Assassin’s Creed Mirage

I am sure many were pleased to hear that coming from 200+ hours of AC Odyssey & AC Valhalla
that AC Mirage would be a game on a smaller scale, returning more to the roots of Assassin’s Creed
instead of an massive undertaking that has been the last 3 games in the series.

I have to admit that I got exhausted playing the main AC Valhalla game, but loved the shorter
DLC addons that were released later on, Ragnarök specially. It somehow just felt about the right
length and AC Mirage does that perfectly here for me, clocking in at a shorter 15’ish to 20 hours
depending on your play style, you won’t be exhausted by the time you finish it.

You might have noticed that main character for Mirage, Basim had an appearance in AC Valhalla.
Mirage time wise is set before Valhalla happens, and tells the story of him, who he is, where he came
from and what he will become.. this happens around 10 years before the events of Valhalla.

I won’t spoil the story as usual, but what you can look forward to is missions with a variety of ways
to complete them, stealth being the preferred way of playing for an easier time, Mirage’s combat
is fun, but getting over run by guards even at low levels can have you accidentally die with enough
hits coming in from the enemies on all sides.. I found that out the hard way per usual.

Whilst in combat, one thing that annoyed me as the level up system is based on at where in the story
you are, starting at novice .. you don’t have particularly any skills, weapons besides your dagger
and starter sword.. but even as you progress you cannot pick up weapons that the enemies drop..
A design choice I am not particularly fond of, I guess I got too used in the other games grabbing
a bow & arrows.. with plenty of ammo around. Here as you progress you can get throwing knifes but
again ammo is scarce so you might want to hold off on using it just for the heck of it style.

Talking a bit more about the story, as you investigate the Order of Ancients and find out more
about them, their intentions and what they do, there is 5 acts to go through in the game with a total
of 42 missions to complete, all in all the story is fine as it progresses and due to the shorter
length overall of the game, it’s easier to jump in and remember what has happened compared to previous
entries where there was so much introduced and happening that you would need an hours recap honestly
to be on top of everything if you take a few days break from gaming.

Whilst not doing main missions, Baghdad is a fun little playground to explore and take advantage of.
The game is absolutely gorgeous, and if you have a PC that’s up to the task with a heftier GPU you
can really see the shine. Below you will also find the PC requirements for Mirage and above in the
beginning I have included some screenshots I grabbed early in the game to give you an idea of
what the game looks like.

But like I said earlier, Baghdad is a fun little playground to take advantage of
and there is activities you can do besides Synchronization points high up in the sky to get a fantastic
aerial view of the ancient city. Pickpocketing is one of those fun activities which can garner you items
, money, or even favors that you can cash in when perhaps completing a mission, or if you got into
trouble with guards, you could use a favor to make them forget about you. Another activity within
the city is wanted posters of you, that you will want to remove, these are based on a notoriety system.
You will also find side activities that grant you favor tokens like undertaking world contracts,
or returning lost books, and mysterious shards that can be traded in for gear.
The city itself is divided up in districts, and each of these districts also have their own unique feel
within the city. Guards are basically everywhere in the game, and if you’ve been up to no good, like
I mentioned before wanted posters start appearing and even civilians will yell at guards if they
recognize you. So truly taking a stealthy approach wherever you go in the game is probably the best
course of action.

So how does it run? With a 12600kf and 32gb of ram & a RTX 3070 playing at 3440x1440p very high detail
gave me around 105-115fps in general. Above is also a in game benchmark in the screenshots you can take
a look at.

Final word

Compared to the older AC games, Mirage feels like a modern game that has taken proven working ideas
from the old games and incorporated it succesfully, the combat (specially sword) is fine, but not
as gruesome as the older titles, and it’s been perhaps a little bit too simplified to the limited
types of enemies there are this time around. Voice acting, Music, and general world feel is something
Ubisoft excels at, and it’s more than satisfying.. you might even learn a few arabic words, phrases
if you pay enough attention.

I definitely would suggest you give Mirage a try yourself, if you like an open world to explore,
stealth, parkour, and side activities to complete and have 20+ hours to spare.

Atlas Fallen

I had previously seen some footage of Atlas Fallen and the game peeked my interest,
now that it has been released I had the opportunity to dive into the world of Atlas Fallen
The game is an Open World Action RPG that features beautiful visuals, hard as nails combat
with an interesting story and a vast world to explore for secrets, treasure, side quests
and you name it.. it’s got it.

Without spoiling any of the story I’ll recap quickly the events that unfold as the game begins.
Unnamed, that is you.. essentially a worthless slave in the eyes of some people.. born only
to serve and cater to others.. but that all quickly changes when you stumble upon a gauntlet
during an early game quest involving finding a thief outside camp.

This gauntlet holds serious power and pretty quickly makes it presence known to you in form
of a ghost like projection, whilst speaking to you it’s obvious the power has lost most of
it’s memories and actual powers… now you unnamed, are the Gauntlet Bearer.. with a main
objective of helping out Nyaal (name of the power) a long the way to find out who he is, what
has happened, what he is and so forth.. not far into the game you will find out about Gods
fighting over power, and how the humans are involved and how they perhaps have made an mistake.

The world of Atlas Fallen is vast, and ruthless, filled with monsters sized from tiny to
Gigantic.. here is where Atlas Fallen shines, the Combat is fluid and ferocious, but also
hard as nails.

Personally I am horrible at combat in these types of games and get my ass kicked most of the
time over and over again, but sticking to the game with a never give up mentality and ignoring
you might have died a few dozen times already is rewarding as heck when you manage to beat
up an gigantic boss.

While exploring the world and finishing tasks you will level up as in any game,
and by collecting things along the way, you can upgrade your weapons at forges around the world…
to perhaps make combat a little bit easier, there are also spells you can use..
as you would have guessed for sure. Finding gauntlet locations around the world also lets you
fast/instant travel between points, as it faster than sand-surfing across the large map.

Personally when I got into the game a bit further, and powers, upgrades unlocked,
it took me a while to get used to the games system for upgrading and changing powers
it wasn’t all that self explanatory that some games are.. I had to think twice what things do
and how they work, obviously a design choice from the beginning,
but perhaps this could have been simplified further a long the way for the common man like myself.

Back to the story and world, the game itself like I said before is stunning visually and
has a great photo mode built in also so you can grab some awesome ingame shots..
As in all my reviews, the screenshots from various aspects of the game can be found above
in the beginning of the review.

The game for those who wonder how long the story mode is it clocks in around 10+ hours …
and if you are into completions (100%) .. then you should set aside around 25 maybe 30 hours to finish
it all. I said earlier the game is hard as nails,
and I really mean it.. playing the game on easy even gave me a hard time with bosses, but for
those that are hard to the core in these types of games you can severely ramp up the difficulty
above easy or normal… The voice acting in game is done nicely, I have no complaints there and
the music chosen suits the game perfectly giving off the world vibe as a whole.

For PC specs the minimum requirements on Steam are not that demanding but recommended is for
sure a different story as you can see below. Luckily the game has FSR 2.0 support so those
of you with a newer kind of GPU can take advantage of frame generation helping out along the way.

I just recently after a few months of waiting for parts built my new gaming rig to a more modern
standard, upgraded from an i5-9600k to i5-12600k, upping ram to 32gb.. and playing Atlas Fallen
on 3440x1440p at high details with FSR enabled gives around 100fps.. this on a RTX 3070 (8gb)
to give you an idea what you could expect from your own system. Also worth mentioning, I had
not a single crash of the game so far, gotta give kudos on that one.

If you love exploring, finding secrets, hard as nails combat and got 10-30 hours to spare..
the sand filled world of Atlas Fallen is definitely a game you should take a serious look at.
Gorgeous, well paced story, it’s got it all.. the only wish I have in regards the game for myself
is that optimization could be taken a step further, hardware requirements are quite strong to
have 60fps or above, and perhaps add a beginners level that is slightly easier than easy for those
who enjoy exploring, story.. but are perhaps not that great at combat.

Aloha Motorfest!

When you think about Hawaii, the first thing that comes to mind is not necessarily
Racing but instead food, surfing, music and perhaps Elvis Presley. Ubisoft surely
took an unexpected route here with picking the location, but I could not have been
more happy how it turned out.. instead of choosing a larger locale that we have
seen before, Hawaii in a smaller scale turned out to be the cozy gorgeous spot
we all needed for our Motorsports..

Unlike other games in the Motor Racing genere if you are not familiar with The Crew
franchise from before, differs in the sense that it incorporates besides Car racing,
Motorbikes, Airplanes and Motorboats for your speed needs.

Whilst The Crew and Crew 2 were a ton of Fun back in the day, Ubisoft (perhaps)
has not been known in their games for a great feel when driving.
Motorfest fixes that and has restored my faith that they do know how to do handling
properly for all the different motored vehicles you can pick from.

Jumping in to the game, follows the basic introduction & pattern.. pick your first
car and go racing in a league/playlist of your choice and work your way up to
afford the next vehicle, winning races in Motorfest or completing races also gives
you upgrade parts for the car to play around with, Ubisoft has made upgrading easy
here, showing clearly what the part performance is and how it affects the car when
applying said upgrade, making it quick and fun. But you can of course, if you are
a wizard with tuning/setups.. go into the fine details of how all the parts function
and tweek it all to your liking. The options are all there, only dependant on how
much credits you have earned and parts unlocked so far.

Speaking on credits, you have two ways of purchasing items in game, either race
earned credits or Ubisofts own currency. Personally I prefer the first option, even
if it is the grindier way, but hey.. we came for racing, and race we shall.

One big hooray for Motorsport that I have to point out compared to the Forza Horizon
series is that whilst Horizon is fun, after time the constant wheelspins (rewards)
started to slightly annoy me, and there is none of that in your face here..
making it for a more enjoyable experience overall..

Race lengths in Motorfest are just right, not too short.. not too long.. keeping
it quick’ish, stunning, and fun, jumping between locations for the next race can be
achieved depending on your progress with instant travel or how I prefer to do it,
switching to your Airplane to take in the views / weather of Oahu while heading to
the next challenge.. or exploring for photo opportunities / hidden treasures.

So how much racing & other activities is there to do in Motorfest you ask?

You are looking at around an estimate of 24 hours with racing to complete the main game.
Currently there are over 600 vehicles in the game to collect, and this number will
grow over time.. more activities/playlists etc with the year passes to come, so for
an completionist you can definitely add about the same hours on top.

How does it run?

I’ve held off on the review(s) until now, as I had to wait for new computer parts due
to an complete upgrade of my gaming rig, going from an i5-9600k with 16gb of ram on
a 3070 (running at a mix of medium/high/ultra settings) at 1440p for 52-60fps.

To now running an i5-12600k, 32gb of ram with a 3070 still at 1440p, custom settings
of more high than medium, this garnering a more constant 60fps in game without dips.

One interesting thing here is that there is no fullscreen mode, and Frames are locked
to either 30 or 60fps in game. Whilst 60fps is fully enjoyable, I would still like to
see in a future update unlocked frames and fullscreen enabled.

As usual, in the beginning of this review you have a ton of screenshots in game
to display the gorgeousness that is Motorfest.

Final words 

Motorfest is 100% worth playing if you are into racing games, it’s smaller scale,
variety of vehicles that can be used, gorgeous scenery from the mountains to the
city graffiti art, weather, aerial views.. good handling, music makes it a perfect
package to escape to for a virtual race-cation in Hawaii.

Technically a solid package, that hopefully improves further in the future with
unlocked frame rates and more.

Bit late to the worlds greatest circus party with horsepower over the top and drama til we drop.
Crofty has said a few times it’s lights out and away we go this season already, but there is no
better time than now to review this years edition of what F1 2023 PC version brings to the table
after a few updates and fixes.

I won’t be spoiling the story mode, and will go through the modes and enhancements that are
new to this years game, also I will give you an idea how the game runs in the real world on hardware
other than the latest i7-i9 CPU and 4090 RTX Graphics cards, since we all are definitely not in that
category as gamers..

I’ve been playing F1 games since the very first ones on multiple platforms, but none have I had so
much fun with as the Codemaster series of the licensed game, and reminiscing specifically back to
2016-17 when they took steps forward in Graphics and drivability, one can only say 2023 really has
leapt lightyears forward on all aspects… and they have kept driving fun since 2009.
One could say it’s almost the best time of the year when a new Codemasters F1 game releases…

For this year Codemasters have brought back the story aspect to F1, you might remember I said in 2021
for the first Breaking Point story mode, it was a good fun distraction for a few hours.. taking on
a netflix like approach, but also had some annoying things such as phones ringing all the time,
a bit corny, but ultimately an enjoyable addition to the game, giving more meat to an already
great package.

2023 builds upon the original Breaking Point story, with people you might remember, Aiden Jackson,
Devon Butler, Casper Akkerman and then there is of course new people like Callie Meyer, whom is
the first female brought into the F1..

The story begins with a recap of what has happened previously, so if you missed out on 2021, don’t
worry you’ll be brought up to speed quickly, and can jump in to the new story arch directly without
feeling lost.

This year focuses on the Konnersport team, where Aiden and Devon have signed
respectively, and are now team mates.. without going indepth and perhaps spoiling things,
what you can expect is a longer than the previous story from 2021, more twists, more drama..
more meddling, happy moments, sad moments, and a fight for the future in the sport..
Costs and success reflecting real life struggles.

But what I enjoyed in the story were the objectives set out for you on what to achieve,
and the possibility of overachieving for bonus points.. But also with the twists happening
you could give answers to the press favoring one or the other thing, to mention a few of the
improvements/additions in game..

All in all the story mode is not a short one to play through with 17 chapters on the line to go
through, and for the achievement hunters out there.. this game does take a good while to grind
out if you are after the 100% completion (49 in total) the last one’s being tied to multiplayer
progress taking the longest.

If you are getting F1 2023 after reading this, don’t sleep on the story mode by jumping directly into
the online racing parts.. it is all in all a worthy part of the game to play, adding even more
content to cruise through in this filled package..

And speaking of content in F1 2023, this is probably the only critique I will give for the game
this year, but I was a bit lost in the beginning starting the game where everything was and why
things were locked, 40+ hours into the game and I still am occasionally going wait a minute what
sub menu was this thing in… I have added screenshots from all aspects of the game above, so be
sure to check those out to get perhaps a better idea if you are a bit lost on what I mean.

Everything besides Career, Local Multiplayer (LAN) and League Racing (requires signing up)
is placed under F1 World, comparable to last years F1 Life.. , and yes this year also features
Super Cars, Home decoration, clothing, trophies etc. for customizing things… a design choice
for sure placing it all there, but then there’s the stubborn me who goes I want a quick race
button on the front menu directly, but I guess we will get used to the new system eventually.

Goals are a big part of the game, to complete your compendium of stickers etc, the more you
drive the more you unlock upgrades to your world car, parts, contracts, and epic people such
as Christian Horner or Guenther Steiner. All for that online grind, to become the best..

As you guessed all the tracks are there for this years season, but for F2 this year we right
now only have the 2022 lineup.. perhaps this will be upgraded in a later update?.

Now for the gameplay, compared to last years where cars felt sluggish, and bit heavy on driving.
This year, the cars feel almost super glued to the asphalt for maximum downforce..
which always feels nice to anyone playing, there’s no panic mode constantly going on thinking
you’ve lost control of your car.. while this of course might not be to everyone’s liking, compared
to other sim racing games… you have to remember that F1 2023 is not aimed to be a perfect
sim racing game, but more accessible to everyone who wants a go at the worlds most known
racing series, and you can of course tweak everything from an assist point of view
if you so wish, disabling racing lines .. to disabling traction control etc. to have the game
respond to your racing style, experience.

Other updates that felt good so far, no more AI getting automatically super starts and glued
to your behind at starts, I always felt that was annoying and unfair in previous games, guess
this has been a requested feature, hitting another car or them hitting you also is not automatically
your own fault (reflecting on your driver standards license)… also now pitstops can be an
immersive QB button presses on changing settings, making it a bit more realistic,
same with Formation laps if you want to experience this, also as a last mention the anonymous
press person has now also been replaced with Natalie Pinkham that anyone will recognize having
watched Sky Sports F1 or F1 e-sports streams previously, taking it one more step closer to realism.

How does it Run?

With an aging i5-9600k/16GB RAM and a 3070 (8GB) the game continues to impress every year with
how good it looks and the frames it generates, this year is no different… turning Ray Tracing
off and just solely going old school I would have to the north of 145fps at all times, and topping
out at 180fps using High Settings / High mix… adding RTX to the mix and we drop down to 80-100fps,
while shadows and lighting effects are always nice, this year I’ve opted to play with purely higher
frame rates instead. In the above gallery you can find the Benchmark I took on day 1,
but later tweaking some options resulted in above as mentioned.

I hope you can draw some conclusions for your own system based on this mid-system spec.

Steam Minimum / Recommended Specification.

Final word

F1 2023, is the series that keeps on giving.. year after year it brings something new to the table
improves on existing features, modes, graphics… I can honestly say, this package is what I
wanted, needed, and will keep me racing for many months to come… until 2024.

What will 2024 surprise us with? It’s starting to get hard to guess what they can bring to the
table in the future, but I wouldn’t be dissapointed if a career mode revamp would be the next thing
they would start from scratch, why not start at Karting, F-series.. F3-F2-F1… to add even more
racing … time will tell what 2024 gives us, but for now 2023 will keep us occupied and happy
racers for many months.