Top 5 games right now
#1 Grand Theft Auto
The best version (so far) of one of last-gen's finest games, GTA 5's remaster is testament to how much difference a graphical overhaul can make, even just a year after release. Rockstar's ability to render worlds that are caricatures of real cities, yet somehow more authentic than shot-for-shot recreations, is based on details. With this remaster those details have been refined, expanded, and improved.
The headline new feature is the first-person viewpoint, accessible at any time by cycling through camera options using the touchpad. What seems at first to be a gimmick is in fact the best way to appreciate the sheer amount of work that Rockstar has put into this re-release: it's as close as possible to not just the look of LA, but also the feel. Down at eye-level, you get to grips with what Los Santos is really like. Those of you that have been to its real-life inspiration will already know: a combination of beauty and despair, a desert metropolis where parts of it reach for the stars, while others are left to rot in the sun.
Walking around the world is a strange experience, familiar yet alien, digital tourism with a side of ultra-violence. And it is ultra – fist-fighting and shooting in first-person brings a whole new immediacy to your actions, and one that may very well make you think twice about partaking in them.
There's a weight and force behind your movements – it's not perfect, sometimes feeling sluggish (we recommend turning head bobbing off – just one of the many control and camera options so you can tweak first and third-person combinations to your desires). But when you connect with the world, be that with a punch or being thrown clear from a motorcycle wreck, you feel it rather than just witness it.
It may seem odd to be this affected by seeing through your character's eyes, especially since it's been 21 years since Doom came out and popularised a first-person revolution. In that time we must have killed more people in first-person than Bret Easton Ellis, but whereas in some games you feel like a gun attached to a floating camera, here you feel like a person on the street, connected to your surroundings. Falling out of the sky after bailing out of a plane and forgetting my parachute, the horizon spins horrifically: disorientating, panic-inducing, physically authentic. That's how solid an anchor it is to the world around you.
Rockstar could have just tacked the first-person on, of course, but again it's the attention paid to the finer details that makes its world so appealing. Cornering on a motorcycle will see you lean into it, shifting your weight on the bike. Planes can be flown by reading their working instruments. On the ground, you're closer than ever before to the detritus and overbearing infrastructure that plagues LA – discarded Big Gulps, cracked and potted streets, sun-damaged and crime-addled neighbourhoods wrecked with graffiti and gangs, puke-neon tinged car dealerships – are rendered with a realism not yet seen before.
This is made possible, of course, by the jump to 1080p and the extra grunt the new machines offer. GTA 5 was a beautiful game on 360 and PS3, but on PS4 it's something else entirely. Walking the streets of Los Santos and walking the streets of LA are essentially the same experience, thanks to the superb texture work (generally – some interiors can look a little flat), much improved draw distance and pedestrian and car density. As impressive – and important – is the superb lighting: Rockstar has nailed daytime LA's sense of unreality, a place so dedicated to artifice that that even the sky seems fake. That the frame rate was rarely troubled in my time with it so far is scarcely believable.
Other changes are smaller, but feed into the overall picture. New songs blare from the radio, and the touchpad can be used to to cycle through items you've acquired, such as clothing. While the campaign itself remains the same, it's apparently been tweaked to reduce frustration in certain sections (although it must be said that we did not encounter any moments that seemed much easier).
By now you'll have almost certainly made your mind up on GTA V, and probably this remaster as well. If you enjoyed it the first time around, you'll love it even more. It's worth double-dipping just to walk around in the world.
If the somewhat pat dialogue, misogynistic leads, poor representations of women and frequent hard violence didn't appeal before, they won't now. But while nothing has changed in the story these characters tell in cutscenes, the new tech has changed a lot about the story you make out of them.
Game Stats
Grand Theft Auto 5
- GTA Online now much more stable...
- Graphical enhancements are superb.
- First-person adds a lot to exploring Los Santos.
- ...even if it sometimes falls over.
#2 Far Cry 4
You need time to deal with Far Cry 4. A lot of time.
You certainly ideally want more than the four days we were allowed with Ubisoft’s new open world shooter. This isn’t to say you won’t be able to finish the game’s main campaign in the time we were allotted to play it in, because we did. That’s just to say that that there’s so much more going on in Far Cry 4 beyond its narrative that it could keep players glued to it for weeks. Possibly months.
The reason for this is that Far Cry 4 puts a premium on distraction. Players may set out intent on taking part in a story mission, but on their way to a checkpoint they’ll invariably run across a radar tower or an enemy-held outpost or even a herd of animals whose pelts they need to unlock a weapon slot and all of a sudden, their original motivation goes flying out the window.
BIG COUNTRY
Far Cry 4 is a true open world game in that it entices – in fact, flat out encourages – players to go off piste. This is a game that offers unbridled freedom as a given. There’s a story anchoring the action, but the best moments in Far Cry 4 are those that players create for themselves – like riding an elephant through an enemy outpost or escaping from insurmountable odds by leaping off a cliff and deploying a wingsuit. Far Cry 4 has a decent plot, sure, but its biggest strength is the fact that, for the most part, it doesn’t get in the way of players experimenting.
The game’s map compliments an open-ended approach. It’s filled to bursting with activities, from radar towers to unlock, to outposts to raid to races to take part in and more. Once players engage in any of these missions, a laundry list of new activities opens up. The hardest task players are likely to encounter in Far Cry 4 is to stay focused on the task at hand.
READ MORE: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare review
WHAT'S MY MOTIVATION?
The story of Far Cry 4 centres on Ajay Ghale and his quest to scatter his mother’s ashes in the country of her birth, Kyrat. Upon arriving, he’s snapped up by the local dictator – a flamboyant psycho named Pagan Min – from whose clutches he quickly escapes. Ajay soon comes into contact with Kyrat’s freedom fighter movement, The Golden Path, and it’s here the narrative starts to splinter.
The Golden Path has two leaders, Amita and Sabal, and both of them have very different ideas on how best to bring down Pagan Min’s brutal rule of Kyrat. Sabal is a conservative; while he puts a premium on the value of human life, he’s also committed to bringing Kyrat back to what he sees as traditional values. Amita, for her part has no time for Sabal’s borderline sexist outlook, but she’s not above taking over Pagan Min’s drug running operations if it means schools and hospitals can be built.
There’s no clear moral compass between the pair of them and the narrative is made all the more compelling by the fact that the player is eventually forced to pick a side. In Kyrat there are no easy choices and the player will likely have to reflect on the path they’ve chosen in the closing moment of the game.
Game Stats
Far Cry 4
- Compulsively playable.
- Kyrat is the best Far Cry world yet.
- Omnipotent AI at times.
- Lots of insta-fail stealth missions.
#3 The Last of Us Remastered
Describing The Last of Us as a massive success would be a bit of an understatement. Not only did it sell a bajillion copies, it earned over 200 Game of the Year awards and a Best Game Bafta. And let’s not forget that 2013 also featured a little-known title called Grand Theft Auto 5.
In The Last of Us Remastered the already technically spectacular PS3 game gets thePS4 treatment, with higher resolution graphics and a 60 frames per second refresh rate. Not only that, but it bundles in bonus extras such as director commentaries, multiplayer map packs and the excellent Left Behind story DLC.
If you played it the first time around you’ve now got the perfect excuse to play through again, and anyone who missed it on PS3 is in for a gaming experience like no other.
READ MORE: Our original The Last of Us PS3 review
FIRST OF ALL...
Hopefully you’ve heard of The Last of Us by now, but just in case, it’s a third-person action adventure from Naughty Dog, the makers of the fabulous Uncharted series.
It's much darker than the Indiana Jones-like adventures of Nathan Drake, instead casting you as the grizzled Joel, one of the few human survivors left after a virus has turned most of population into zombie-like mutants. For reasons too interesting to spoil, Joel has to escort the young Ellie across a ravaged United States, using improvised weapons and stealth against terrifying zombies and the often violent and predatory remains of humanity.
That’s the broad setup for what is a heavily story-driven game, and thanks mainly to the relationship between Joel and Ellie, it’s a truly exceptional, emotional, sometimes humourous, sometimes harrowing, always thought-provoking narrative. The lines between right and wrong are blurred, combat is frantic, desperate and always about survival. Essentially, there's no other game story with this sort of depth or maturity.
It’s so good, in fact, that it’s currently being turned into a movie through producer Sam Raimi, and he’s really not going to have to do much to it for the movie to be a rip-roaring success.
READ MORE: The 30 Best FPS Games Ever
PIXEL PERFECT
The Last of Us on PlayStation 3 was already a handsome game - in fact, it was arguably the best-looking game ever released on the console. But the PS4 still offers a significant performance boost.
The headline improvements are higher resolution character models, improved shadows and lighting, longer draw distance and generally improved detail. There’s still some texture pop-in to be seen when you’re out in the open, but otherwise this is a gorgeous-looking game, and one that really does look as though it was made for next-gen consoles. One of TLOU’s greatest strengths was its gritty realism, and that’s taken to another level by the enhanced detail of the next-gen remaster.
FRAME, SET AND MATCH
While the improved graphics look lovely, it’s the higher frame rate that has the biggest impact on how The Last of Us actually plays on PS4. By default, the game now runs at 60 frames per second, doubling the original game’s 30 frames per second on PS3. The game feels a whole lot smoother than it did before, in particular during combat, where the controls could sometimes feel a bit twitchy before.
Sadly, there is very occasionally still a bit of slowdown in Remastered, so there’s an option to lock the action at 30 frames per second, with the added benefit of improved shadows on this setting. We’d definitely stick with the 60fps setting, but it’s nice to have the option.
Game Stats
#4 FIFA 15
World football tends to move in cycles – and as the FIFA games attempt to replicate the sport as closely as possible, EA’s annual soccer sim must also move on.
If FIFA 14 was Barcelona’s tiki-taka, death by 1000 passes, FIFA 15 is Germany’s more explosive World-Cup-winning evolution of it. Like Spain at Euro 2012, FIFA 14’s patient style was considered boring by some. In its quest for realism it had lost some of the breathless excitement that makes football such an absorbing game – and that’s the focus of FIFA 15.
HEAVY METAL FOOTBALL
FIFA 15 feels like it’s been in a few extra training sessions to sharpen up. Its reactions are faster and it’s found an extra yard of pace since last season. It maintains the realism but injects a bit more ‘heavy metal’ as Jurgen Klopp would call it. Players seem more responsive to movements of the left stick, with a last-minute nudge to either side often enough to beat a defender or draw the foul when running at speed and if the momentum is with you. With the right player it’s also more effective from a standstill, shifting the player’s weight one way and then bursting the other past the defender.
In fact, weight and momentum play a bigger part in general. Ground passes are zippier, particularly over longer distances, meaning you have to be more accurate with them to keep play flowing. Players now use all parts of their boots to nudge, flick and lay the ball off, although you will have to get used to giving them a touch more power. Stringing together a few first-touch passes is hugely satisfying, particularly because it often feels on the edge of all falling apart, a bit like pulling off an improvised combo in a beat 'em up.
- Possession tackles.
- Great presentation.
- Goalkeepers in desperate need of balancing.
- Single-player modes a rehash of last year.
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