REVIEW OF GAMING

From George Best, through Gazza, to Adriano, every footballing generation has its own cautionary tale. These mercurial talents are so full of promise, capable of unbelievable skill and destined for even greater glories. Then, usually due to the temptations precipitated by fame, and possibly dispensed as a liquid or powder, the player self destructs, ends up broke, sick or worse. But surely that won't befall EA’s seemingly immortal FIFA series. Well, probably not so long as its rival keeps making mistakes like the Aston Villa defence. Remember Villa? Nonetheless, it feels like there’s a growing risk that FIFA will never quite hit the gameplay peak that its sumptuous off-the-pitch features deserve. Which is slightly frustrating, but far from a disaster. As expected, this season FIFA is better. It’s better than FIFA 16, and it’s also better than Pro Evo 2017—or it  certainly is on the PC . It’s better than a frozen Sunday morning on a five-a-side pitch. FIFA 17 is bigger, more beautif...

Like many, I was surprised when Hitman was announced as episodic. Surprised, but not worried. Story has never been the main focus of the Hitman series. That changed for Hitman: Absolution, and I—like many series fans—didn't much care for that game. In deciding to release each mission individually, IO seemed to be signalling that this new Hitman was back to being a standalone series of sandbox murder playgrounds. Everything fans loved about Blood Money, but larger and with more options. Looking back, that's pretty much what we got. Hitman, like Blood Money before it, does have a story, but it's a tale told in the margins—in post-mission cutscenes, overheard dialogue, and, later on, specific mission objectives that nonetheless follow the regular template. That's good, because the template works. There is a target, or two, or four, each with their own routes and security. Your job, as bald killer clone 47, is to assassinate them. You can, in many cases, just shoot you...

If the Walking Dead TV show can’t decide whether it wants to be a dark, maudlin drama or a schlocky, gory thrill-ride, Telltale’s interactive adaptation has established a more consistent voice that allows room for a bit of both without leaving you suffering from tonal whiplash. Its problem is that between the comic books, the TV series and the games, the cyclical nature of its narrative has become ever more apparent. Still, if a riff is catchy enough then it can bear a certain degree of repetition—and though some of its scenarios are familiar, Season Three opens with a double-header that shows The Walking Dead at its best, with characters you can care about, a couple of genuinely shocking surprises and a clutch of well-staged set-pieces. It certainly helps that Telltale’s new engine finally feels fit for purpose. While Batman still had its share of performance issues, there’s little to grumble about in Ties That Bind: everything runs that much smoother, with snappier transitions tha...

Ethan Winters drives deep into the Louisiana bayou to find his missing wife. We follow his car from above, a tiny speck against a vast expanse of remote, isolated swampland. The setting sun casts a gloomy orange glow over the landscape, giving you a creeping sense of foreboding. If you get lost or go missing—or worse—out here, who would ever know? It’s a beautiful, evocative shot, and almost certainly an homage to the Torrance family’s yellow car snaking through the Colorado mountains at the beginning of The Shining. But Resident Evil has always been inspired by horror cinema, even if recent entries in the series have been more Uwe Boll than Stanley Kubrick. This understated opening immediately sets the tone for Resident Evil 7. It’s a return to the atmospheric, slow-burning horror of the original, with a few nods to contemporary games like Alien: Isolation and Amnesia. The shift to a first-person perspective might suggest it’s a bold reinvention of the series, in the same way ...