been one of my favourites because Just Dance is kinda fun.
So onto the fourth game: Rayman Legends. In the spirit of every Rayman game, it's a fun little platformer with floaty jumps and super-precise timing which nonetheless is wonderful to play and beautiful to look at. The story isn't important, being pretty much the same as Origins in that your hero has been asleep for a while and the world has been taken over by evil creatures. Rayman must save the world from the evil wizards and save the teensies et cetera, et cetera. But Rayman isn't a story game so much as it is an art game, the levels are beautifully details and the music is great. Each level set ends with a level which is a run-and-jump to classic rock tracks, and the unlockable characters are numerous and varied, if only possessing a total of three distinct actions - you've got Rayman's run and jump, Globox's run and jump, or the barbarians' run and jump. That being said, it's still a cool game, and the fun is in playing and replaying the levels rather than getting all the unlocks. Although you kinda get two games in one because it also includes a "Back to Origins" section which you unlock by collecting enough "lums" in each level to get a lucky ticket. It's a good system, although troublesome because the tickets have some prescribed pattern of prizes to give you (and I only know that because it didn't save once when I turned off my Xbox and I had to do half the levels all over again).
The next game is Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut. I haven't played it much, because it's not really the best which is a shame. You're a space pilot escorting a civilian ship to an abandoned space station (don't ask me why, they haven't explained that yet). There you find some computer A.I. and get the strike suit ship, which is the best because it has a missile salvo which is reminiscent of the over-the-top, Megas XLR-style robo-violence I loved so much maybe eight years ago. And it would be great if these missiles actually did some decent damage. But you have to get within the enemy ships' weapons range to fire it, and the salvo is unwieldy at best. And the movement feels so slow! You're in a spaceship, you should be rocketing towards the enemy at near lightspeed, but it feels like a lumbering truck because speeding up barely speeds you up and you spend half your time braking as you try to keep the same person in your sights, trying to blow them up with lock-on missiles or, more conveniently, just shooting them until they explode. The controls feel counter-intuitive, too, the banking and rolling on the right analog stick unless you change the controls, and you only have three presets so you can't change the shooting to the triggers and the zoom to the buttons. The first few levels are pretty tedious thanks to the lack of speed and constant cutscenes, and I can't be bothered to go on when I have more interesting games to play.
Speaking of, my final game is Trials Fusion. There's no story here; you're a stunt biker who performs outrageous stunts on even more outrageous courses, from ridiculously tall cliffs to TRON-esque neon cities. Oh, and everything is exploding. There's little else to say, besides all those times you die will either make you burst out laughing, or they'll make you scream and ragequit. But it is amazing good fun.
That's all the games I have for the Xbox One. I'm sure in the next few weeks I'll have more games to talk about. Oh, also Edge of Tomorrow. I'll have a review for that as soon as I've seen it.
Adieu!
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