What We Played #139: The Playroom, Crysis 3 & Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

Wandering around continental Europe this week has separated me from my PS4 but I have dragged my PS Vita along for company. It’s been subjected to being swabbed for explosives and careful examination under x-rays, being surrounded by dense rubber in its case it does look a bit suspect I have to admit, but is none the worse for it.

What this has done is give me the opportunity to see how well Remote Play works. I have to say that I am pretty impressed so far as given a moderately good Internet link it has enabled me to log into Warframe to get my daily bonuses though there’s been enough lag to put me off trying to actually play a mission. If I had a game to try that was less dependent upon reaction speed and reliable hitting of L2 and R2, which are mapped to small areas of the Vita’s rear touch panel, I suspect it would work quite well despite being some 4 milliseconds away from home as the photon flies.

Dear ol’ Tuffcub is still racking up the hours, kills and completed challenges in Killzone: Shadow Fall.  He’s also been having some ‘unsuitable for minors’ fun with PS4’s Playroom and its second-screen app Toymaker. Sony didn’t have the kind of toys that he’s been making in mind for that!

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Ni No Kuni and King Oddball, a review of which is incoming, have all seen some screen time as have “LEGO: Marvel Heroes on PS4 which is great fun and Don’t Starve which is not”. In the latter he “wandered about, picked some berries, annoyed some bees and not much else happened so I turned it off”.

As for Need for Speed: Rivals on PS4, “it’s pants. You can barely drive an inch without a cop car trying to take you down. What a stupid game mechanic.” Which is hard to disagree with.  The ‘Master’ levels of Resogun have also been causing a degree of consternation and resulted in him “swearing an awful lot”.

DanToo has just finished his exams so is looking forward to getting some serious amounts of gaming in over the coming weeks but has still managed to find time this week for some Crysis 3. “It’s bloody brilliant to be honest. It looks fantastic and feels more polished than the second. Loving the bow too.”

Obviously his exams haven’t kept him too busy as he also “played the usual races on F1 2013, and have taken over Real Madrid on Football Manager 2013. I’ve lost 4 matches and won 16 but somehow I’m close to getting sacked. Strange one that.”

Like all good snake oil salesman Blair is peddling his own brand nonsense this week:

I’ve played The Stanley Parable. I wrote about it at length and did some third person nonsense because that’s what the game is all about. Well, that and finding all of the different outcomes and endings. It’s one of the best games I’ve played recently.

I then thought I’d be a bit disappointed by BioShock Infinite’s DLC – Burial at Sea Episode 1 – but was pleasantly surprised. It looks wonderful, Rapture is really a beautiful place, and it was great to explore it again. It really felt quite short and the gameplay was much the same, but the story was brilliant and Levine managed to take me by surprise with a brilliant ending once again.

I’ve also played OlliOlli, which I can’t talk about until next week.

Which is probably as close to a cliffhanger as we get around these parts. Stefan has played through the “eminently enjoyable” Broken Age and thanks to the ditching of the daft embargo you can read all about it in his review. He’s also played some more Planetary Annihilation where he “can now hand it to the one note AI, but get thoroughly smashed by anything vaguely human.”

Aran has been concentrating solely on Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag this week and has scoured the surface for chests and animus fragments leaving him just the wrecks still to explore. He’d like to get the platinum but is concerned that as “one of the social trophies relies solely on luck” that it’ll take a while.

Last up this week is Dom who has been playing Mario Party: Island Tour for our review and notes that “it wasn’t really something to repeat on your own – it improves a bit with some other 3DS owning mates but not much!”  On a happier note he completed his first PS4 game, Knack, and says that if he “didn’t have a pile of other games to play I’d just carry on with it on a higher difficulty having really enjoyed it”.

At the top of the Knack-preventing pile was Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag so he’s made a start on that and reckons that “so far it’s great, the graphics are awesome on PS4, though in some cases they’re so good they hurt my already poor eyesight!”

That’s it from us so now it’s time for you to join in and share what you’ve been playing…