Danger Zone (2017, PS4)

In an era of remakes, remasters, sequels and spiritual successors, there’s never been a better time to peruse your gaming catalogue and wonder which ageing franchise deserves a return. After playing Danger Zone, I am confident that we need a new Burnout game in the coming years. Unfortunately, I am also confident that Danger Zone simply will not scratch that itch.

Danger Zone serves as a standalone version of the ‘Crash Mode’ feature in the later Burnout games. You drive into traffic and try to cause as much damage as possible. As the pile-up grows higher, so does your score. Eventually you can detonate an explosion and use in-air controls to steer the wreckage into yet more cars.

In theory, DZ has all the necessary parts to make this work. Some former Burnout devs are on board. There are cars. There are busy intersections. There are explosions. There are no drivers, thank god, so you can enjoy all this unadulterated violence without feeling awkward.

But to say these are the only parts you need to recreate the magic of Burnout is to sell the franchise very short indeed. In hindsight, Crash Mode was a fun diversion from what Burnout was really about; racing. It was a clever way to give players a new objective other than racing from A to B, and it also let them maximise the explosions-per-second ratio. It was a wonderful compliment to the whole experience, which was ultimately still about driving fast and ramming other racers off the road – not Average Joe commuting to work.

When the controller is in your hand, Danger Zone feels like Burnout. Purely in terms of second-to-second gameplay, it’s a reasonable approximation. But unlike any Burnout game I ever played, I found my attention waning after 30 minutes. Very quickly, a routine is established in how you get an ideal score on each map; you need to bounce from one ‘smashbreaker’ collectible to another, each offering an additional explosion and bounce. The extra bounce lets you hit more cars and grab more cash bonuses – and the smashbreakers are usually positioned in such way that there is a perfect line through each level. This is similar to the classic Burnout levels, which were often structured in such a way that you had to try and navigate your twisted wreck into as many new lanes of traffic as possible, to ensure the highest level of collateral.

But, again, these were fresh objectives sprinkled in between more traditional races, and thus the formula wasn’t exposed as quickly.

It isn’t just the variety of Burnout that is stripped away, however. DZ has a bafflingly dry presentation, utterly soul-less and quiet. It feels like a proof of concept whipped together to impress investors and secure funding for an actual game. Literally every level takes place in a sterile warehouse environment, with no music, and no vehicle selection options. You drive a white sedan into traffic, to silence, and if you fall off the track, you’re told the ‘simulation’ is terminated – I guess suggesting this is some kind of fake warehouse – a somehow less exciting venue than a regular warehouse.

While the mid-2000s pop-rock of the PS2 games isn’t exactly hip any more, DZ opting to not include music of any variety is simply confusing. The title has a humble price tag, so maybe major-label music rights were a no-go, but anything would have been better than this.

The same can be said for location variety and some unlockable car models. At a budget price, this didn’t need to be Grand Theft Auto proportions — but it needed to be more than this. The graphics are dated, with completely unremarkable destruction modeling and physics, so at a certain point you have to ask what exactly did they spend money on?

The price is an interesting sting in the tale for this game. As you can tell; I didn’t really like it. But it does play ok. There are fleeting moments of Burnout nostalgia. Some levels, especially in the third tier, are actually kind of creative. They use the ‘simulation’ narrative to do away with real life constraints and have some fun with the level design. At just over a tenner (EU), with about 80 minutes of gameplay, there are worse investments. If you are absolutely starved for Burnout-esque content and looking for something cheap – it’s a tentative recommendation. Just don’t expect to be satiated for long. In some ways, Danger Zone has only worsened my pining for the legendary racing series to rise from the ashes (and glass, and rubber, and steel).

Charlotte Flair vs. Becky Lynch vs. Tamina vs. Carmella vs. Natalya (WWE, Money in the Bank 2017)

Watch this match here. (Sub required, $9.99 monthly)

This was the first ever women’s Money in the Bank ladder match.

As is often the case with WWE, most of the talk surrounding this match centred on the finish, so I’d be remiss to start anywhere else. For those who didn’t see it, James Ellsworth, Carmella’s squeeze, knocked Becky Lynch off the ladder, climbed it himself, unhooked the titular briefcase, and tossed it to a prone Carmella on the mat, who was then declared the winner.

There’s a lot to wrap your head around here, but your tolerance for this finish will vary depending on how much stock you invested in the idea of this as a ‘historic’ match – and I don’t refer to it as such because WWE chose to use that verbiage. Bar the odd street fight here or there on very rare occasions, weapons-based gimmick matches were not the domain of women in WWE until very recently. To participate in a heavily promoted ladder match, one of the most popular stipulations in all of wrestling, after decades of men making their names this way, is a cool milestone – and an important one. I can 100% understand anyone who was frustrated with this finish if they were hoping for a more… traditional conclusion. I think people, especially WWE’s long-suffering female fans, wanted something that would be used in video packages for years to come. They wanted their version of Razor Ramon standing atop the ladder at Wrestlemania X with two Intercontinental titles. As Carmella herself alluded to on Twitter, they wanted their ‘boyhood dream’ moment. They didn’t get it. They didn’t even get the simple visual of a woman, be she heel, face or whatever, climbing the ladder and retrieving an object. That seems like a pretty low bar for WWE to miss.

Were this not a ‘first time ever’ occurence, I don’t think I or anyone else would care as much. The finish was a new idea to get some heat on a young heel, for a show that is sorely lacking one on the female side, so that much I can get on board with.

It’s an overly-cutesy finish, which I’ve grown to hate, and that’s WWE’s bread and butter these days. Any match that isn’t just two dudes trying to pin each other becomes a game of ‘how creative can we be?’ in this company. This was akin to Big Show losing a tables match by accidentally stepping on one and breaking it because he’s so fat. It was a cute idea; some people even loved it. But a lot of people just groaned. When a push comes to shove though, it just irks me because you only get so many ‘first time ever’ moments. This will always be the first ever ladder match with women in WWE. It will always be James Ellsworth. It will outlast both his and Carmella’s careers. And in years to come I think even people in favour of this finish will realize that.

As for the match, well, I don’t have another 500 words to say on that. It was a pretty lame ladder match, near the bottom of the Money in the Bank rankings, were you to be a big enough loser to sit down and actually rank them. While Charlotte wowed near the finish with another beautiful dive from the top rope to the floor; there wasn’t much to speak of here in terms of high risks, innovation or thrills. There were several instances where people came off very shakey and nervous, which is understandable, but the end result was a very underwhelming match, bell to bell. There was good heat though, with most of the nearfalls (is that what you call it when someone almost gets the thing in a ladder match? Answers on a postcard) generating a lot of crowd noise – but that only took the match so far.

Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4, 2017)

As the story of Horizon began to show its hand, about 40 or so hours into my time with it, I was excited to see it through to its conclusion. The bizarre dystopian world was starting to unravel, and I was very close to learning how it all came to be. With that in mind, I started to focus entirely on the game’s main quest – foregoing side activities and miscellaneous sight-seeing.

When I did this though, it didn’t​ sit right with me. In my own head, I wasn’t playing the game properly. In the dozens of hours that had come before this, I enjoyed Horizon as a real ‘stop and smell the (robot) flowers’ game. A game of exploration as much as a game of action. A game where I relished talking to villagers who were selling their wares at the local market, just as much as I did the large-scale dinosaur battles.

Horizon is so much more than the sum of its parts. On paper, it’s an open world action game with crafting, RPG elements, and a post-apocalyptic setting – you know, every triple-A video game ever. But with its wonderfully well-developed protagonist, jaw-dropping visuals, and a very unique twist on the ‘after society has fallen’ setting, it manages to elevate itself above other games with those very over-done descriptors.

If the world of Horizon was confusing to you when it was first revealed (a Native American-inspired society of tribes, juxtaposed with robot dinosaurs? And it’s set on Earth just a few hundred years in the future? What?) then, like me, you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the story of the main campaign. The world of Horizon is more than just a backdrop for our protagonist’s arc – how it came to be is a major plot point. You’ll spend as much time learning about what happened to society as you will about what drives the tale’s heroine; Aloy. It serves as great motivation​ – a legitimate sense of discovery driving you forward.

The gameplay is similarly compelling; offering solid stealth and combat mechanics that develop over time. The second half of the game introduces foes five times the size of the first half, and gives you more tools to experiment with when taking them down. Tripwires, ropecasters, proximity mines, freezebombs, electric arrows – the list goes on. The arsenal is robust enough to allow you to play as you please, but there are strategic bonuses to using certain items in certain fights. Aloy’s ‘focus,’ a plot-device MacGuffin that gives her ‘video game protagonist analysis vision,’ highlights the various parts of each dinobot, with suggestions on how best tackle them. In some instances, mounted weaponry from the machines can be blasted off and used against their former owner; it’s wonderfully satisfying. Some gear is locked behind side quests meaning the aforementioned deviations from the main campaign are often worth it. You’ll meet a colourful cast of warriors, get some new toys, and accrue XP to unlock new abilities in the game’s simple skill tree.

The nuance and variety in the robot battles is juxtaposed by the idiocy of fighting human enemies. Foes of the homosapien variety have uninspired AI patterns, and even fail to live up to them on occasion. Whether they’re snipers, brutes or beefy sub-bosses, most rival tribesman just charge at Aloy mindlessly, often getting hung up on level geometry or immediately losing interest the second you disappear around a corner. It feels antiquated and lacking in polish – which are not terms I’d use to describe the other 90% of Horizon. Goons fumbling their way through scenery aside; Horizon wows at almost every turn. The game is an almost never-ending series of vistas, with ‘god-rays’ poking through the clouds every morning and a giant pale moon at night. Almost every location is sprinkled with airborne snowflakes, flower petals or ash, which along with the swaying brush and trees makes the environment feel alive. The elegant orchestral score, along with Aloy’s charming monologues about the scenery or weather, mean the game is beautiful to listen to; a ‘podcast game’ this is not. With a robust ‘photo mode’ at your disposal, it feels like developers Guerilla were well aware this was a world worth poking around endlessly.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is a beautiful and satisfying game. It establishes a fascinating premise and actually sticks the landing in the final act; a rarity in video games. The gameplay is open-ended and varied, with the silly human enemies and repetitive side quests not tarnishing the thrill of the game’s core missions. While Horizon works magnificently as a stand-alone title, this is certainly a world I’d happily revisit in years to come.