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F1 22

RACING MULTIPLAYER

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If, unlike the children of billionaires, you’ve never had the opportunity to sit behind the wheel of a car designed to pass from your view in the blink of an eye, welcome to the next best thing! F1 22 brings new life and colour to the simulated

driving experience. This is the first F1 release under the EA Sports umbrella, and it sees a new freshness and polish.

Positive improvements abound. The game looks sharper, tracks feel more accurate, and things

TUNE UP! Music plays a big part in the signature style of F1 22 , and showcases talented artists like Diplo, Charlie XCX and Deadmau5. It adds flavour to the experience, which made us realise just how much we’d been missing this from previous versions.

There are also graphs and reports that you can access during practice sessions, providing feedback on your performance. It’s a more in-depth feature which, while not essential, can really take your experience to the next level. While not entirely friendly, the AI is definitely more aware of you on the track. AI drivers are no longer determined to stick to the racing line at all costs, and they’ll frequently recognise your pace and leave you the space you need. The personal touch continues with F1 Life, which lets you live out dreams of being an F1 driver, like constructing your home entirely out of marble, parking a state-of-the-art supercar in your lounge and kicking back with your entourage. F1 22 is a complete package with options to suit everyone, from the casual Sunday driver to the hardcore league racer. DN

react the way they’re supposed to. Meanwhile, the new F1 cars have been faithfully reproduced and look spectacular. Handling is almost completely new, as you’d expect with the new real-world 2022 car designs and regulations. Cars dance around corners, with tyres seemingly made out of glue. It means that favourite settings are null and void, and returning fans will need to find their feet again. It’s refreshing revisiting classic racetracks with entirely new machines, and discovering new ways to attack times.

XENOBLADE CHRONICLES 3

ACTION RPG MULTIPLAYER

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Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a rich feast of a game, where every single morsel is served up in excessively large portions. We’re presented with a fully-realised combat system, deep storylines, beautiful environments and much menu management. The sheer size of this game is overwhelming. 55 hours is the estimated minimum

time that you’ll need to commit to, and that’s if you only play the main storyline. You can cut that

TRAIN IN VAIN? You can trade classes between party members, allowing you to train unique abilities into individual characters. Combining skill sets across 24 classes produces a weird variety of results. It’s like combining peanut butter and jam, or peanut butter and Vegemite. Sometimes it works, other times it definitely won’t be to your taste.

for an explosively delicious eye feast. Early on you learn more powerful attacks, called "arts", which can be stacked in sequence to deliver damage to opponents with increasing brutality and gorgeousness. You also master more powerful combination attacks, where two of your party fuse together, like some mid-sized Voltron. While regular combat is fun and some mid-tier fights can be challenging, the boss fights are more story-driven than skill based. So, finishing off bosses becomes more of a checkpoint rather than a test of finely-crafted skills. Meanwhile, upgrading weapons gear and power gems, levelling up characters, and customising outfits makes for enough content to warrant its own separate game. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a pure JRPG. Big, bombastic, and beautiful. Your journey won’t be over quickly, but it will keep you entertained for the entire playthrough. DN

down to 25-ish hours if you skip the cutscenes, but where’s the fun in that? Completionists should prepare to put in around 150 hours to tackle everything. As with everything else, the environment is massive. There are huge open worlds to explore, filled with giant flora and excessively oversized enemies to battle. The story is on a similar scale, massive and sprawling. For new players, storylines run deep, but don’t require having previously played any other games in the series. Combat is visually chaotic. With up to six party members, even basic auto-attacks make

12 SEPTEMBER 2022

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