You’re moving too fast

This month’s Play crop is a bit of a contradiction. Games are all about progress: we expect something new for our money, for more powerful hardware to take us to places we haven’t seen before. Yet this month brings an object lesson in the follies of simply racing off toward the horizon without a crystal-clear plan for what to do when you get there.

We had high hopes for Anthem (p102), and indeed it has its moments – sporadic little flashes of the brilliance we had hoped for from BioWare’s answer to Destiny. Yet by and large, the game we’d dreamt of is left to dwell in our heads. It has been rushed out the door, certainly, a technical mess of a game that clearly needed more development time. Yet the game is also built on questionable structural foundations in its design. It’s a loot game with boring loot, and nothing of value to do when you get it.

By contrast, Devil May Cry 5 (p106) is a game of far simpler ambitions: to do what came before all over again, but better, and more beautifully. But this is a series with its own bumpy history. By paying close heed to its own past, the future for Capcom’s series looks bright.

So, just give ’em more of what they like, right? Sure, providing you ignore Crackdown 3 (p110). While charming in places, it is the same charm the first two games gave us on Xbox 360 a decade ago, and a game that exploded onto the scene with a bold promise of a cloud-powered future finally limps over the line feeling more like an earnest tribute act than anything else. If all this shows us anything, it’s that game development is no binary choice of sticking or twisting – a shame, perhaps, since that’s one area in which BioWare’s games have long excelled.