4 GAMES TO PLAY ...
Gravel
PC, Xbox One, PS4
Gravel is fast, bright and hectic in the arcadey mould of Sega Rally. Yet the expansive career mode, extensive track list and detailed tuning options puts it right up there with modern racers like Project Cars or Forza. It might not have the same flair but by encouraging players to be both impetuous and skilful, Gravel hits on a winning formula, and one that provides the now customary rewind feature with a meaningful weight not often found elsewhere – redo and rescue your race position but at the cost of valuable style points. With gritty, challenging opponents, engaging race venues and satisfyingly tight controls, Gravel is a plucky young upstart well worth checking out.
Surviving Mars
PC, Xbox One, PS4
At first, Surviving Mars will be familiar to any gamer with experience of base building, resource gathering and exploring uncharted territory. But once Mars starts to feel like home, things get very different. Surviving Mars has an exciting variety of pre-plotted “Mysteries” that kick off wholly new scenarios for established colonies to navigate, from contact with strange 2001-esque structures to episodes of political unrest or threats from diseases. Meanwhile, discovering esoteric technology might enable you to control the minds of your colonists or prevent them growing old and infirm. With such a combination of innovative challenges and proven structure, Surviving Mars has an allure worthy of the red planet.
The Trail: Frontier Challenge
Switch
As a penniless wanderer making landfall in The Trail: Frontier Challenge, you have one thing to do: push the thumbstick forward and hike to the next camp. A diverse collection of gaming elements spring up to surround your footpounding, from crafting or cooking to completing challenges and earning upgrades, but The Trail is unusual in amounting to little more than an almost crude simulation of walking outdoors. You’ll see forests and mountains, snowdrifts and rivers. You can chop trees, hunt rabbits or gather berries. It could have been a charming, hypnotic handheld diversion, but sadly the jerky frame rate ruins the experience.
Florence ipad/iphone
Without spoiling the plot, Florence is about how our relationships entwine with our lives. It’s definitely more story than game. Yet Florence boasts some impressive interactive design, with a careful focus not merely on how interactive the story should be but on how each interaction, each minigame, should create the story itself. Making small talk, for instance, involves building a puzzle, and as the characters gel and become closer, the puzzles become easier. Or, alternatively, the speed a puzzle is completed insinuates the flow of a later argument. What disappoints is how this astutely unconventional approach is wedded to a narrative that challenges no conventions, leaving Florence with a pleasant but ultimately fleeting appeal.