Forza Horizon
Microsoft's premium racer steers away from its traditional model of a simulated driving experience here and turns a corner into open-world adventure with a fitting narrative. Players drive around, competing in events to gather XP, that unlock new vehicles and races. It feels more arcade-like than its Forza 4 brethren, but that makes it more up my street all the more. Lest we forget, it still has the realistic Forza DNA running throughout.
The showcase events – where you'll race planes and air balloons – are immense as are the various high-end vehicles you can pick up rusting away in secluded parts of the map. There are vast areas to explore, plenty to discover, and tons of content to get your money's worth.
Online modes are where it's at, though, with most of my game time spent on a neat hide and seek feature. Overall, it's definitely one of the better racing games I've played recently. Handling is more forgiving, speeds are exhilarating and graphically, the game is a stunner.
Hitman: Absolution
Agent 47 returns after a six year hiatus in by far one of the best Hitman games to date. As usual, the stealthy skinhead sneaks through missions, brutally assassinates targets and ticks off objectives in numerous ways.
Players have the freedom to be creative and make each murder all the more majestic. Spike someone's coffee, plant explosives, or simply whip out the garrotte and throttle before stealing the victim's clothes, hiding the body, and wandering off without casting suspicion. The formula is tried and tested, and it looks like Square Enix has done plenty of the latter here, because this is a far more polished product than any previous Hitman ever was.
The story itself leaves much to be desired, but the hugely inventive level design is impressive, varying enough to keep you gripped all night. There are a few tedious moments when trying to evade guards – that made me wish Agent 47 had Dishonored's powers of possession – but Hitman Absolution sits far more in the realm of realism than Bethesda's shank-fest and it's easy to start feeling like quite the assassin yourself. I love it. Absolution takes the sick-minded stealth genre to new levels and delivers in style.
Next page: Jet Set Radio HD
COMMENTS
Re: Pathetic
Ok, it's true that most of you will probably have not "missed" Hitman, with the overkill of advertisements recently. But it is still one of the better games out there released in the last few months.
Don't be too misled by our headline, these roundups are meant to wrap up any (good) games that we haven't managed in full multi-page reviews. There's loads of average junk around and we've missed out plenty of titles.
If we only covered small indie titles and completely unheard of console games from the last 2/3 months, I doubt we'd even have 10 (let alone 20 here) that are all rated 70% or more.
Just for the record, the new Hitman rocks! It has drained at least £30 worth of electric at home in the last week, I swear.
Pathetic
Expect far better from The Reg than a bunch of affiliate links to massive brand games that no one's likely to have missed. Seriously, I'm trying to avoid Hitman, which has only been out a week or so and is still doing TV ads.
Very poor show.
Popular games you will have seen and may buy through Amazon
to earn us some affiliate money on our tag rhtopten-20, in time for xmas.
Repeat, Repeat
Virtually all of these are sequels, what about some review of original games or do those not exist anymore ?
Our last "games you may have missed" piece back in August included Journey. Great game and it still gets played often in my household!!
