Games of the week: Resident Evil 5 & 6, Bee Simulator, Sparklite and Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts
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Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts
Platform: PC, Xbox One, PS4
Genre: FPS
Price: £24.99
A package holiday to kill for
Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts often has the feel of a perfect getaway: snow-covered mountains, pure blue skies, chic glass dwellings among towering pines. Except you're looking for killspots, not R&R. Contracts abandons the open-world structure of the previous game in the series and instead focuses on five locations, with a to-do list of connected missions and side-tasks like bounties bringing variety to the assassinations you'll be carrying out. Encounters, meanwhile, are more forgiving, with enemies slow to react in force and discovery less of a game-ruining failure, encouraging a mix of long-range attacks and up-close wetwork that creates a challenging but satisfying assignment.
Skip to the end: A handsome target-hunting experience with very big guns.
Score: 8/10
Resident Evil 5 & 6
Platform: Switch
Genre: Survival horror
Price: £29.99 each
Reanimator
After the phenomenal remake of Resident Evil 2 earlier this year, this Switch release of both Resi 5 & 6 (as separate games) feels lazy and overpriced. There's no attempt to upgrade or revamp either game, despite the lengthy time since their original launch (2009 and 2012, respectively), which only exposes their many flaws, as well as illustrating how poorly they both compare to the genre-defining success of the 15-year-old Resident Evil 4. History lessons aside, Resi 5 does at least bring innovation in the form of co-op play, which works well on Switch, while die-hard fans will need Resi 6 in order to reconnect with everyone's favourite character, Leon S Kennedy. But clunky controls and chunky visuals won't attract newcomers.
Skip to the end: Far too expensive for either imperfect episode.
Score: 6/10
Sparklite
Platform: PC, Mac, Xbox One, PS4, Switch
Genre: Action
Price: £24.99
Crank it up
Death in a 'rogue-like' game simply returns you to base, giving you the chance to upgrade your character or abilities before heading back out for another go. Sparklite is a charming, Zelda-style entry to this replayable genre with some neat story ideas – the world you explore is different each time because the entire planet's surface is fracturing and remaking itself, while running out of health sees you snatched up by a mechanical arm and hauled back to the flying airship you call home. But Sparklite's upgrade system feels underpowered and early options don't make enough meaningful impact on your play, while enemies and environments lack the personality of your hero's growing party of allies on this fun but shallow quest.
Skip to the end: Fun but doesn't have the variety for long-term replay.
Score: 7/10
Bee Simulator
Platform: Xbox One, PS4, Switch
Genre: Action
Price: £34.99
Honey trap
You can't fault Bee Simulator for delivering on its promise. You pretend to be a bee – collecting nectar from flowers, returning it to the hive, and then doing it again. There are diversions from this life of repetitive legwork (or wingwork, if you will), such as rescuing lost bees, fighting wasps, popping children's balloons or saving your hive from dastardly human landscapers, and the simple flight controls make buzzing in and out of people's legs a briefly enjoyable experience. But your hive and the park you're confined to is full of invisible walls, collecting nectar is a boring process of flying past a flower and your bee is somehow able to sting repeatedly without the usual fatal consequences. Steer clear.
Skip to the end: Uneducational, underdeveloped and uninteresting.
Score: 4/10
