In order to escape that waking nightmare that is The Maw, Six must jump, climb, run and throw her way through the puzzle filled ship. Entering and exiting every room in this game involves figuring out how to scale heights that Six’s little arms can’t reach, or to navigate a patrolled area and find the key to a door that will allow her to escape. The puzzles in Little Nightmares are sometimes difficult to discern, but they were never outright impossible. Even at their most opaque, the puzzles in Little Nightmares invite exploration and genuine wonder rather than eliciting frustration. Upon solving each room, I felt real joy at having insight into a new problem. Furthermore, while the puzzles in Little Nightmares are interesting enough to stand on their own merits, a layer of tension lies beneath each one, with the ever present threat of the game’s monstrous villains on patrol and ready to uncover you at any moment.

"The enemies are one of many perfectly tuned aspects of Little Nightmares. They evoke a strangeness and bodily horror that speaks to The Maw as a setting, while remaining grounded enough to feel real and threatening."

In fact, many of the game’s puzzles incorporate these enemies, requiring that you distract them with a broken pot while you frantically grab a key and fit it into a massive lock, or that you call an elevator that will have an enemy on it, which you’ll then have to sneak past. These puzzles are made even more difficult when enemies team up on you; reaching for you with meaty arms from both sides of the table you’ve taken cover under.

The enemies are one of many perfectly tuned aspects of Little Nightmares. They evoke a strangeness and bodily horror that speaks to The Maw as a setting, while remaining grounded enough to feel real and threatening. The story’s most terrifying villain is definitely the woman who the game’s opening shot depicts, and she’s the most normal thing in the game. For the most part, Little Nightmares embraces the uncanny, depicting a world just close enough to be our own, and just off kilter enough to be truly terrifying. Each level is based upon an aspect of The Maw, such as “The Prison”, or “The Kitchen,” and the thematic shifts that occur throughout the game help each level to feel unique, while carefully crafting a complete experience that unifies the diverse aspects of the world.

Little Nightmares strikes a delicate balance between genres. It’s a puzzle platformer that crosses into horror survival, while at the same time it uses a cartoonish art style to depict absolutely horrifying events and characters. The synthesis of all these things makes it a unique and fascinating game, that is a joy not only to play but also to simply take in. Every room is filled with details that convey a depth to a world only passed through by Six. Elements of game design are also undertaken with a playful creativity. After death, Six awakens at the last checkpoint, as though falling to her doom or being strangled by slugs were merely a bad dream. In one puzzle, I’m pretty sure the designers actually intend for you to die. The checkpoint advanced only after I’d jumped to my death.

"When Little Nightmares fails, it does so in small ways. My largest complaint is the truly horrific loading screens. Death is a minute-to-minute occurrence in Little Nightmares. Upon death, players should be ready to wait a good thirty seconds to a minute while the game resets."

Little Nightmares is filled with the unexpected, and its approach to level and enemy design, as well as artistic style, makes it a fascinating game to explore.

When Little Nightmares fails, it does so in small ways. My largest complaint is the truly horrific loading screens. Death is a minute-to-minute occurrence in Little Nightmares. Upon death, players should be ready to wait a good thirty seconds to a minute while the game resets. In the more accommodating sections of the game this issue isn’t noticeable, but as the puzzles grow more complex and failure becomes more frequent, it can add real pain to your play through. In one particularly frustrating section of the game, this meant spending a sizable portion of my time waiting for the game to load, before being eaten once more almost immediately.

Little Nighmares also suffers from a relatively imprecise control scheme. It isn’t a purely two dimensional game, meaning that you do, at times, need to move Six forwards and backwards, but depth of field is extremely difficult to gauge in Little Nightmares, and the more forward-and-backward came into the game, the more unpleasant it got. This forward-and-backward conundrum also came into play quite frequently crossing narrow spans, and I walked straight off beams several times because I didn’t know what dimensions I was moving in.

"The game’s puzzles are fascinating to unravel, and the ending is one of the most cathartic, wondrous conclusions that I have ever played."

This difficulty came to a head at a particular point in the game, and while I won’t spoil it, I can assure you you’ll know when you get there. It’s the one moment the game utterly and completely fails to play to its strengths. Rather than demanding that players search for the solution, it is painfully clear, and rather than letting players move through at their own vaguely controlled pace it demands that you navigate a system of obstacles rapidly and with precision, even as the controls place you out of position. This one section was the only time I became truly frustrated with the game, which is, on a whole, almost without unpleasant stages.

Little Nightmares asks a lot from its players. It asks that they engage with a cartoonish art style, a horrifying spectacle, and a platformer that doubles as horror survival. For the gamers that accept this genre bending work, a truly rewarding experience awaits. Though not a single word of dialogue is spoken throughout the story, atmosphere, presentation and motion imbue the world with meaning. The game’s puzzles are fascinating to unravel, and the ending is one of the most cathartic, wondrous conclusions that I have ever played.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox One.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

The pre-order bonuses are skins.

Pre-Ordering Dawn of War will grant you custom skins for the Imperial Knight, the Wraithknight and the Morkanaut. Thankfully, no gameplay related content has been gated off by the pre-order bonuses, so you needn’t be worried about players who pre-order gaining any sort of competitive advantage. It’s nice to see Relic offering a small bonus for pre-orders rather than keeping any units or modes locked behind the pre-order wall.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

The story will be dark.

It seems that Tekken may be getting the Game of Thrones treatment with its next iteration. Katsurhiro Harada has gone on record stating that the story for Tekken 7 will be especially dark. Though we don’t have any particulars at this time, devotees of the games may want to brace themselves for the loss of some characters.

Day of Infamy distinguishes itself from better-known shooters by stripping the UI down to its bare minimum, and reducing the time-to-kill down to zero. These two design choices make it a tense experience were even small mistakes can get you killed. If and when you are killed, the game will give you very little information about where your enemy was shooting from, or how they did it. When you respawn you’ll have just as little information as you did in your last life, and you’ll have to carefully pick your way towards the objective, knowing that somewhere a sniper is waiting.

"Instead of penalizing players with an excessive timer in order to make death in game consequential, Day of Infamy ties respawning to objectives."

When and why you do respawn is one Day of Infamy’s most interesting systems. Instead of penalizing players with an excessive timer in order to make death in game consequential, Day of Infamy ties respawning to objectives. If your team is attacking, then your respawn will be earned upon capturing a point, meaning that the attacking team has a set pool with which to achieve the objective, and which is only replenished when they complete that objective. On the other side, defensive respawns are earned by regrouping, a process where at least one defender must return to the very back to the map to trigger their team’s respawn, meaning that a defender must abandon their position to bring their team back. Regroup too often and the team will run out of spawn points, fail to regroup and you’ll find yourself alone on the objective, unable to retrieve assistance without ceding the point.

Respawning is one system within Day of Infamy that is emblematic of the design direction. The one-bullet time-to-kill is another imposing factor on gameplay, that fundamentally shapes how the game functions. Because the consequences for dying are so steep, players work hard not to, and tactical gameplay that is a waste of time in faster moving shooters really shines in Day of Infamy.

Nowhere is this more felt than in the game’s officer and radio operator classes, which must work together to be effective. Officers in Day of Infamy have a binocular set, and can call in air strikes, artillery barrages, and smoke screens for their team. These are tremendously powerful abilities that can turn the tide of a game when used appropriately. The catch is that officers must have a radio in proximity, which are only carried by the radio operator class. The result is a demand that players work together, that the radio operator shadow his or her officer, and that the officer read the battlefield and apply their awesome power appropriately. Once I grew to understand this mechanic I started looking out for officers even when I wasn’t playing a radio operator, and set up behind or front of them in order to provide cover and security to that vital two man team.

"If Day on Infamy has a problem, it is that it fills its niche too well. The game is not accommodating towards new players. There is a learning playlist where new players can wet their feet, but the game graduates you out of this playlist quickly, and once it does you won’t be allowed to return."

As an aside, I highly recommend that new players looking to get into Day of Infamy but who are worried about the fast time to kill and the unforgiving mechanics play the radio operator class. Your primary job is to stand next to an officer, and players who choose the officer class tend to have at least a decent handle on the game’s mechanics and a working knowledge of the maps. If nothing else, playing the operator will force you to think and work as a team, which is crucial in the game.

Even when you’re not a member of the officer dream team, tactics are available at every level, with smoke grenades, dynamite, and rocket launchers spread out across the game’s classes. Even with a strict class system, I rarely felt completely helpless. The classes are well balanced, and even the flamethrower has enough drawbacks that it isn’t a guaranteed killing machine.

If Day on Infamy has a problem, it is that it fills its niche too well. The game is not accommodating towards new players. There is a learning playlist where new players can wet their feet, but the game graduates you out of this playlist quickly, and once it does you won’t be allowed to return. While this should prevent veterans from stomping the poor souls in the practice list, it also means that those very same souls are shoved into the real world a little too soon, and that the practice list is filled mostly by bots which give no real indication of what’s in store once players start matchmaking.

New, and even veteran, players should be prepared to spend much of their time dead. Its easy to die in Day of Infamy, and the consequence for doing so can be minutes long as you watch through a team-mates eyes while they painstakingly approach the objective, or stubbornly refuse to fall back and regroup.

"Day of Infamy succeeds in crafting a shooter experience where death feels present and real, and success comes in the form of surviving engagement after engagement through teamwork, a little luck, and the proper application of the tools at hand."

Even when you’re not dead, the game can still be a slow affair. Map knowledge is crucial to even find other players, and moments of frantic action are spaced by long stretches or run-die-run. The closest you’ll get to feeling like a badass will be surviving a house clearing. The tactical aspects of Day of Infamy also depend on a team with a strong sense of the game’s mechanics. Sometimes the game can feel truly hopeless when you’re matched against more experiences opponents and your own team flounders before capturing a single objective.

Still, despite the game’s narrow focus and steep learning curve, Day of Infamy delivers a brutal, intense, tactical shooter that is a joy to play once you narrow in on the game’s core mechanics. Day of Infamy seeks to choose one gameplay experience, and hone in on how that experience can be its best. With death so near at all times, and its consequences so deep (at least by video game standards) every moment in Day of Infamy is filled with anxious potential.

Every time I come out on top in a close quarters fight it feels wonderful. Every time I watch the man in front or to the side of me get blown away I feel fear. Every time I sprint across open ground I chant, “Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die,” under my breath. Day of Infamy succeeds in crafting a shooter experience where death feels present and real, and success comes in the form of surviving engagement after engagement through teamwork, a little luck, and the proper application of the tools at hand.

This game was reviewed on the PC.

Vikings: Wolves of Midgard saves itself from being a forgettable dungeon crawler by embracing its subject matter whole heartedly, and establishing a core gameplay experience that it then builds gradually as players level up and gain new skills. The first choice you’ll make when you step into Vikings is what characters abilities you want and their chosen style. This means that you start the game with a primary class, but you aren’t locked into it. If you want to multi-spec into an archer as well as your tanking set, you can do so at the cost of progression in your main class. You can even change weapon sets and classes at the press of a button, allowing you to transition through fights in a way that fits the mechanics of the moment.

Player choice is also bolstered by the ability to choose a stat to boost by 1% each time you level up. If you focus on a particular stat, you can work with a 30% increase to damage or health by the time you reach the game’s late stages. Alternatively, you can invest broadly across your stats so that you do everything a little bit better.

"Vikings: Wolves of Midgard saves itself from being a forgettable dungeon crawler by embracing its subject matter whole heartedly, and establishing a core gameplay experience that it then builds gradually as players level up and gain new skills."

Customization and character progression in Vikings are robust enough that they’re engaging, without becoming confusing. Players will fill their skill trees about half way through the campaign, and can then go back through to buff their skills in their main tree or spec into another. This means that players do not have abilities to choose from within their class, each class comes with only as many abilities as it can use, with no spares. This is both a feature and a shortfall. It have been nice to have a little more choice, but in other games with vast arrays of abilities to choose from I typically narrow in on my favorites and use them to the exclusion of all others.

Using the abilities you do have access to is exceptionally satisfying in Vikings. Each ability has a clear use, from engaging enemies in a line, to getting yourself surrounded before freezing them all in a frost nova and then shattering them with a flaming sweep of your sword. Even on lower difficulties, combat in Vikings feels like it has stakes, and while you may be safe taking on a single enemy at a time, tackling groups can be dangerous.

"When it’s not killing you with the environment, Vikings tries to do so with a wide variety of enemies."

The game also rewards risk taking, by granting XP bonuses for multi-kills and forcing you to plow through the levels thanks to the exposure mechanic. Many levels in Vikings take place in hostile environments, be they howling fjords or the poisonous realm of Utgard. The exposure mechanic puts a time limit on how long you can travel through a level, before you have to turn back to the safety of a fire or press on in haste to try and reach the next cave to shelter in. Most of the time, exposure just put a little pressure in the back of my mind as I moved through levels, but it did at times make for truly desperate fights and I tried to cut my way to safety, and I died more than once to the icy cold.

When it’s not killing you with the environment, Vikings tries to do so with a wide variety of enemies. Vikings successfully walks a fragile line between remaining true to the mythology it draws from, and providing players with a rich and diverse encounters and landscapes. Though averting Ragnarok is your primary goal, there are other smaller threats to contend with as well. In order to rebuild your own village you need to subjugate the other clans, and even as giants walk the hillside, crusaders from the south threaten to destroy what remains of your people.

All of these conflicts give players a wide variety of enemies to combat, without feeling like the narrative has lost focus, or that your character is being distracted from the apocalypse just over the horizon. It also means that the game takes place in a variety of landscapes, from frozen tundras to sandy islands and the depths of Hel.

The boss fights at the conclusion of each story mission are just as varied, sometimes taking the form of a single massive enemy, while others are represented by waves of opponents that seek to drown you in their numbers. Each boss fight had its own mechanics and systems to learn, and I almost always needed more than one attempt before I understood the boss well enough to take it down.

"Despite the balance that Vikings brings to player choice and the well-rounded experience that forms the game’s campaign, Vikings is not without its flaws."

Despite the balance that Vikings brings to player choice and the well-rounded experience that forms the game’s campaign, Vikings is not without its flaws. Aspects of the UI are clunky, making the act of selecting a piece of gear or the next ability to unlock a chore that you have to return to again and again. The game also suffers from a repetitive structure. Each raid consists of a zone to fight your way through, populated by enemies that can be dispatched with relative ease, concluded by a boss fight and the distribution of loot before returning to your village. This structure made for a worthwhile first play through, but discourages playing back through the game. Even if you vary your class, or bring a friend along, you’ll be fighting the same things, in the same ways, if you play the game more than once.

The story, while containing an interesting plot, is devoid of characters to sympathize with and feel connected to. The chieftain you play as is an impatient murder machine, who shows no interest in the advice of their counselors, and cares only for when and where they’ll next wet their blade.

Still, bugs hold Vikings back more so than any design flaws. During one boss fight, the boss stood still while I hacked away, while another scripted sequence caused the game to crash three times before I could successfully move on. Hit registration is inconsistent, and enemy health displays can be wildly inaccurate from time to time.

Vikings: Wolves of Midgard is a good game, with great balance in its character customization, and a fun, deep, and rewarding combat system as well as a compelling plot with enough variety of enemies and locations to keep the gameplay fresh across the fifteen hours it takes to complete the campaign. However a repetitive raid structure, and a distracting number of bugs keep the game from being a must buy.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox One.

WRC 6 begins with an introductory drive through two of the game’s stages, using each turn, bend and straightaway to explain a core system. Pull R1 to accelerate, R2 to break, press “B” to pull the handbrake. That’s about all you get and it’s about all you need to get going in WRC 6.

Single player features a variety of modes. Quick Game allows you to craft a stage yourself, choosing where to race, the conditions, the time of day, as well as which car and driver you’ll use. It’s a good way to jump straight into the game, and enjoy your favorite stage.  Custom Championship allows you to set up the championship of your dreams, featuring the rallies of your choice. You can play through the whole series, and then challenge your friends to match you on all your favorite stages.

"World Rally Championship 6 is a fun, accessible racing game, but it stops the moment it has established a core experience."

Career mode is primary draw of WRC 6’s single player experience. In career mode, you’ll sign a contract with a team, joining their roster for a few seasons to compete with their cars and under their colors. Each team has a strategy, some favor speed over all, while some value keeping the car intact, while still others are willing to adjust their strategy to your play style. Once you’ve signed on with a team, you’ll compete in the championship for however many seasons you contract dictates. Conformity to team goals will improve team moral, and make your team more efficient in the pit stops between stages. If you fail to meet your teams goals at the end of your contract, you’ll need to find employment elsewhere, but struggling drivers needn’t worry too much, other teams are always looking to hire.

Career mode is the standout feature of WRC 6. It gives each race stakes and consequences, and helps to frame the driving in a way that breaks up the monotony of merely transferring into the next stage or rally. Despite this, it doesn’t go far beyond giving each race a little context. The maintenance area does not change from rally to rally, there’s no visual customization of your cars or uniforms based on your achievements, nor do the personalities of your crew factor in any way. At the end of each season, you’ve either performed well enough to renew your contract or not, with very little consequence either way.

The unfulfilled potential of career mode is mitigated somewhat by WRC 6’s weekly challenges. Each week a pair of challenges ask players to drive under specific conditions and modifiers. Players compete to earn points, with their largest point margin being earned from their first try. If you’re unsatisfied with your rank after your first run, you can go through again to accrue points and bump your position on the leaderboard. In addition to taking place on a specific stage, with specific cars, there are also modifiers, like a race without pace notes, which make this mode even more challenging.

These features make WRC 6 a solid rally driving game. The cars are beautifully modeled, and they handle well. The game is accessible to new drivers, while retaining a high skill ceiling to reach for. At the end of my first season in career mode, I was just beginning to really understand how my car handled, and enjoyed improving on that understanding and pushing myself to eek out every bit of speed I could as I slid into tight turns. The game is particularly satisfying when you can nail a sequence of turns just right.

"The cars are beautifully modeled, and they handle well. The game is accessible to new drivers, while retaining a high skill ceiling to reach for."

To compliment the excellent handling of the cars, WRC 6 has fourteen rallies to participate in, across five continents. These rallies feature a wide variety of stages, from short winding arenas, to switchback mountain passes, to marathon dirt tracks. Playing across the game’s rallies never felt repetitive, and the variable weather and time-of-day settings made the already wide selection feel even vaster.

Where WRC 6 succeeds in establishing a strong core experience, it struggles in the details. While car models are beautifully rendered, the environments you drive through are decidedly not. Grassy fields are monochromatic, trees are amalgamations of two-dimensional cutouts, and boulders simply look silly. The game’s skyboxes are flat and uninteresting, and are mostly vague extensions of the closer, equally boring landscape.  I don’t often care about graphics, but the low quality in WRC 6 lent the game a strange two-dimensionality, and I sometimes found myself hurtling head on into obstacles because I wasn’t able to discern the depth that was present. This problem was compounded in night stages, where three-dimensional context for what I was approaching was largely removed.

In addition to its graphical issues, World Rally Championship has numerous problems with consistency. Roadside features that seem like they should be soft turn out to be immovable. I’ve run into barbwire fences a number of times, expecting to be capable of removing myself from the tangle, only to find that I’m boxed in and unable to escape. The penalties for going off road are also woefully unclear. Manually resetting the car to escape entanglement sometimes adds a penalty of just one second, while other times it can be up to eight. Furthermore, sometimes just dipping a wheel off road has been enough to trigger an automatic reset, while at other times I’ve been able to abandon the course for extended periods, driving parallel to the road while I try to figure out the most efficient way back on.

"Where WRC 6 succeeds in establishing a strong core experience, it struggles in the details."

None of this is helped by the co-driver’s pace notes, which are a collection of sound bites cobbled together so hastily that they often trip over each other, and de-sync with the course so that as you approach a hairpin you’re told you’re coming up to a gentle “right-6.”

WRC 6 has a solid core experience, but feeble attention to detail and non-existent reward system make replaying the game, or sticking with the career modes past a few seasons a dubious proposition. The game feels more like content-as-marketing for the real World Rally Championship than a game that was meant to compete with other racing games on its own merit. Fans of the real world championship will enjoy the fidelity with which WRC 6 recreates the stages and cars of the championship, but if you aren’t already a fan there’s little reason for WRC 6 to be the game you pick up. Other rally games have more to offer audiences that are looking for a complete gaming experience.

This game was reviewed on Xbox One.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Do I need it day one?

Failing to ask this question has been the downfall of many a gamer. They’ve seen the trailers, they’ve read the interviews, they know that in a year when someone sees them wearing pre-order bonus armor they’ll feel like a true badass. Trouble is, if you buy the game before anyone has played it, nobody can warn you that the hype isn’t real. So ask yourself if you really need the game day one. For some of us there are games like that, the sequels to our favorites that we’re going to play regardless of what reviewers say. But for many new games coming to the market, there’s no reason to buy it before the reviews come out. If you don’t have to have it day one, maybe wave off for a bit and find out if it’s worth the money.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

New look, same mechanics.

While Injustice 2 features substantial visual upgrades from the original, most of the game’s core mechanics remain the same. Players will still make use of character traits, clashes, stage transitions and intractable environments in order to dominate their foes. For fans of the first game it’s a sign that the core mechanics remain the same, but if you’re burning out on Injustice, the sequel may not be the breath of fresh air you were hoping for.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Prey is neither a remake nor a sequel, but a reimagining.

The new Prey will not mirror its predecessor. Nor is it a sequel. Instead it is a sort of reboot, a reimagining of what the game might have been like, had the devs had access to modern gameplay technology. Prey will be thematically similar to the original, featuring powerful aliens, semi-magical abilities, and a puzzle component. Fans of the original who aren’t looking for a straight re-master will likely find the new game well worth the wait.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Automata is set after the events of Nier, but is not closely connected.

Automata will share the world with its predecessor, but the story of the two games will be largely disconnected. Automata occurs at an indeterminate point in time after the first game ends. Gamers looking for a direct sequel to the first game may be disappointed, but the game will likely feel more welcoming to new players as a result.