Star Wars Battlefronts 2

Have a look at some of the campaign mode on Star Wars Battlefronts 2 on Xbox One X.

For the tech geeks, I changed the video settings so that all the options were on, so there should be things like cinematic lens distortion etc - I presume if you know what you're looking for, you'll notice it!

The game looks fantastic - the first one looked great on Xbox One, but this takes it to another level. Looking forward to seeing what else the campaign has to offer!

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Update (contains spoilers)

Have played further into the campaign now, and I have to say that it's brilliant if you're a Star Wars fan - even at 40, there's something cool about getting to fly the Millennium Falcon or 'be' Han Solo. The story unfolds nicely with an unexpected twist, and the use of locations is a great way to showcase the outstanding graphics and bring the Star Wars universe to life.

Some complaints - a couple of the blasters are rank - Leia's blaster is brutal and took away some enjoyment from the Naboo level, and I find the card system utterly redundant. I haven't felt a great need to engage with the special abilities and so it seems like an unnecessary addition to the game. I thought the same about Battlefronts 1, so I'm guessing the inclusion in the sequel means that someone found them useful.

Still to venture on to the multiplayer, I'm hoping it has more longevity than the first Battlefronts, which got old very quickly.

I'll update this review as I play more. In the meantime, here's the Bespin level of the campaign, there is some bad language.

Update 15th December

I finished the campaign and really enjoyed it, it was easy to dip in and out of and my only real criticism is that it could have done with being longer.

The value of the game now comes down to what there is to get me coming back for more. I reckon I played about seven hours on the campaign, which isn't much for the £50 pounds that the game cost. The multiplayer has been nothing more than a frustrating experience so far.

Perhaps it's just my general lack of skill or it might be that I'm just being matched against better, more experienced players, but I'm getting hardly any time at all (sometimes just seconds) in the online multiplayer games before being killed - usually at the hands of some unseen enemy.

It's so frustrating and not at all fun, there is no time to build momentum or get into a battle before I'm back at the landing page having to pick out a class of soldier to make my next attempt.

The character selection is ok, a bit of something for everyone, but you're offered cards that will boost your skills or weapons, but without unlocking them, they choice is limited and as a casual gamer I generally can't be arsed mucking about with cards - I just want to get into the game.

So far (as you can see from the video) I've found the online multiplayer to be a less than enjoyable experience. I just got annoyed getting killed all the time, and there were a number of occasions where I could shoot an opponent several times only to be killed by a couple of shots back.

I'll persevere and try and improve to see if it becomes more fun, but if there's no improvement I can see this game getting traded in for something that's going to get played more.

South Park: The Fractured But Whole

I took delivery of South Park: The Fractured But Whole this morning, and have had my first look at it tonight.

Will get around to a full review soon, but for now I can tell you that it captures the tv show superbly and starts with laughs aimed at the juvenile in all of us.

Here's a clip of the first half hour or so of the game:

A Week With Xbox One X (Review)

I hit 40 this month, and as is tradition with big birthdays, I got some great gifts from my friends and family. The headline grabber (in my eyes, at least) was the Xbox One X - Xbox's latest addition to the Xbox One family.

Billed as the world's most powerful console, it has a lot to live up to. I have had various incarnations of the Xbox since the very first console (which I still have) and through the Xbox 360 (ordered at launch but delayed because of the stock issues), the 360 Elite and the Star Wars edition R2-D2 Xbox 360 - which still sits proudly under the tv in my bedroom alongside the recently moved Day One Edition Xbox One, which lost its place in the living room to make way for the X. So I was excited and interested to see what the X could do.

Some reservations, and things to call out in this review though. First thing is I don't have a 4k Ultra-High Definition TV - I'd  like one, but they're not cheap and some other things need to take priority for just now (sadly!). With that in mind I did have some scepticism about how justified the upgrade to the Xbox would be, and how much of a difference it would actually make to the games that I already had.

This also isn't a technical review. Suffice to say I've got a little knowledge about teraflops and RAM and all that, but it's not stuff that really floats my boat, so this review isn't going to be an insight into frame-rate analysis or assessing the level of detail in each pixel, as impressive as that may be, it's not really top of this casual gamer's agenda.

What I'm interested in is whether the much-vaunted power in the X actually delivers a better gaming experience to justify the upgrade from a console I already kinda loved.

Next thing to note is the games that I've tried on it, and to say that I've tried to get a feel for the difference using:

• Xbox One X Enhanced games (Call of Duty WWII; Rise of the Tomb Raider; Dishonoured 2; Halo 5; Quantum Break; Forza 7 -albeit just the demo)
• Xbox One games that haven't been enhanced (GTA 5; Tomb Raider; Minecraft)
• Xbox 360 Backwards Compatibility games (Civilization Revolution; Gears of War 3)
• Original Xbox Backwards Compatibility games (Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic).

Before we get to the games, though, I want to share my first impressions. First of all, the look and design of the console - it's the smallest Xbox One yet, and is a marked improvement on the design of the first Xbox One. It was really easy to set up (I'm told that if you have the Xbox One S, you can simply switch the consoles without having to move cables around). I moved my Xbox One to my room, so had to plug everything in from scratch - it took a couple of minutes and was much easier than I'd anticipated. 

Powering it on I knew that there would be an update to download and probably some significant wait times before I could get playing, but the reality was that the console was set up and ready to go after only a few minutes - much speedier than I'd anticipated and this was likely a combination of the speed of the console and also down to the cabled connection that I use to the Virgin Media hub which gives around 200Mps broadband speed. 

Everything moves quicker than it does on the Xbox One (which wasn't exactly a slouch itself) - the dashboard, recently given an improved facelift by Xbox, is slick and responsive, with game tiles loading more quickly on the X than on the One.

Load times for the games have improved as well, so I can 'jump in' quicker than before. This isn't consistent though - I noticed that the enhanced games still have fairly lengthy load times which I presume is down to the amount of additional data required for the improvements, so I can live with that.

Graphically, the X really delivers. The enhanced games are ridiculously good to look at, even on my aging 1080p screen. In fact, Rise of the Tomb Raider (on the best visual setting) prompted my wife to say it looked like we'd got a new TV. The X has taken an already cracking looking game and given it a massive makeover. Some of the visual touches (the green explosive gas, for example) are eye catching on their own, but when there are loads of them on screen at once you really get a sense of what that extra power gives you.

Forza looks terrific, it's the flagship title on the X, but for me the game that really steals the show visually is Halo 5: Guardians. It is simply stunning on the X - I genuinely can't wait to see this on a 4k screen at some point because the 1080p visuals are outstanding. They are as good as I have seen on any game. 

Call of Duty, Dishonoured 2 and Quantum Break also deliver big style in the visuals and all of the enhanced games are a demonstrable improvement on the experience delivered on the Xbox One. 

The X is also supposed to deliver an upgraded experience to any Xbox One game and I would say that this is definitely the case. Each game I tried looked better and appeared to have better 'touches' in them (think about tail lights reflecting in puddles in GTA, or better shadows on Tomb Raider) and everything looked sharper than on the same screen using Xbox One.

Looking at the backwards compatible games, they too either looked better or at the very least played quicker and more smoothly. Civilization Revolutions was a joy, the visuals are crisper, better animated, and the whole game plays much quicker with the additional processing grunt of the X.

Quite how the X can make improvements to these games without patches and updates is beyond me, but I'm glad it makes them, as they are very impressive. 

The only game I didn't notice a huge difference with was Knights of the Old Republic, but this is a game that must be around 15 years old, if not older (I was playing it the night my wife's waters broke when she went into labour with our son, who turned 14 in August, so it must be a bit older than him!). 

My overall experience of the X has been overwhelmingly positive. I miss the Kinect - I know it was never a hugely popular thing when the Xbox One launched, but I found myself calling out "Xbox record that" out of habit so many times when there was something gorgeous on the screen that had me grinning, and I'm not going to buy an adapter for it so I'll just need to adjust.

Xbox have definitely delivered with the X, it's an incredible bit of kit and I can't wait to see how publishers find ways to get more and more out of it. At some point I'll upgrade my TV to a 4k screen and will revisit this review to see what changes, but in the meantime the X still has me grinning from ear to ear at the experiences, and that's even before Star Wars Battlefronts 2 has landed through my letterbox.

Hats off to the team at Xbox, it's easy to say that they dropped the ball when the Xbox One launched, but with the X they've picked it back up and fired a screamer into the top corner. 

I hope that you've enjoyed this review, if so, please do share it and like my facebook page (The Shan Gamer) and follow me on twitter @theshangamer