Some long overdue game opinions

This month I 'ave been mostly playing:

SKYRIM

I decided to give this a go despite me finding Oblivion unbearably tedious. After all, holding up into endless unconvincing wilderness is only fun for so long. I'm pleased to report that Skyrim is a step up from its predecessor on every front, the endless landscape is peppered far more liberally with points of interest and the plot isn't an utter snooze fest, although those expecting the sweeping operatics of Mass Effect et al will be disappointed. That being said, Skyrim still didn't manage to hold my attention for long - I gave up staring into the jaws of a dragon that my woefully underpowered character just could not best, and I didn't fancy ploughing through hours of tedious fetch quests to level up and retry.

DEVIL MAY CRY

Following disappointing financial results, many gaming news outlets have been reporting on Capcom's very public supposition that it may have been overzealous in outsourcing its IP to external development teams. I'll certainly concede that the results of their doing so have been mixed (case in point; Resident Evil 6), but one shining example of how well outsourcing can work is British developer Ninja Theory's westernised take on Devil May Cry; it's slick, stylish and gorgeous, and an excellent halfway house been traditional Devil May Cry sensibilities and the post-Dark Knight expectations of Western audiences. Gameplay is enormous fun, even if it's really more of the same. My only real misgiving about Ninja Theory's work is the needless dropping of the f-bomb during cutscenes, which feels tacky and forced

Devil May Cry missed its sales targets by a fair margin, so if Ninja Theory will get the chance to make a sequel is anyone's guess. Here's hoping.

TOMB RAIDER 

Games have come light years since a blocky, pyramid-boobed Lara Croft took her first pensive steps into crude caves of right angles in the mid 1990s, and this recently released reboot is a stark reminder of that fact. Tomb Raider's gameplay mechanics read like a 'greatest hits' of this gaming generation's most overused cliches - upgradable weapons, ability points, a  cover system, quick time events, Arkham Asylum/City style inter-goon banter, to name but a few. Naughty Dog's Uncharted series covered little new ground, but offered enough personality to effectively mask it. Tomb Raider does not, however, and is little more than a fun, serviceable parody of what has gone before.