In Demon’s Souls and its successors, you died a lot, but never unfairly. Bloodborne is from the same stable, and shares those games’ refusal to mollycoddle: it believes you’re a better player than you think. The opening hours of the game will see you slaughtered innumerable times by shambling behemoths, zombie dogs and humans armed with scythes and pitchforks, but every time you’ll know what you should have done differently. Like a hostage with Stockholm syndrome, you fall in love with its convoluted gothic labyrinth, populated by terrifying beasts whose wailing you can hear several streets away. The successive disembowelments at their hands, claws and slavering maws train you until you become hunter rather than hunted. Demanding a more aggressive playing style than its forebears, Bloodborne inspires the same obsession. A brutal masterpiece.
PS4; Sony Computer Entertainment; £47.99
ALSO OUT THIS WEEK
Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number, PS3/4/Vita, PC, Mac & Linux
In the original Hotline Miami, you played a hitman responsible for clearing buildings in a procession of dizzyingly fast murder sprees. It was a joyous homage to 80s ultra-violence drawn in a faux 8-bit style that made its gore cartoonish rather than disturbing. The sequel is still steeped in nostalgia, from its harrowing difficulty level to the amusingly distorted VHS-style pause screen, but this time the carnage gets a bit much, even in pixellated form. It’s also less open-ended, forcing you to use characters with preset restrictions – one starts with a gun but can never pick up a new one – where the first game let you choose strengths and weaknesses by donning a selection of gruesome-looking animal masks. Bigger, bloodier, more difficult and less interesting, Hotline Miami 2 is a disappointingly retrograde follow-up to a game that was lauded for its uncompromising spirit of invention.
Devolver Digital, £10.99
Sid Meier’s Starships, iPad & PC
Sid Meier’s monstrously addictive game Civilization detailed mankind’s evolution from cave dwellers to space farers. It’s there that Starships picks up the story. Starting with a planet and a puny fleet of ships, your job is to construct a mighty galactic federation, extending your influence, co-opting planets and crushing rivals. The meat of the game is turn-based space battles, where ships in your fleet can manoeuvre and fire a weapon or launch a squadron of fighters before watching your opponent do the same. Victories earn you credits to spend on scientific research and upgrading your fleet, processes which are nowhere near as deep as those of Civilization, but that still manage to add a solid sub-game to its progressively more complex starship engagements. It’s not pretty, and some will mourn the absence of multiplayer, but this is entertaining tactical fun without the tedious stat management.
2K Games, £9.89
