Rare Replay

Celebrating a gaming legacy with one of the best-value compilations of all time

Something of a hodge-podge, is this Xbox One exclusive. It’s a collection of 30 notable offerings from one of British game development’s most enduring names, returning all the way back to its origins as Ultimate Play The Game. But it’s an incomplete picture, missing several of the games for which Rare is most fondly remembered. Its piecemeal delivery is an awkward fudge, with some games unchanged, others emulated, and more appearing as high-definition updates. Yet it’s also a wonderfully generous package, valuable both for its historic significance and for its sheer volume.

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Mafia III

The death of the family

“Mafia is known for its stories… stories about crime,” Andy Wilson, Hangar 13’s executive producer tells us, shortly after the game’s debut unveiling in Cologne, Germany. By this point we’ve seen protagonist Lincoln Clay in action – he’s exactly what you’d expect from a Mafia protagonist: angry, dejected, with a violent disposition, but also somewhat charismatic and – in his own way – alluring. Obviously, he’s on a revenge quest (he’s just returning to New Orleans, where he was raised, after the Vietnam war), but that doesn’t mean Hangar 13 wants to simply churn out the same gangster revenge plot that’s been stuck in a feedback loop for years.

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Grand Ages: Medieval

Laying siege to the console castle

It’s perhaps not the sexiest impression to take from a preview, but what impressed us most about Grand Ages: Medieval was how its developer, Gaming Minds, has managed to take something so outwardly complicated and make it so apparently simple. In the hour we spent being talked through our hands-off demo by creative director Daniel Dumont, we watched from a god’s-eye-view as settlers, trade caravans and soldiers by the hundred scurried across the crisscrossed roads of late game Europe, peddling wares and besieging towns seemingly completely under their own steam. Sometimes Dumont would zoom in to show us something, like what was in the back of a trundling trade cart, but for the most part, Grand Ages’ populace seemed like model citizens. By this we mean they weren’t pestering us.

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Volume

Even better than herding rectangles, you say? It can’t be!

Never has a game’s title lent itself so readily to trite observations about its content. Mike Bithell’s follow-up to blocks-with-feelings breakthrough Thomas Was Alone offers an enormous serving of stuff, and just in case your appetite for sneaking around its neon environs isn’t satiated by the 100 story missions, there’s a level editor, too. Player-generated content is already suitably… voluminous, and particular gems find their way into the hallowed ‘Staff Picks’ collection to save you trawling through the Pac-Man clones.

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Lost Dimension

Gunpowder, treason and… not a great plot

Too many JRPGs run through a very familiar story set up (some hybrid of ‘kids team up to save the world’ and ‘kids join forces to attend Japanese high school'), but this unique title from the under-celebrated studio behind Etrian Odyssey has a refreshing arrangement. You start off with a large party of characters, but this number dwindles as traitors in the group are exposed and… disposed of.

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We Happy Few

Wait, what? A survival game set in a quaint English town full of bobbies on the beat, bunting, and people having a jolly good time, you say? Oh wait, now we see the creepy masks, rampant drug addiction, and corpses among the flower beds. Never mind. Welcome to the not-so-sleepy, and really quite unsettling, Wellington Wells in 1964. It’s broad daylight, but we’re still afraid.

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Acer M220

A budget Windows Phone that isn’t a Microsoft handset? Can this simple little device compete with the bargains being churned out by the Redmond software giant?

It’s tough being a non-Microsoft handset in a Windows Phone world. The company has inadvertently put a stranglehold on its own OS, producing solid handsets across the entire line that often undercut the competition. This makes outside manufacturers a little weary about developing for the platform, which already sees far less returns to investment versus iOS and Android. Acer is quite brave going in at the deep end, with the Lumia 435 already securing the bargain-bin sector as a fully featured device that can be had for as little as forty quid. On paper it should give it a run for its money, exceeding in some areas while falling behind in others.

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