Author: dpugh007

In August 2018 Microsoft announced the launch of Xbox All Access, a limited-time offer (only available in the US) which allows those who sign up to get an Xbox One S or Xbox One X console, Xbox Games Pass and Xbox Live Gold for a set fee per month – with no upfront costs. 

To see if the Xbox All Access offer is for you, we put together this handy guide explaining everything we know about Xbox All Access and how you can sign up.

Xbox All Access: what is it?

Xbox All Access is a limited-time subscription offer which sees you receive an Xbox One S or Xbox One X console, 24-months of Xbox Live Gold (required for online multiplayer) and 24-months of Xbox Games Pass (Microsoft’s subscription service which grants access to over 100 games) in return for paying a fixed fee for 24 months. There is no upfront cost and 0% APR.

The offer is available until October 31, 2018.

Xbox All Access: how do you apply?

The offer is currently only available to those in the US. To sign up, you must go to your closest Microsoft store (it can only be applied for in person), choose a Xbox All Access bundle and apply for a Dell Preferred Account (DPA). 

According Dell’s website , the Dell Preferred Account is a “revolving line of credit that gives you the purchasing power to update your technology”. In other words, you pay a set amount each month rather than a lump sum (however, that is also an option).

When you apply at the Microsoft Store, you immediately find out if you can qualify for DPA and therefore Xbox Access All Areas. If you are approved, you will receive a DPA welcome kit by mail within 10 days, which contains account information and payment options.

Xbox All Access: how much is it?

There are two bundles currently available: the Xbox One S and Xbox One X bundles Xbox All Access bundles.

The Xbox One X Xbox All Access bundle start at $34.99 per month and includes an Xbox One X console, 24 months of Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Live Gold. This bundle has 0% APR for 24 months and no upfront cost.

The Xbox One S Xbox All Access bundle starts at $21.99 per month and includes Xbox Live Gold and 20% saving on Xbox All Access.  This bundle also has 0% APR for 24 months and no upfront cost.

Xbox All Access: important things to know

Before you sign up for Xbox All Access there are some crucial details to be aware of:

If you return the console, you are still responsible to pay for both memberships

Xbox All Access is subject to the Microsoft Store standard return policy. This means your chosen console has a 30-day return policy. However both memberships are not returnable and are non-refundable.  

It’s yours to keep after the two years

Signing up for Xbox All Access means you own the console and the 24 month Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Live Gold memberships outright upon purchase. 

Microsoft Limited Warranty only covers the Xbox console for one year (90 days for the controller and accessories) 

If it malfunctions after that then you are responsible for any repair costs and monthly payments will continue until the remaining balance on your Dell Preferred Account is paid in full.

Outstanding balances at the end of 24 months are subject to APR

Rates range from 19.24% to 29.99% variable APR. The Minimum Interest Charge is $2. 

More information is available at Microsoft’s website. 

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Battlefield V isn’t interested in boots treading the same old ground of World War II. There’s no re-enactment of the D-Day landings that have been long etched in our consciousness from films such as Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers and last year’s Call of Duty: WWII. Instead, as I play through the War Stories that make up its single-player campaign, the big D this time around is ‘Diversity’.

Scandinavian sandbox

The first and most prominent of the war stories is ‘Nordlys’. Set in the snowy mountains of Norway under the beautiful Northern Lights, you’re a young resistance fighter called Solveig on a mission to rescue another resistance member who’s very close to her. It seems neatly coincidental that DICE, a Swedish studio, is depicting a story closer to home, though franchise design director Daniel Berlin tells me there were other factors. 

“It wasn’t necessarily, ah, we’re Scandinavian, we need to go to Scandinavia,” he laughs. 

“It’s a particular part of the world that hasn’t been depicted much. Solveig’s personal story about her family really speaks to us but also in terms of the location.”

Indeed, the ice and snow, which you can even get around certain parts of with skis, makes for a distinct visual palette that greatly contrasts with the hotter climate of ‘Under No Flag’ where you’re part of a small crew from the Special Boat Service infiltrating enemy lines on the shore of North Africa. Even when you do take to more familiar sights like the rural battlefields of France, it’s as colonial soldiers who had previously never set foot in this country they’re fighting for.

In Norway, my approach differs from the all-out warfare of Battlefield’s multiplayer. While it’s possible to go in guns blazing, the open environments allow me to take a far stealthier approach. I manage to distract the enemy with lures before throwing a knife in their back, or just take the higher ground, bypassing one outpost without firing a single shot, lest I give myself away, prompting a soldier to rush for the nearby alarm.

This persists in the story’s latter half when I find myself in a vast sandbox (or rather icebox?) surrounded by mountains and alpine trees, giving me freedom in how I approach three targets I need to find and destroy in a bid to sabotage German plans to create a new devastating weapon. Compared to the way Call of Duty’s campaigns have often been referred to as big-budget shooting galleries (left out altogether in the new Black Ops 4), this open approach is a natural fit for Battlefield V’s War Stories. 

“A scripted experience can be great, but the truly great experiences are when we just give you a set of tools and then you author your experience yourself,” says Berlin.

These experiences are still punctuated by cinematic cutscenes with specific narrative and emotional beats, but I also get a feel for a variety of tones and narrative techniques. For instance, ‘Under No Flag’ feels more comical in nature, bolstered by the colorful language of the cockney band of cut-throats and criminals that make up your SBS unit. As convict Billy, you learn that his particular set of skills in robbing banks are very transferable for making bombs to blow up German aircraft, so this operation almost has something of a heist element to it.

No glory

The next war story to grab my attention was ‘Tirailleur’, immediately reminding me of the 2006 French film Days of Glory. Days of Glory depicts an ensemble of North African soldiers in the Free French Forces, which Berlin tells me was a definite inspiration point. 

“That perspective really ties into what we want to do in Battlefield V,” he explains. 

“It’s a tragic story about this company that’s fighting for a nation that doesn’t accept them and a land that they’ve never been to.”

Narrated by your character Deme as an old veteran recounting his experiences as a tirailleur, the discrimination he encounters from white soldiers is painfully visible from the moment he first steps onto French soil to when he and other black soldiers like him are sent on a suicide mission to capture a part of the countryside beset with enemy gun placements and tank-stoppers while planes fly overhead. While it conveys the sense of scale Battlefield is known for, you also feel the impossible odds that these black lives are thrown against without any regard from their white commanders.

While I was able to play ‘Nordlys’ in full, I only had a taster of these other two stories. However, Berlin assures me that all of them will be consistently substantial. 

“This time around, we knew what we were doing to a larger extent, so we made sure from the get-go that each and every war story had a certain length and quality,” he says.

Enemy lines

There’s also one more story that will be released later as part of the new free post-launch service Tides of War, though it may stir some controversy. In ‘The Last Tiger’, you’re not just playing a devastatingly powerful tank, but from the German perspective. Berlin explains that the well-received tank mission in Battlefield 1 had influenced their decision to create a tank mission in Battlefield V, for which there was only one candidate.

“The Tiger is pretty much what Spitfire is to the airplanes – it’s the most iconic tank of the era. The gun alone is the same length as a full American tank,” Berlin says. 

“But with that depiction comes the German perspective, and how we tell that story. I don’t want to spoil anything but the emotion we want to evoke is the feeling of consequence, and the fact that, even if you deny your actions in war, you have to live with the consequences of what you have done.”

It’s by no means a heroic story then, but just as the other War Stories are demonstrating a diversity in its, well, diversity, not only through its characters but also in the emotions, narrative, gameplay and palettes, it seems appropriate that DICE isn’t shying away from tackling a darker grey area of World War II. 

“We want to show diversity, and we want to show untold stories,” says Berlin. 

“Everything comes together as a varied product with a lot of diversity across the board.”

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Call of Duty has been around for a long time. A good 15 years, in fact, and it’s gone from WW2-set Medal of Honor rival to the very blueprint of what it means to be ‘triple-A’ in modern gaming. For 13 of those years the series has released a new entry on an annual basis, but since 2016’s Infinite Warfare, the cracks have really started to show.

Sales have slowly declined, and what was once the most exciting FPS experience on the market has become fatigued by its own over-saturation. Traditional asymmetrical shooters are no longer the kill of the hill. Now hero shooters such as Overwatch, and Battle Royale titles such as Fortnite, wear that crown.

Last year’s Call of Duty WW2 was a fun return to the series’ roots, but in order to change CoD needs to look forward rather than back. So what has long-time developer Treyarch done to solve this problem? Copied those hero shooters and Battle Royale titles, of course.

The result is Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. A game that quite shamelessly cherry-picks the most in-vogue mechanics and features, and combines them with that instantly familiar FPS template. It’s certainly far from a original plan, but for all its mimicry, Black Ops 4 manages to give itself the shot of adrenaline it’s lacked since 2015’s Black Ops 3.

Back to black

The traditional single-player campaign is the first casualty, dropped in favor of some brief ‘stories’ that introduce the game’s eight Specialists and their respective backstories. Considering that these solo modes used to be the big selling point of CoDs of old – think the heyday of Modern Warfare – you’d think its omission would be a bad thing, but Treyarch has proved time and again that deft storytelling is not its forte, so the absence of a campaign isn’t the grand loss it first appears to be.

Black Ops 4’s new three pillars are the long-running veterans Multiplayer and Zombies and newcomer Blackout, marking the series’ first entry to embrace online play across all modes. Multiplayer has received some of the biggest changes this year, weaving the familiar bombastic gunplay and some new features that aim to elicit a more tactical approach.

Health is no longer regenerative, so taking refuge behind cover and waiting for your lifeblood to return won’t do you any good here. You now have a StimPack mapped to ‘L1’/’LB’ that refills your health bar, Far Cry-style. If you’re a long-time CoD devotee, this one mechanic alone takes a while to feel natural, but its inclusion only serves to add to the flow of play rather than hindering it. Now you have to manage your health, your gear and your ammunition, forcing you to play smarter when you need to choose between healing and reloading.

The length of time it takes for your health to refill once you’ve administered a Stim Shot, and the time it takes for it to recharge, has also been slightly increased from the Beta – to stop players from abusing it. As with every new change in Multiplayer, learning to compensate for this delay fundamentally changes how you approach each systemic encounter. Every player now has their health displayed above their avatar, so you can see in real-time how much life a player has. It’s by no means a game changer, but it proves a little extra tactical information (especially if you’re playing Search & Destroy as a team).

Those aforementioned Specialists – first introduced in Black Ops 3 as an attempt to give traditional classes a little more personality – have been rejigged to create a symbiosis between their key traits and abilities. While you can still just jump in and play as whichever character you like (running, gunning and camping ad infinitum), there’s a pleasing synergy to using each operator as part of a wider team effort.

Crash can throw an Assault Pack to refill his team’s ammo supply, or use a special ability to heal everyone on the team in seconds. Prophet has a Stun Drone that will automatically incapacitate enemy players, while Recon can use a carefully placed Sensor Dart can reveal enemy positions in real time. There’s still the likes of Ruin and Battery, who are just there to cause mayhem, but the fact there’s a renewed focus on cooperation is a change Black Ops 4 benefits from tenfold. Every bullet, reload and mantle feels like the CoD you know, but it’s just different enough to shake up the minutia of play.

There are 14 maps available at launch – one of the largest selections to ship with the series – but it’s definitely a mixed bag. Being able to play some of the classic maps from Black Ops’ earlier entries is certainly a treat – Summit is still a masterpiece in level design, and Jungle will forever be the home of sneaky ambushes – but some of the best are actually new additions to the roster. 

Icebreaker is easily the most enjoyable – which uses a submarine trapped in a glacier as its setting, complete with tight corridors, open areas and ice water for sneaky underwater kills – while Hacienda, Slums and Contraband are destined to cement themselves as new fan favourites thanks to how well they suit Domination and other objective based mode.

Dead to rights

Zombies returns with its biggest launch-day haul of content yet. As much fun as its tongue-in-cheek horror action has been over the last decade or more, it’s also started to feel a little fatigued overall. This year’s entry adds in another installment in the long-running Aether storyline, but it’s in the new Chaos storyline that things really get mixed up for the better.

The two launch stories – set aboard the Titanic and a trap-filled Roman arena – are some of the craziest yet, with everything from exploding tigers to axe-flinging gladiators to battle. The addition of customizable classes and a rejig of how long it takes to revive teammates coalesce to make one of the most enjoyable iterations on the mode yet. Much like Multiplayer, it’s no grand reimaging, but a handful of adjustments in many of the right places.

Much like Multiplayer, Zombies is no grand reimagining, but a handful of adjustments in many of the right places. The voiceover, as always, is top-notch and the interplay between characters shows Treyarch has worked hard to add a new depth to its undead lore. Every map is riddled with secrets, traps, shortcuts and weapons galore. It’s brilliant fun with a bunch of strangers, but even better when you’re fending off the dead with friends.

Royale with cheese

Finally, there’s Blackout – the new Battle Royale mode that’s hoping to give the likes of Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds a run for their money. It certainly doesn’t try to hide its blatant mimicry of those elements that have made this genre so popular over the last couple of years – skydiving into a giant sandbox, looting for weapons, and fighting down to the last man or woman as the map shrinks around you – but it works because it’s using the slick production values of CoD, and integrates all the familiar ingredients you’ve come to expect from it.

The gunplay is spot-on, with the random placement of weapons forcing you to adapt your play not just to the situation you’re in, but the gun in your hands. Just found a sniper rifle but realized you’re an awful shot? Few things are going to teach you to learn to no-scope like a champ than a team of remaining survivors bearing down on your position. The map itself is incredible in scope, around twice the size of Fortnite’s iconic locale. Littered with areas that call back to classic Black Ops levels – such as NukeTown 2025 – it’s effectively a playable CoD monument.

However, the size does mean buildings are spaced out quite far apart in some sections of the map, so it can take a while to find a weapon if you’re trying to avoid other players touching down in the same area. This means there’s a far steeper learning curve for players less experienced with BR games, but with all manner of CoD elements sprinkled in for extra flavor – such as randomly placed zombies and collectable perks – there’s plenty to keep you on your toes once you learn the ropes.

Treyarch has clearly made an effort to make its systems as user-friendly as possible, such as auto-fitting accessories to a specific weapon as soon as pick it up. Mapping health items to the same button as your Stim Shot in Multiplayer also creates a neat synergy to transition from one mode to another. Your wingsuit (the game’s equivalent of Fortnite’s glider) is also incredibly easy to control, especially when you’re leaping off a tall building for a quick escape from an ambush. There’s also support for split-screen play in Blackout, but the frame rate can take a bit of kicking when it’s in use.

Interestingly, Supply Drops seem to have been dropped entirely by Treyarch for this year’s CoD. Considering their prevalence in series since 2014’s Advanced Warfare (where players spend in-game currency or real-world money to buy packs with randomly collated skins/weapons), their absence is hard to miss. However, with the instant popularity of Blackout, it does seem likely that the studio will be adding a different microtransaction system in its place since. As to how this affects Multiplayer and Blackout remains to be seen, but they’re likely to still be only cosmetic in nature.

Verdict: play it now

Despite the loss of a proper single-player campaign, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 doesn’t feel like a game with a central pillar missing. In fact, the slick execution of the new Blackout mode and the key changes to Zombies and Multiplayer make this one of the most content-rich instalments in years. It’s not going to win any awards for imaginative design, but with every mode firing on all cylinders it doesn’t need to. CoD finally has its fun factor back – and about time, too.

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