E3 2016 - Bethesda

Of the secondary tier of conferences at E3 alongside EA and Ubisoft, Bethesda was the undisputed winner last year thanks to down to earth speeches and plenty of game footage. This year they kick off with a new Quake title, an arena shooter FPS called Quake Champions.

Unsurprisingly after the success of the new Doom, which returned to a retro shooter style reminiscent of its 1993 original, this game will likely copy that style (also like its progenitor from 1996) capitalising on the frenetic, fast paced, less realistic play-style that has gone full circle and become refreshing again for people tired of grounded, cover-based shooters.

The CG trailer finishes and a budget Wilson Fisk arrives on stage to fully announce Quake Champions with technical specs like 120Hz and unlocked framerate which I can only guess is impressive judging by the crowd reaction. Then again by the end of this conference, judging by the crowd reaction would be like trying to jet ski on jellyfish wrapped around your feet. Ambiguous and potentially dangerous.

It's called "Rabbit In A Shitshow".

Bargain Bin Kingpin goes on to connect Quake with E-sports and competitive gaming which seems to be a big push for everyone this year. He makes a point to describe the game using words like "classic" and "fast" but disappointingly no actual gameplay is shown.

Next comes Pete Hines looking like he's got a head inside his head trying to get out. He talks about Bethesda's recent successes like Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout Shelter, Fallout 4 and Doom. My only criticism here is actually the crowd making obnoxious grunts and dog noises like "bros" at a sports match or something. Even EA didn't have that and half of their entire conference was sports.

This walk down memory lane also serves as a hype-ramp into future announcements, so what a flaccid anti-climax it is to hear about Elder Scrolls: Legends again. The strategy card game no one asked for. A cinematic trailer for the card game's "story mode" (which is a sentence I still don't fully understand) tries to introduce some characters before dramatically crashing to a black screen for ten seconds in the middle of it.

Peak Times continues to talk about the game with some possible gameplay footage showing behind him. It's difficult to determine what is gameplay when it revolves around staring at a virtual desk but he announces the game is also coming to mobiles and tablets which I guess makes sense.

Card games are fine, Video games are great. Combined though I just don't see the point.

Next up Bethesda Director and Teen Heartthrob Award Todd Howard thanks fans for making Fallout 4 such a success and introduces new add-ons to the game.

These include elevators, armour and weapon racks, conveyor belts and "track kits" which are essentially Marble Run style slides and flumes. Having not played the game this feels more like the components to building a factory at this point but presumably they can be used for traps and shelter defences.

This is furthered by a new feature of being able to build your own vault, seemingly blurring the line between Fallout 4 and Shelter. Speaking of which, will also get an upgrade with new locations, enemies, characters and combat system as well as being announced on PC as of July 2016.

I haven't seen gleeful sadism like this since Timesplitter's body-inflating dart gun.

"There is something else that you've been asking us about." Says Matthew Mccushionghey before a trailer for a remastered Skyrim plays and my only thought is "Who exactly was asking them about this and why?"

Well putting aside the fact that a remaster is almost always an inferior announcement to a brand new entry in a series, there are multiple problems with remastering Skyrim. Firstly it's the most recent game so there will be less of a contrast between graphics of last generation and this generation. Surely choosing an older game would emphasise the progress made since then with a far more significant contrast?

Secondly, by remastering an older game you get to revive its accessibility. Many new players (myself included) only began playing The Elder Scrolls series with Skyrim so to introduce players to some of the great prior games in the series can only be a good thing surely?

And thirdly epic RPG's like Skyrim often have players sink hundreds if not thousands of hours into them. Making all their progress essentially obsolete with a remaster doesn't make buying the touched-up version all too appealing.

But of course, remastering any of the older games also requires more work so just forget all those benefits I guess. The crowd at the conference seems pretty excited so I guess I'm in the minority on this one.

I won't pretend it doesn't look amazing, I just think there were better choices.

Next the reformed Niko Bellic steps on stage to talk about Dishonoured. Although rather than the expected Dishonoured 2, he announces a new game from Arcane Studios called Prey. A futuristic FPS with supernatural elements and psychological themes somewhere between Dead Space and Soma. Due for release sometime next year on Xbox One, PS4 and PC and despite a seemingly purely cinematic trailer, the setting and plot is very intriguing and Prey is a solid addition to the conference.

Noah Bennet from Heroes appears on screen to continue talking about Doom's success. It's grating at this point but at least Bethesda makes the point of thanking the fans and the talk does eventually progress to something worthwhile. Namely the whole host of features, maps, weapons and game modes being added soon, most of which are completely free which is hard to make any criticism of really..

Jack Coleman leaves and Bee Hives returns to announce a demo of Doom's first level arriving on all current gen platforms but for some reason, only for a week...That kind of stifles the good will attitude to be honest. Is it really such a huge business loss to just let people play the first level indefinitely?

He also claims "youngsters" call demos "shareware" now...Is that true? I still call them demos but I'm young, I am still young right? Shit! Are demos old fuddy duddy language now?

"I remember when a blowjob was what you did just to get the game cartridge working."

Continuing to impose quarter-life-crisis dread on me is the E3 crowd, as the game director for The Elder Scrolls Online appears. The deformed dog-seal grunts and barks return in force along with piercing sustained banshee wails and I begin to wonder if I'm watching E3 or the fucking X-Factor.

Speaking of meaningless dead air, game director Matt Firor continues to sing ESO's praises with it's 7 million players and other grand statistics emblazoned across a trailer for a game that's already out. I guess you'd call it a highlights reel or perhaps a porno since this conference is starting to feel so masturbatory.

The now intensely punchable crowd continues screaming at the stage until Matt finally announces something properly. A Dark Brotherhood DLC releasing...well, today actually. A trailer shows a lot of backstabbing and grim talk just as you'd expect but the crowd must have not expected that because they lose their little minds all over again.

A more technical update called "One Tamriel" is announced which, from what I can gather, connects all the players in the world with "no level restrictions" or "content barriers" and apparently that's never been done in a multi-platform MMORPG before. Which probably explains why I've had no interest in the genre as arbitrary content barriers seem like a stupid idea in the first place. Regardless, the audience yet again goes apeshit about the news.

Maybe they just really like this guy...

Moving on, Beate Rimes returns to explain how Bethesda too is trying to screw with the E3 conference formula as much as possible by having an after-party where the already raucous crowd can get shitfaced and watch Blink 182, who might be the first thing this audience didn't go rabid-dog insane for.

Bethesda steps into the Virtual Reality ring by announcing Fallout 4 and Doom to support VR capabilities, siding with the ludicrously expensive HTC Vive. We then bounce over to some kind of pre show-post show buffer commentators who make some bad jokes and then threaten to inflict them on game developers in interviews after the conference.

To close the show, oddly separated from the studio's earlier segment we hear from Arcane Studios again, this time, they are talking about Dishonoured 2. A clean-shaven, sleep-deprived David O'Doherty arrives to premier the gameplay footage. Footage that at first consists only of sweeping views around the game's environments but granted, they look visually impressive and his talk about the detail the city will have and the natural, interruptable behaviour of the NPC's sounds good too.

I'm going to describe the walkthrough overall because to stop and start as many times as this segment did would just be annoying. So the game has two playable protagonists, Corvo Attano from the first game and Emily Caldwin, the woman seen in last year's cinematic trailer. The walkthrough shows an area called the Dust District which naturally is plagued by dust storms that affect your visibility and the enemies'. We see some of Emily's supernatural powers and the creative traps and distractions you can create with their combinations.

Daybed O'Coffeetea talks about the wide array of choice the game will have in how you complete the missions. Stealth or action, lethal or non-lethal, with the latter presumably having some implication on the story or perhaps just whether guards can wake their colleagues up.

Another level displays time-travelling abilities between past and present versions of a level. Gimmicky perhaps but what looked like a fun feature for just one of the levels. The diverse and choice-oriented gameplay, tactical use of gadgets, supernatural abilities and weapons, plus the enchanting steampunk aesthetic makes Dishonoured 2 a potentially fantastic sequel and I haven't even played the first one.

Plus the time-travel doohickey itself looks cool as hell.

Things finish with Dishonoured 2's release date of November 11th 2016 and a gameplay trailer showing mostly what we just saw. Pete Finds himself back on stage and after a lot of thanking all the developers and bigging up their after-party shenanigans, the conference comes to a close.

Bethesda was never going to match the quality of last year's conference but they could have done without congratulating themselves on everything for the majority of this one. That said, what seems like some undeniably good content and games are on the way and had they employed snipers to take out those knuckle-dragging neandafucks in the audience I would consider Bethesda winners already...

E3 2016 - EA

So begins EA's conference. The spotlights start sweeping, generic electronic music starts pumping and the overlord-mother-screen injects subliminal messages into your brain mass as the code-words flash "PLAY. TO. FEEL. LIVE TO PLAY. WIN TO FEEL. PLAY. WIN. REBEL. RULE. SUBMIT."

"Ignorance is strength..."

The hypnosis finally wears off and slippery silverman CEO Andrew Wilson slithers on stage talking about "a new type of show" which equates to the conference for some reason being held in two different places simultaneously. Shady McSnakehips hosts the Los Angeles event while Peter Moore resides at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, dressed in a sexy little black number that I thought he'd probably regret under the huge Apollo spotlights, but it seems quite the opposite. In fact he's a bit nippy...

They constantly switch between these locations presumably so the audience doesn't fall asleep and yet I zone out of Wilson's stock chatter about EA's vague importance in an abstract location somewhere in the game industry.

"Did any of you see the Battlefield trailer last month?"

Wilson asks, trying not to disappear up his own arse and suppress a wanky smirk given the widely known knowledge that Battlefield 1's trailer has become the most liked trailer in Youtube history for reasons not entirely clear to me personally.

Sergeant Slick promises an hour long gameplay stream after the conference before introducing Brian Cox's less successful younger brother to talk about Titanfall 2, Swiftly moving into a multiplayer gameplay trailer we see new features such as teleportation, grappling hooks and advanced Titan-on- Titan melee combat.

He goes onto announce a new single player mode exploring the bond between a sentient Optimus Prime voiced Titan and their pilot. The single player's as yet unclear story shows mainly what you'd imagine with the increased spectacle of scripted set pieces, warfare against what seem to be un-piloted machines and human soldiers but also interestingly a few seconds of the world's (probably hostile) wildlife in the form of some large frilled-lizard type creature.

Titanfall 2 is due October 28th 2016 which I thought I'd make a note of since no other games in the conference are given a release date.

Next up is a hip-hop backed Madden NFL17 trailer that looks like every other Madden trailer and I don't give a shit so let's move on. Except we can't move on because Peter Moore wants to talk mooooree about competitive gaming and how they're trying to involve more players in competitions and tournaments despite not being professionals. "Challenger" "Premier" and "EA Major" are some words he says that all basically mean competition in the sadly not dead language of "marketing dronese". 

A documentary video involving two pro gamers of Madden tries desperately to get us invested and excited for an upcoming tournament and potential face off between them. The video then cuts to them and some other finalists loitering awkwardly onstage whilst a man known only as "Stan" interviews the much hyped competitor who now has a broken arm...I'm sure it'll still be a close contest though... 

I feel like this entire segment should have been nicknamed "Stiff"

We return to Perter Phwoore who announces a 1 million dollar prize fund for one of the numerous competitions they're planning to hold...at some point, I guess...Honestly sports games are like a slow form of lobotomy for me.

Next arrives a man I suspect might suffer the most misspelled name in the world, Aaryn Flynn talks about Mass Effect: Andromeda, describing it as larger in scope than the previous games, with an entirely new cast of memorable characters. A behind the scenes trailer shows snippets of footage in between lots of developers sitting at their desks. 

We see a new streamlined or flattened (depending on your cynicism) Normandy spaceship, a variety of new alien worlds and a Yahg-like enemy charging at an armoured player character. At least one Asari exists here with what seem like significantly improved facial animations and expressions, possibly motion-captured if other footage in the trailer is any indication, and a new Mako (land vehicle) replacement that looks a bit too much like a remote controlled toy car. 

We see more planet-side and outer-space environments and a structure looking curiously similar to The Crucible, which fans of the series will know is potentially a really big deal. The trailer finishes with a woman abruptly waking up in a spaceship and breathlessly whispering "we made it." A sentiment the development team and fans will likely echo if the game dodges more delays and is ever actually released.

Actually in all honesty, take as long as you want, just please don't fuck it up.

Short back and sides returns to talk about the hundreds of updates EA have made to all their games recently which doesn't seem like much of an achievement to me when most game updates are there to fix bugs.

EA Play To Give is the next ambiguously titled nebulous jargon concept project to be introduced and after running it through my "translator" (a starving marketing executive I keep tied up in my basement) I can confirm that I still don't know what the fuck it is.

It seems to be about connecting gameplay features to charities, as though completing certain objectives would donate to charity but they also talk about Play To Give having an end and another 1 million dollar donation going...somewhere...I'll talk to my translator again and get back to you,..This time I'll use the "phrasebook."

Do YOU even know what you're talking about?

Zigzagging back to Teater Moore he checks the audience isn't dead before introducing FIFA 17 where an aggressively bad actor steps out from a small gazebo and gives a speech about the magic of football that I'm pretty sure even the most avid football fans would be curling their broken toes at.

It turns out the guy is also the protagonist in the game's "story" mode, oh wait I don't have to put mocking quotes around "story" since they've decided to call it "The Journey" and that does it all for me. You follow Alex Hunter through the highs and lows of a blossoming football career. Interestingly they chose to focus on the inner spirit and enthusiasm of the character rather than the violence, racism and corruption that are equally important features of the sport.

NBA2k16 Livin' Da Dream is not only an atrocity of a title but a similar attempt at an emotional, dramatic story mode in a sports game. I can't in good conscience recommend you looking it up but the acting was about on par with Mr Hunter's cringeworthy performance on the EA stage which suggests to me another horrific soap-opera trainwreck of a story.

Sorry Gazebo Joe, no one's acting career has kicked off at E3.

Peter Moore (no relation to the serial killer of the same name) insists on continuing to talk about FIFA and how they've now got the likenesses of real life football managers in the game. So now you can see all your favourite soulless, testicle-faced middle-aged men angrily swearing at you from the sidelines, just like on TV.

Jose Mourinho, arguably the most famous of football managers for having a precious shred of something close to a personality, joins Peter on stage to announce that he too is in the game before interrogating and publicly shaming Peter Moore on their inability to secure more than four football manager's likenesses in the game, 

Peter tries to win back control of the situation by asking Jose if his son is in the trap of their microtransactions not realising his mistake of being a grinning EA employee rubbing his fingers together and talking about money at an event with cameras.

And you were doing so well too! With all your talk of charity and not being a money-obsessed tyrannical conglomerate.

I had some jokes to write about the rest of the FIFA footage but my beard was so long that it got tangled in the keyboard and I didn't realise because I was fucking asleep.

A stretched Scandinavian Bill Nye steps out wearing an obnoxious "we are gamers" shirt and starts talking about how magical "Yarny" and last year's cutesy platformer Unravel was. He then introduces EA Originals, an effort to support small developers and even apparently redirect all profits straight back into their projects.

An example of the new initiative is introduced by a nervous man named Klaus from the undeniably small twenty-person Zoink Studios in Gothenburg. We see screenshots of an indie game called Fe. A game where you play as a fox-type creature exploring the nature and wildlife of a purple hazey forest.

As titularly apt as it would be, a Jimi Hendrix soundtrack might not quite suit the tone.

Seemingly an open-world platformer where your magical fox critter communicates through song with the peaceful creatures of the forest and uses stealth to avoid those that are hostile or "spread silence." The game looks good but it also unfortunately looks like 90% of all other indie games where a small vulnerable player character explores a harsh stylised world, see Limbo, Cave Story, Don't Starve, Closure, Never Alone, et cetera. It seems the supposedly more innovative indie scene of game development may have unwittingly created their own form of mainstream.

The Star Wars theme suddenly and jarringly blasts gentle Fe off the stage and Jade Raymond talks unnaturally slowly, possibly drunkenly about the frightening amount of Star Wars games being developed. A trailer jumps between almost every major studio in the United States hyping up each of their own different projects, all bubbling with love of the franchise and not even entertaining the idea of the well running dry.

The Battlefront developers make a point to mention that they've "listened to the players" and realised how stupid they were not to include Force Awakens content and that they're scrambling to rectify that as we speak.

The show closes with Mr Fantastic bragging about how mindbogglingly visionary they were to take Battlefield to the only logical place the series had left. To make his point he then leaves the stage, travels back in time to WW1, lives through all four years of it and returns older, wiser and under a different name to continue talking about it.

Such a shame he lost that shirt in the trenches...

A trailer for Battlefield 1 is started and then for some reason stopped before showing the full thing three minutes later with an equally unnecessary hip-hop soundtrack.

He mentions again the much-hyped gameplay stream of Battlefield 1 happening after the conference and we cut to a small area embarrassingly close to the main conference to talk about that upcoming footage that had better be pretty breathtaking with the amount of preamble it's getting.

Bafflingly, the players of this live-stream are Jamie Foxx and Zac Efron who look absolutely the contractually legal minimum amount of excited to be there. This pointless cutaway to a pointless non-showing of footage comes to an end and the time-traveller describes the game's environmental destruction, dynamic weather systems and "behemoth" vehicles like blimps, accompanied by screenshots that could have easily been footage were this stream not so monumentally important.

Perhaps your next charity idea should be "Play To Give A Fuck".

Shrimp-hips returns to say goodbye and also give one final push to what must now be a life-changing Battlefield 1 gameplay stream and the conference officially comes to a close. The event didn't feel as long and tedious as their previous conference but it also didn't match up in terms of pure, unfiltered embarrassment and stupidity. 

EA's conference was a middling mop of mediocrity with no unexpected gems and those present soaring by like shooting stars to a pensioner that takes a full minute to crank his neck upwards. Amidst these glimmers sat a lot of ultimately meaningless platitudes and business aspirations that are essentially the filler or advert breaks to any conference. 

Not an unbearably painful conference but a woefully forgettable one all the same...Unless you like FIFA of course, in which case you must be off your tits with all the crazy content you've seen. Don't worry though, perhaps ask Perky Peter Moore if you can borrow his...

X-Men: Apocalypse - Cinema Review

The Fox Studios X-Men movies have always fallen in the middle between the grim solemnity and gritty brawls of the DC films and the snappy, character banter and flowing fantasy fights of the Marvel universe of films. They also tend to fall in the middle of these two extremes in terms of quality and X-Men Apocalypse is regrettably no exception.

I took some time after seeing the film to let opinions gestate which in this instance allowed an increasing number of flaws to boil to the surface. The initial reaction of my cinema viewing however was a positive one and I'll revisit that reaction later.

Following on from 2014's  Days Of Future Past and 2011's First Class before that, Xavier's school is established at this point, as are mutants in the eyes of the public and governments. Many mutants still wander lost or disillusioned with Charles' ideals but there is no Brotherhood of Mutants yet and Magneto himself is trying to lay low and live a quiet life amongst humans and his new family since the events of Future Past.

The film actually starts in Ancient Egypt setting up Apocalypse, his penchant for body swapping and stealing abilities, his God-like worshipped status, his four loyal "horsemen" and how he becomes indisposed from 3000BC to the 1980's when the film takes place.

A lot of aspects of the film are divisive and Apocalypse himself is one of them. I feel Oscar Issac provides a good performance as the villain and his presentation, behaviour and voice are all suitably imposing and aloof. His motivation however is never entirely clear which given some of the unabashed exposition elsewhere in the film is a surprising oversight.

"From the ashes of their world, we'll build a better one" So like, Ancient Egypt again but with strong people?

Expected terms like "cleansing the world" come up often but whether that equates to killing everyone and starting anew, tearing down the structures of civilisation and brainwashing people into worshipping Apocalypse or something else entirely is something many audiences have been unclear on. It didn't personally bother me during my viewing but it's one of the most common criticisms I've heard. As for Apocalypse's "horsemen" we have Magneto, Angel, Psylocke and Storm and their motivations and characters are also somewhat suspect.

To start with Storm, making her new debut in the reboot since Halle Berry's version. She lives as leader of a small group of street thieves in Cairo, using her powers for simple distraction of market sellers and authorities. Meeting Apocalypse, he enhances her powers to the level of the weather-goddess we're used to but apart from that what he offers her is unclear. Storm idolises Mystique, as do many new characters, so she has the ideals of an X-Men recruit despite thievery presumably brought on by poverty. Would she not object to Apocalypse's talk of "cleansing the world"? Or is she as unclear on his motivations as the audience?

"Can I have more dialogue?"

"No, I need to demolish Cairo."

"What?"

"I mean...Humanity has lost its way."

Angel is introduced as an unwilling prisoner in an underground mutant fight club. Injured in a match against Nightcrawler he becomes a belligerent drunk until Apocalypse finds him and gives him new metal wings. Despite this painful process I guess I can see how Angel would feel indebted to Apocalypse but again, his one line of dialogue implying involuntary involvement in the fight club suggests he might too be against global annihilation and tyrannical Ancient Egyptian God worship.

Magneto's motivations make perhaps the most sense. We see Erik attempting to blend in with humanity. We see his deep love for his wife and children but eventually identity being discovered authorities attempt to apprehend him. Through panic and incompetence his family is killed in some quite astonishing (almost unbelievable) bad luck.

Fassbender acts the hell out of it but in terms of writing it's down there with how Charles loses his hair. In terms of setting him on the path of "Fuck humanity" it works well enough or at least better than his counterparts.

And finally we have Psylocke whose motivations and character I'll explore with the same amount of dialogue and backstory she's given in the film...

So the plot of the film makes enough sense in its barest skeletal form but any attempt to think further on it exposes a lot of its flaws, unnecessary choices and forced eventualities. Dealing with a world-ending God mutant like Apocalypse naturally puts the story on a larger scale but the writing seems to struggle with how to deal with that and the ever-expanding cast. This results in some of the characters literally standing around with nothing to do whilst others catch up to the next milestone in the story.

"At least Gambit would've brought a pack of cards..."

I'm not as adversed to the lack of mutant-on-mutant fight scenes as some critics (who were perhaps still giddy from Civil War) but what exists is rather cramped to one end of the film and nothing special in terms of choreography and flair.

Which leads to perhaps the biggest overall problem of the film in that it is so unremarkable for something so grandiose and ambitious. The plot is generic if arguably serviceable, the fighting is mediocre compared to the inventive use of superpowers in other films, the dialogue is too much in exposition and too little in actual character and the tone is uncomfortably jarring at times.

This last point is epitomised by what is otherwise a great action sequence of Quicksilver saving the entire mansion's students from an explosion. This moment is prefaced by significant events of injury and loss signalling a low point for the film's heroes but in-keeping with Quicksilver's jovial character the action scene is treated goofy and comical going so far as to set it to Eurythmics for 80's nostalgia points.

The scene in isolation is fun albeit arguably derivative of Quicksilver's similar scene in Days Of Future Past but in context it's tonally staggering and there are several other moments of humour a little too close to intense drama that give the film an uncomfortable flow. I'm grateful there is humour in the film to stop it becoming Man Of Steel levels of dour and pretentious but the pacing leaves it as detrimental as it is refreshing, effectively cancelling each other out.

To bring the dialogue into scrutiny is to also bring up one of the film's strengths oddly enough, which ties into my initial positive response overall. The dialogue is poorly written for the most part and at times downright ludicrous and awful. Whether Bryan Singer has lost the plot or this arises from having four different writers on the film, it is a crippling weakness that is only alleviated by the excellent performances from most of the main cast. Michael Fassbender in particular is on top form acting especially during his family man incognito subplot.

Michael returns from his first read of the script.

The fact that Fassbender, McAvoy, Evan Peters and others are still entertaining and engaging with some of the shoddy lines they have to work with is testament to their acting ability. New characters like Storm, Angel, Nightcrawler, Cyclops and Jean Grey are given the briefest of set ups but the actors do an admirable job trying to breathe life into the handful of lines they're given. Speaking of Cyclops and Jean, who receive more of a focus and an attempt at characterisation, whilst Tye Sheridan and particularly Sophie Turner step into the role of the characters accurately and effectively without simply emulating their predecessors, the classic romance between them is woefully empty.

Victim again to the sparse characterisation and non-expositional dialogue, the pair only really bond through shared proximity during traumatic events and actual chemistry is practically non-existent. In fact, if we strictly follow the film's mishandled portrayal, Scott has no interest in Jean until he actually sees her through his new power-restraining glasses and Jean shows no interest in Scott until he displays his powers in an unorthodox lumberjacking of Charles' favourite tree. If this is what we're supposed to go on in terms of budding romance, theirs is a completely shallow relationship based only on appearance and destructive power...Things actually offered freely by Apocalypse so perhaps these two should be horsemen instead...

"I like you now I know you're hot."

"I like you now I know you have WMD eyes."

To talk about the cinematography and aforementioned choreography I'm picking Wolverine's cameo which is essentially an advert for the upcoming R-Rated Wolverine 3. Logan goes 100% bath salts on Colonel Stryker's guards, for once actually showing a lot of the blood and gore that would naturally come from an angry, metal-clawed immortal beast man going to town on his captors. The choreography and camerawork is so bland however that were it not for Hugh Jackman's rabid performance and the novelty of the blood this scene would be entirely forgettable. 

This comes to a climax when Jean psychically undoes some of the brainwashing (I think that's what happened anyway) and Logan decides not to skewer her, Scott and Nightcrawler instead escaping into the wintry forest. With thought-out cinematography this could be a perfectly adequate, even good scene but for some reason we get a static, flat angle shot of the door with Wolverine monkeying out into the snow looking like a ridiculous shirtless tramp rather than a deadly feral mutant weapon. The film is plagued by numerous thoughtless choices like this.

One of those choices is behind what they're looking at...

Coming to a recommendation for Avenue Q: Armageddalypse is tricky because I did enjoy the film on my initial viewing and despite a myriad of problems, the performances and visuals carried me through enough that the flaws didn't detract extensively from an overall engagement. That said, this has some of the worst writing since Last Stand (Ironic considering the film makes a snide jab at it) and the longer you think about it the more of a mess the story structurally and tonally becomes. 

If you're a fan of the X-Men films, Apocalypse is not so bad as to abandon the series altogether, even if it does do some baffling things with the continuity. There's some fun moments, striking performances and visually impressive set pieces to enjoy but don't go expecting poignant plots, resonant or memorable dialogue or inventive execution of fight scenes.

Don't go with your brain essentially. The recommendation can only really go out to fans and even then it's a disappointingly lacklustre entry into the series. The future is ambiguous but ominous for the mainline X-Men films at this point. They might be better focusing on spin off films, centred on individual characters as they've done with Wolverine and might be doing with Gambit rather than trying to juggle their huge ensemble of characters and tell a coherent plot involving them all.