Hi all!
This week, I take a look at Tropico 5 for PC, a game series I’ve always been interested in, but never taken the plunge into. To read this weeks review, click the link below, where I’ve done it on behalf of GamrReview.com:
http://www.gamrreview.com/review/91643/tropico-5-pc
As always, stay cool peoples, and by all means get in touch!
Dan
Hi all,
Once again, I’ve managed to write a review for gamrReview.com. This week, it’s on the indie game Concursion that I saw back at EGX rezzed back in March. The review can be found below:
http://www.gamrreview.com/review/91558/concursion-pc
I’ve also been putting in more time and effort into my game, so please, clink the link below to give it a go:
As always, thank you for reading,
Dan.
Hi all!
As I said last week, I’ve been making a few reviews over at GamrReview.com, so this weeks latest is Among the Sleep, which I Kickstarted a while ago. The game was alright, but failed to capitalise on such a unique and brilliant concept due to it’s length and depth.
The review can be read at:
http://www.gamrreview.com/review/91533/among-the-sleep-pc
Hope you enjoy it!
Dan
p.s. I’ll be putting up a few posts about my game in the coming weeks, here’s to hoping I can get it finished soon!
Hi all,
So for the previous two weeks I was actually on holiday travelling the length of my little country: the UK. Unfortunately, this left me little time to work on anything at all, so coming off of holiday I was able to work on getting through Transistor for the PC. The review has been edited, and is currently up over at GamrReview.com, so if you fancy taking a look, click the link below:
http://www.gamrreview.com/review/91524/transistor-pc
I’ll be doing this for the following weeks as I have quite a few games that I need to review for that site, from Among the Sleep, to Tropico 5. Rest assured that I’ll be back to my usual Friday, 10am posts before long, but for now, I’ll have to consolidate my reviews over there.
Thanks for your support,
Dan
When Octodad was announced and shown off around the time of the PS4 announcements, I couldn’t have been more excited at the chance to play it. Here was a platform holder like Sony, bowing their head to an indie studio, and making way for a company that wouldn’t have been given the time of day 5 years ago. The Game looked goofy, fun, and all around a brilliantly unique game that I couldn’t wait to play for all of its ideals. Octodad was unfortunately delayed for the PS4, and as I haven’t got around to buying a PS4 just yet (my PC is more powerful than both the PS4 and Xbox One, and there just hasn’t been unique games yet) I decided to get the game on my PC. Did Octodad live up to my huge expectations? or was I just living a dream as to whats possible with indie development?
You start the game of Octodad out at a church about to attend a wedding ceremony. The game messes with the joke of Octodad being an octopus in disguise from the offset, throwing little quips about people not noticing he’s one straight away before you even control him. From here, its your job to find your suit and embark on an epic quest of controlling Octodads four limbs to pursue getting to your wedding reasonably presentable. The control mechanics are the core of this game, with Octodad being rather hard to manoeuvre reasonably well. You control his right and left arm with the left and right analogue stick respectively, pressing the RB button to pick things up and pressing it again to put things down. To walk, you press and hold one of the triggers on your controller in order to raise a leg, the longer you hold the trigger down, the higher it goes. Whilst you hold the trigger down, you then use the analogue sticks to control in which direction the leg should point or move. Combining all these actions allows you to manoeuvre Octodad around the world, but you have to be careful, everyone is always watching you, meaning if you make too many mistakes or are too clumsy in how you move Octodad around, you’ll suffer for it when people start to notice you’re not human.
Throughout the course of Octodad, you’ll be repeating similar events to the start, with levels designed to push your controls of Octodads limbs to the limits. There will be levels where you have to do household chores, and other levels where you’ll just have to take your family out to the shopping market. The everyday scenarios with this crazy character adds a sense of.. surrealism to the game that I haven’t felt before in others. Who would have thought scanning items through a checkout would be so much fun when it’s considered a chore in everyday life. I suppose you could say that Octodad gets your preconceived notions of boring things in real life and flips them on their head with the introduction of one strange main character.
The games chore stages couldn’t last forever though, with Octodad starting quite blissful, but turning into a fully pledged story before long. To make sure there’s a narrative, Young Horses have made a arch nemesis to Octodad: a chef. The chefs out to expose Octodad to his family and the world, and he won’t give you an easy ride in his mission to do so. This central theme pops up in places, and adds some urgency to an otherwise slow and weirdly paced game. You’ll be shopping in the supermarket with your family, when all of a sudden the chef appears and you have to run for your life, ensuring you’re not caught, otherwise you’ll need to repeat the sequence all over again.
The game starts to change its pace half way through with this introduction of the main antagonist, meaning that the fickle controls are no longer fun and hilarious to use, but are instead annoying and frustrating at times. The final boss encounter for example involved walking across a lot of small beams, which I admit that I spent easily 15 minutes repeating over and over. I understand the developers need for a narrative to ensure that players didn’t feel like they were skimping out, but this narrative with its ups and downs and changes in pace deterred from Octodads core principal: funny controls in mundane situations. Using a badly controlled octopus to sneak past guards or walk across thin obstacles isn’t fun when the mechanics are just not there to support it.
The humour is great to begin with, but will soon become a little dry after a while, with both the narrative becoming a little more serious in tone, and the jokes becoming stale as time goes on. In this sense, its a good thing Octodad doesn’t overstay its welcome. Coming in at almost 2 hours long (I managed to finish it in 109 minutes), it’s easily one of the quickest games I’ve played in recent memory. This may or may not bother you (I know some people take a game time= value decision), but when it’s on sale in the humble store, I still think its great value for a truly original idea for a game.
I’m glad Octodad exists. I feel it shows how far our industry has come, where a random game with very random mechanics and a very strange plot can get the backing of a huge publisher like Sony. It also stands as an accumulation of how creative developers can be, allowing them to come up with an idea, and sticking to it through thick and thin. Whilst the game of Octodad itself didn’t set my world on fire, the fact that this game exists at all still excites me even after completing it and having my fill. I truly commend Young Horses for this game, and look forward to their future endeavours.
3/5
Given the nature of the game I’m currently developing, I decided it was time to delve into the mobile app market to see what competition is in the market, and what innovative/original ideas were out there. Whilst browsing, I came across a nifty little app that I liked the trailer of called Unpossible, an obstacle avoider game, similar to my own, which had a unique sound track and slightly different course structure in that you’re on a never ending tube that generates obstacles on the outside. Usually, tubing games stick you on the inside, so this definitely made the game stick out for me.
The game starts you off on a tube where you’re constantly moving forwards, throwing obstacles at you which you need to avoid by strafing left and right around the tube. You’re stuck to the outside, so you don’t have much room to navigate, but it’s enough to keep the game tight in gameplay whilst also being loose in controls. You can choose to strafe by either touching either side of the screen, or by rotating the device to the side you’d like to move. I personally went for the touch controls as I felt they gave me more precision when navigating between lots of obstacles.
The levels begin easy, with big pilons sticking out of the tube allowing 90% of the tube to avoid them, but they soon get faster, and the obstacles start grouping together, meaning that it becomes harder and harder to avoid them all. The difficulty I could say is inconsistent, with early levels being so easy you breeze through it and get scores of 2 minutes and over, with the second level ramping up the difficulty to the point I could rarely reach 30 seconds. This isn’t a detraction from the game, and if anything, adds to its addictive behaviour, but can become infuriating for many players looking to beat their friends on the scoreboards.
The game consists of 3 levels, and 3 daily levels, meaning the game doesn’t offer much in terms of content. Where it makes up for this though is its replay-ability, ensuring players replay levels time and time again until they finally beat their last score. It’s not as addictive as say… Super Hexagon, as there are times that you feel cheated like it was impossible for you to avoid something no matter what you done, but the game still allows you to become hooked to some extent to constantly strive for a better score.
For £1.49, I certainly learnt a lot about my current competition on the market, and it makes me want to improve myself and my work for my upcoming game Twixel, with my game needing to be polished to Unpossibles level of detail. For £1.49, you really can’t go wrong with this addictive little game, and I must warn you: the soundtracks absolutely fantastic.
3/5
Given my love of Magic: The Gathering, I was surprised I didn’t happen upon Hearthstone sooner. The Free to Play World of Warcraft card game seems to be an exact replica of Magic, but at the same time adds its own uniqueness to the formula. With its recent release on the iPad, I decided to give the game a go, firstly for the amount podcasts have been talking about it, and secondly as its free and I needed an excuse to use my iPad.
The game starts out by slowly introducing you to the games mechanics via some tutorial matches which will make you actively partake in the game before setting off and versing other players. Here, you’ll learn that every turn you take gives you 1 more mana than the last which you can use to summon minions or cast spells. The objective of the match is to dwindle the enemy players health down to 0 from its starting strength of 30. You can use your minions attacking power to attack the enemy player, or the individual minions the enemy summons. After a few matches, you’ll learn that you can use some cards to summon powers for your player themselves, such as weapons that allow them to attack, and after a few more fights you’ll finally learn about your own heroes ability, which always costs 2 mana and differs depending on the character you choose to play as.
The games mechanics don’t take long to learn, but its the cards themselves you’ll have to master, as building a desk here is just as important as it is in Magic. Your decks are allowed to hold 30 cards in total, with only 2 duplicates in any given deck, meaning that you can’t rely on one amazing card for the whole game. The desk builder does contain a nifty companion, that will ask you to pick from one of three cards at a time, ensuring you have a decent amount of cheap cards and expensive ones for the long game.
Cards are earned whilst you build your chosen character up to level 10, and after that its a case of buying card packs or forging individual cards using the deck builder. In the case of purchasing card packs, Blizzard have done a good job of making sure you get good value in your purchases, with an individual pack costing 100 coins (the in game currency earn by winning games or completing challenges), and other packs costing the following: 2 packs £1.99, 7 packs: £7.99, 15 packs: £13.99 and 40 packs costing £34.99. Each pack comes with 5 random cards, which, considering how much game you get for nothing up front, and how generous the cards are at the start of the game, I see a lot of people purchasing these packs in the hope of getting great cards they could use in their next deck build. The crafting mechanic I mentioned requires destroying your cards to create “dust”, which is then used to create a fresh new card. You can pick from any card that exists at the moment from within the game, which offers a fantastic amount of flexibility for a game like this, but it comes with a cost: destroying cards for dust gives half as much dust as it requires to build a card, meaning you’ll need to destroy a lot to get the cards you want.
Games play out rather predictably at the start of every match, with both players not able to do much with the tiny amount of mana they both have. Thing start to ramp up soon, with different opponents using different, unique cards to really turn your world upside down when battling one another. I’ve had infuriating games where my only hope is set on a strong minion with, just for the opposing player to steal it away thanks to their unique card I’ve never seen before. I’ll then have games where I manage to deal 27 damage in one fel swoop, meaning the other player never stood a chance. I suppose like other card games, it all comes down to the luck of the draw, and how and when you play certain cards, because not everything is left to chance.
I’m enjoying my time with Hearthstone, and its needless to say that I will continue to play the game well throughout the next few years as a nice time sink. It’s a brilliant game to play for an hour or whilst on lunch, or not doing much else, and somehow, whether you win or lose, you always feel like you’re bettering yourself as a player, which is always empowering when it comes to gaming. For a Free to Play game, you really cannot go wrong with picking Hearthstone up and giving it a chance. I give this recommendation with a warning though: you may get as addicted to the game as me with time.
4/5
Having loved Rayman Origins for its fantastic platforming, I couldn’t wait to get a hold of the latest game in the series, Rayman Legends. Screenshots and trailers made me even more jealous of the games Wii U exclusivity, until one day Ubisoft announced that they would be releasing the game on all platforms simultaneously across all systems. I decided to purchase the game on PS Vita, for the sheer sake of portability and for having a game to play on the system.
The game starts out with Rayman and his pals asleep in the forest, whilst the world is being taken over and destroyed by a bunch of dragons and pirates. A green ‘fly’ comes to the rescue by waking Rayman and co, and telling them the world needs saving. The first levels sets you up and gets you used to the basics of the mechanics all over again (being able to sprint, jump, punch etc.), but a twist occurs when you can’t proceed any further in the level, and must touch the screen in order to continue.
This is where the game gets strange and I wasn’t sure about my purchase. When touching the screen, you take control of murphy (the green fly from earlier), and set upon helping the king teensy navigate the rest of the level. In these stages (of which there are many), you use the many abilities of the Vita to help the king teensy through the stage, buy swatting pests flames, slicing ropes of obstacles, and rotating the device to change the shape and layout of the level. This all sounds fine in theory, and finally makes good use of the PS Vitas different sensors and touch screens, but its the actual character that sticks out and is annoying. The king teensy is AI controlled, meaning he’ll walk through the level just like you would if you controlled him. Where the annoyances come in are obstacles or trying to find hidden secrets, as the king teensy can make the wrong move, killing himself and starting the stage again, or ignoring the fact you’ve opened a new door, missing the secrets you’ve uncovered. These sections were my least favourite of the whole game, taking away from the fantastic level design and glorious platforming the Rayman games usually encapsulate so well.
There are around 48 new levels to play in Rayman Legends, with another 40 from the original game, making for a lot of content to play through. Each level has between 3 and 10 teensies to find and rescue, making for 700 tenses in total to help rescue. I can’t say how long I’ve played the game so far, but it must been in the 10’s of hours, and not single digits, as there’s just so much to do and collect. The new levels are interesting and stylishly done, but with half of them being the murphy levels, I became bored and annoyed at how they were designed. Whenever I got around to unlocking a new world I’d go out of my way to avoid the murphy challenges, so that I could have fun on the normal levels instead. The inclusion of the original Origins levels was nice, but it feels like a bit of a gimic to make the game bigger with relatively little work. The levels haven’t changed except there’s more teensies to collect than before, making them boring and tedious if you’re like me and played the original game many times with friends and family.
One new mechanic Ubisoft have added for Legends is the ability to store and collect lums that you collect in each level. These lums are accumulated, and can be used to unlock new playable characters, from knight Rayman, to jungle Rayman, it allows you to progress through just playing the game. Everything seems to be revolved around these lums though, with scratch cards being unlocked in levels that can give you more lums, unlocking classic levels from origins, or unlocking creatures that you keep hidden away so that they slowly give you lums on different days of the week.
Ubisoft have also added a new online mode, where you can compete in daily and weekly challenges in order to prove your might against other players across the world. These levels consist of small challenges, like collecting 250 lums as fast as possible, or reach 200metres asap, to which you’ll be rewarded with a small number of lums depending on where you’ve placed in the world wide rankings for that particular challenge. It’s certainly one way to get players involved everyday, with the levels being small enough that you could play for 5-10 minutes a day, just to maintain a score on the world rankings.
Rayman Legends was a weird mixed bag of experiments and tried and tested fantastic gameplay. You can tell, especially with the Murphy sequences, that the game was designed from the ground up with the Wii U gamepad in mind, but those controls only work with multiple people playing. I found myself being the bystander, watching as the AI got to have all the fun navigating the levels. The collection of lums and online scoreboards also felt like a new experiment as a way to ensure players kept coming back for more, even after finishing the main campaign and side levels like the original Origins ones. I suppose what I’m trying to say is: Rayman Legends feels contrived. I enjoyed my time I’ve spent with the game, but cannot for the life of me understand why Ubisoft took some fantastic platforming, and replaced it with such a boring mechanic like touch screen controls and accelerometer controls. By all means play Rayman Legends, you may enjoy some levels, but be warned, you may not enjoy the other half.
3/5
I’ve been reading up on OlliOlli since I first saw an announcement a while back on engadget. It seemed like an interesting concept, one which I even toyed with whilst at university (my idea was to play the game on a touch screen and use one finger swiping down the screen and the other up to mimic the motion of an ollie). My game however, never came to fruition, and here we have OlliOlli on the market as a fantastically intricate skateboarding platformer.
The game centres around controlling your character as he makes his way across each small level, trying to amass as many points as possible along the way. You control the character by pressing the X button to push, and olli/do a trick by moving the analogue stick in a specific direction. The hard part comes in landing your trick, by which I mean you have to press the X button again at the precise moment that you touch the floor, ensuring you score the maximum points possible for the set of tricks you just performed.
Eventually, rails start making there way into levels, testing your ability to grind to accumulate points as well. You land a grind by pressing a direction on your analogue stick just before you touch the rail. The grinding can then be combined with air tricks like Kickflips or Heelflips to increase your score significantly. The whole mechanic of performing tricks pushes you to try and try again until you finally press all the key presses at the perfect times, ensuring your score gets onto the scoreboard or finishes one of the other addictive parts of the game: Challenges.
Yep, each level has its own set of challenges, with some being as small as getting a specific score in a combo, or others entailing landing specific tricks in certain areas. Regardless of what challenge you attempt, you’re sure to bail many times before you finally manage to achieve the specific goal you’re working towards. Once you’ve completed the 5 challenges on one level, a “Pro” level will open up, based on the same act you just completed. This Pro level encompasses harder and more varied gameplay, meaning that players will be tested in order to succeed.
On the main menu of OlliOlli you’ll find a daily grind button. Pressing this allows you to compete with other OlliOlli players across the world by competing on one new stage daily. This option is certainly interesting for those of you who are competitive at games, but may not sit well with others looking for more variety in the game.
The soundtrack of OlliOlli is absolutely sublime. I genuinely would put the game on just to listen to its chilled out beats whilst I went about my day doing other, non-gaming activities. There’s some mellow club music in the mix, along with some dubstep tunes, which makes the task of repeating levels over and over all the more enjoyable. Each music track is repeatable for around 10 minutes, so you could sink hours into OlliOlli without realising.
The one thing I’ll say against OlliOlli is the lack of variety in its gameplay. For example, each level usually just consists of grinding from one surface to another, without ruining your run. A new game mode where players could just roll whilst practicing tricks wouldn’t have gone amiss, but as it stands, if you’re not good a fan of the campaign/main challenges, you might as well stop, as there isn’t too much more to see.
I’ve enjoyed my time with OlliOlli, and it looks set to become a game that I keep coming back to time and time again due to its addictive and short nature. For those of you looking for a challenge, you’ll love what OlliOlli has to offer, but for those of you who dislike repetitive gameplay and are looking for variety in your games (Read: FPS’s with a story), you won’t find much value in OlliOlli. It’s currently on sale for £2.55 from Sony, so grab it while you can at such a fantastic price for a lot of value, I know I’m glad I did.
4/5
As a Kid, I used to beg my dad to go on his PC and play some of the games I watched him play. I recall loving the look of The Typing of the Dead as it was a game that I remembered from arcades at the seaside, and wanted to revel in this myself. Being only 13/14 at the time, I wasn’t very good at typing, and had to look at my keyboard every time a new word appeared on the screen so I could find the appropriate keys and press them. I was terrible, but it was still fun to play the game that I played in the arcades, albeit with a different control method. Does the new, “improved” Typing of the Dead live up to my expectations from yesteryear? Read on my friends.
Being that the original Typing of the Dead was just a rehash of The House of the Dead 2 with typing elements instead of a light gun, The Typing of the Dead Overkill does the exact same trick as it’s precursor, going so far as to include the original shooter as well. Being that I didn’t own a Wii, I wasn’t able to play the original, so all the gags, humour and characters seem completely original to me. The game starts you out by introducing you to the protagonists of the game: Agent G and Detective Isaac Washington. Its through these two characters eyes (and others along the way) that you’ll see a crazy world where mutants (they make sure to remind you that they aren’t zombies, and are in fact mutants) are roaming free, killing and devouring all that stand in their way. Agent G and Washington’s only hope is to find the serum to cure this outbreak, which it seems is in the hands of Papa Caesar, the crazy old man that started this outbreak.
Levels are played by just shooting the mutants by typing in the text that appears below them. The game is a rail-shooter, which means you don’t control the movement on the player, you merely watch as you’re taken on a tour throughout a level and shoot zombies as fast and as accurate as possible. Being that the whole game centres around this one core mechanic, the developers have managed to push it further than I’d have thought, with each word being sensitive to the surroundings or current predicament occurring. It makes for some witty chuckles as you progress through stages, and allows you to have a laugh whilst doing something that most people would find tiring and boring on a day to day basis. You finish each level with a boss fight, which consist of typing faster than usual, or typing the correct words that are coming at you. Bosses are varied enough to keep the stages entertaining, with fantastic design that makes you appreciate how much effort went into creating detailed, original mutants without being too grotesque.
There are many collectibles to be found throughout each stage, ensuring you keep your eyes on the screen at all times whilst typing the mutants words. The whole game kind of pushes you into learning how to touch type, for the sheer reason that you’ll die if you don’t. There just isn’t enough time between seeing a word or letter on the screen and looking down at your keyboard to type it. This could be seen as a weird attempt to teach children and others how to touch-type whilst having fun, but maybe I’m just stretching the premise a bit too far.
The typing mechanic isn’t the only point on the spec sheet to keep you playing though, with The whole game featuring a 3 hour campaign that tells the story of Agent G and Isaac Washington hunting down the cure to the mutant outbreak, and putting a stop to the evil Papa Caesar that’s managed to destroy so many lives. The story is brilliantly funny, with the game taking the Mick out of it’s own ridiculousness every two seconds, a sense of irony isn’t amiss here. Certain groups of the gaming community may not like the jokes that are told, as they are used as the butt end of the joke, thankfully these jokes are rare and uncommon. You may at times take control of other protagonists, but these are only side missions, as the main story is all based around the problems Agent G and Washington find themselves in.
Being a rehash of the Wii Overkill game isn’t a detriment to the typings success, as many players like myself have played the original. If you enjoyed the original Typing of the Dead released in 2001, you’ll enjoy whats on offer here. With more touch typing goodies at your finger-tips, Typing of the Dead: Overkill both challenges you and entertains you at the same time. Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Overkill, and may go back again in the future to improve my typing skills.
3/5
Given the amount of hype TitanFall has received since its debut at E3 last year, I had to give the game a go on release day to see what all the fuss was about. Without thinking, I slammed £25 into the Origin edition from CDKeys.com and preloaded it onto my machine days before launch. With a download size of 50GB, and a host of games sites going crazy for its imminent release, I hoped the money was worth it. After 42 hours of game time later, I suppose I can say that I have a few opinions on the game, and whether you should purchase it or not.
First up: TitanFall is a multiplayer only game, and although it comes with a campaign mode, it’s little, if anything worth mentioning. Upon starting Titanfall, you’re greeted with a main menu which has very few options. Pressing start brings you to another menu asking whether you want to start campaign, or start classic. Whichever option you choose makes little difference; one takes you to a multiplayer game with 30 seconds of audio logs and 15 seconds of pre-scripted animations before a match, the other just takes you straight into the match. The campaign is abysmal, with each stage concluding in a victory or defeat regardless of what you’ve done in the actual match, meaning you play no part in the world at large. Unfortunately, the campaign needs to be played in order to unlock the meagre 3 types of titans you can play as, meaning this is the only necessity in the game. For a full priced game (currently £45 on Xbox One), this is some of the worst value in the industry, but that’s relative to whether you spend time on multiplayer or not.
The matches themselves are what you’re here for, with the control scheme and game mechanics working in perfect harmony to create a fun and dynamic multiplayer experience. The matches play out similar each round, with teams starting on opposite ends of the map and meeting in the middle for a firefight. After about a minute or so, Titans start falling from the sky as players have earned the right to manoeuvre them. These hulking machines of metal, tower over enemy players, allowing you free reign of any robots or npc’s you may happen upon. Encountering other titans mixes the typical combat up, with titans taking a bigger beating than any normal solider would, and having special abilities like missiles that lock onto enemies or forcefields that repel enemy fire. The dynamism comes into play around the time a few titans have been killed and most players are back on foot, as it gives a new element to the combat: pilot v titan action. Titans are terribly overpowered, but to make up for this, pilots run and manoeuvre faster than a titan can keep up, ensuring a balance is maintained. Pilots also have the ability to double jump and wall run, giving a parkour feel to an otherwise static shooter. It can be said that you won’t die the same way twice, which certainly speaks volumes to TitanFalls ability to mix up the way a match plays out.
Throughout these matches you’ll meet NPC’s that are generated and controlled by the server, meaning none of the AI is being processed by your local machine. It means you can have hundreds of characters on the screen at any given time, making the stages a lot more epic in scope and scale, with the exception that the AI aren’t intelligent and don’t substitute for real players. They’ll group up together, have lower health, and generally don’t do too much damage to you, making them great cannon fodder for your kill streaks. There are times that I feel the AI were put in the game to fill the gap that the lack of real players couldn’t fill. With it’s small match size (12 players total, 6 V 6) the AI may have been a necessity to overcome the sheer size of the maps with a limited amount of players, ensuring you’re always coming across something to kill. On the other hand, they feel intentionally dumb and satisfying to kill, meaning coming across a drop pod of them brings glea with the amount of kills you’ll now be able to accomplish. Whether the AI were put in to make the maps feel epic, or whether they were put in as a game mechanic is down to you, but regardless on how you feel about the AI drones, they’re here to stay, so you had might as well slaughter them either way.
One new mechanic that has been added to TitanFalls gameplay is its addition of burn cards. Burn cards a temporary buffs to your character throughout one life. These buffs range from the mundane (like being able to hear an enemy near you) to the extraordinary (like summoning a titan when the game first starts). You can hold three of these cards in each match, which both ensures players aren’t too overpowered, and makes you reserve card uses until the opportune moment.
After each round, you’ll earn your XP, and level up, unlocking more weapons and titan abilities to progress up to the almighty level 50, a level so famed that you need to trade it in ASAP to get a new badge next to your name. That’s it. That’s everything your playtime has got you: a badge. Your second time through will also earn you more XP in each game (1.1x more for 1st regen, 1.2x more in 2nd etc.), but all this does again is give you another badge that looks slightly different. It’s a shame that the game doesn’t offer anything in terms of extra story or narrative for your achievement, but from the makers of Call of Duty, did you expect more?
Thankfully, I’m a competitive person, so this is all right up my street. I want to be the best of all my friends. I want annihilate them, so I continue to play. But for those of you who aren’t into this and are looking for a game to tackle new subjects or have a deeper meaning and better you as a person, TitanFall isn’t going to do any of this, and is instead a refinement of a old and stagnated genre of games.
So for those of you who never touch the multiplayer part of a game, TitanFall probably holds little to no value for you. But, if you’re the type of person that revels in the multiplayer sections of Call of Duty, and buy it exclusively for that alone, you’ll have the time of your life. The lack of a proper story makes the game feel like half of a game, and even the half that’s included feels devoid of content with only 3 titans and 15 maps, and 6 game modes to choose from. One day this may be resolved, but given numbers alone, TitanFall doesn’t offer much in terms of value. Where the value comes is in the dynamism and replayability, with my time invested already clocking in at 42 hours, it doesn’t look like this is going to end anytime soon.
3/5
A Link Between Worlds was announced rather unexpectedly last summer, as Nintendo showed of a line up of 3DS title after 3DS title. As much as it was a surprise, it was certainly welcome, with Skyward Sword not getting the same scores or sales numbers of Zelda titles of the past Nintendo needed a hit to ensure that Zelda was still known and remembered for being one of the best action/adventure games of all time.
You start A Link Between Worlds in Links house, just the same as the original A Link To the Past. Having slept in and late for work, a friend comes in and wakes you up, setting you on course to get to the blacksmiths house as you (Link) are his apprentice. From here, you are set with delivering a new sword to a knight at the sanctuary, where your true adventure will start. It’s at the sanctuary that a new villain is found, someone who is imprisoning seemingly ordinary people in the world in paintings, making them 2D and not able to move. It’s here that you are able to use the sword you were tasked with delivering, and its here that the adventure truly starts.
You’re able to explore most of the world of Hyrule from the offset as soon as you get the sword, with only a few areas being locked until you receive the appropriate item to bypass the obstacles in your path. Link doesn’t level up, but you can find rupees and items in the world before progressing through the story and going to hyrule castle to meet Princess Zelda.
The Land of Hyrule is fantastically detailed, with Nintendo easily toying with your nostalgia of the original by making most things the same, but others tweaked for better replayability and interaction. Dungeons are similar, whilst also taking advantage of your new unique abilities and items to give a interesting puzzle to pass. The world feels alive at the start of the game, but as it progresses you’ll start to get the same conversations happening time and time again. It feels fantastic when you find a new secret or person to talk to after accidentally wondering down a new path that you haven’t seen before.
Like the previous Zelda for the Snes, you’re able to travel between two worlds, one which is lovely and normal (Hyrule), and another that is destroyed and the opposite of Hyrule: Lorule. You travel to this new location by using one of Link’s new control mechanics, which turns Link 2D against any flat walls or surfaces as a drawing/painting. This allows you to navigate pass boulders or enemies without getting hurt, or allows or very clever puzzles.
Lorule is like the dark parts of a Link to the Past, and takes all the enemies that were easy to kill, making them stronger and harder to beat. Lorule is also hard to navigate, with huge swaths of land missing so you have to teleport between worlds in order to get the the correct location. It makes navigating a puzzle in itself, which certainly adds extra hours of gameplay to your experience.
One of the biggest talking points of A Link Between Worlds was the way you got your new equipment. Traditionally, you’d have to navigate dungeons and defeat bosses in a set pattern, always giving you new equipment which helps you unlock the next dungeon along your quest. (E.g. in one dungeon you’ll unlock the ability to throw bombs, then the next dungeon will require this to enter the dungeon itself, allowing nintendo to set you down a one way path through completing the game). In a Link Between Worlds though, you have access to almost all of the equipment throughout the whole game from the offset, for a small fee of renting the items. You keep these items until the next time you die or fall, meaning you could potentially never have to buy out the items throughout the whole campaign. It’s certainly a nice feature, and makes the game more accessible to those who haven’t played Zelda games before, but not a feature I’d recommend for hardcore players, as items that are bought can then be upgraded to become more powerful and devastating to enemies. To also buck trends in this long running franchise, Nintendo have also allowed you to upgrade the master sword, something that has never been done before. By the end of the game, I was killing most enemies in one hit, and felt truly over-powered.
A Link Between Worlds is one of the best gaming experiences I’ve had in recent memory. Nintendo managed to take my nostalgia for the original, put it into a machine, mess around with it, and spit it back out shinier than ever. Everything in the game feels refreshingly original, whilst you know it’s all based on a template so tried and tested. I played the game to completion, collecting every collectible in the game and upgrading everything I possibly could, just to treasure every moment I could. Nintendo has made yet another classic, and you owe it to yourself to play it. I look forward to the next time I start this adventure again.
5/5
As some of you may have seen from my Twitter account, I not have a job writing for the website GamrReview. GamrReview articles appear on VGChartz.com, meaning my posts now have the possibility of being viewed by over 287,000 people a month, something that I feel will certainly get my name out there in this fickle and tough industry.
So for this Friday, I unfortunately haven’t been able to prepare a review for this site, but instead spent last weekend playing White Paper Sutdios’ fantastic game: Ether One, which I then reviewed on GamrReview.com. If you wish to take a look at this review, head on over to the link below:
http://www.gamrreview.com/review/91164/ether-one-pc
Thank you all for your continued support, I hope I can make a positive impact on this industry one day, one little step at a time.
Having played every other God of War game from the PS2 up, I couldn’t pass on God of War: Ascension. The main story may have ended in God of War 3, but I was more than happy to play Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta to learn more about Kratos’ past, and why he has so much anger and hatred in his heart. Ascension was meant to be a extravagant look into Kratos’ past, before the time he sets out to kill Ares in the first game of the series, instead, I was left wishing this game never existed.
The game starts out with Kratos’ locked up, after a cutscene tells us about the sisters of fate, who uphold any mortals or gods who make oaths that are broken. Kratos manages to escape from his chains, and starts out on taking on one of the sisters that was beating him whilst chained. This all takes place on the back of a titan, so the visuals certainly impress so early in the game. This start piece is one of the only points in the game where you’ll have a straight bit of story telling, as the rest of the game jumps back in the past and future time and time again.
Upgrades will be found throughout the duration of the campaign, with Kratos getting stronger and your arsenal of attacks increasing with each new additional item found. These items and upgrades are also related to the story, so when you learn that Kratos gained the item in the past, he miraculously has it for use in the future. It all felt a bit contrived and not at all natural like I was expecting, but the developers wanted to tell a story, and they stuck by it until the end.
The game is comprised of the same gameplay and mechanics of all previous titles in the series, with fights taking place on epic set pieces, which then turns into some puzzle sections, and finally climaxes in a big boss fight with gruesome consequences. This can all get repetitive, especially if like me, you’ve played 5 games of this so far, and don’t need to see the same sequences play out over and over. The one mechanic that Santa Monica studios unveiled to keep this game refreshing and new was the time travel object, that allows you to change an objects physical shape by altering it back to a previous state in which it used to be. This means that statues can be rebuilt or destroyed at your whim, but it doesn’t add much to the game other than a bit of spectacle at times.
Puzzles are boring and occasionally confusing when the answer cannot be seen after 5 minutes of wondering around. At times, the puzzles would feel more like you were breaking/hacking the game to get past constraints rather than actually coming up with the correct solution for the given circumstance. There were platforming sections that would be spaced out too far to the point that if you did make it you felt like you were glitching through the geometry. The times between fighting weren’t to be enjoyed.
Ascension was easily one of the buggiest games I’ve ever played. Period. I would have instances where all sections of levels wouldn’t appear, and throughout the whole campaign I was victim to a terrible audio problem, where sound effects were 1-2 seconds delayed, with my music also skipping and jumping once every few minutes. It made for a terrible experience, with myself getting angrier and more frustrated at each glitch that would occur. There were times that I would do quick time events perfectly, but where Kratos had fallen through a hole to the next level, I had instead died as the game didn’t realise it had to load the next section and instead just killed me. It was so buggy that at the end of the game when cutscenes were happening, all audio and speech was spoken at the same time, with the camera just zooming in and out on a Kratos that I could control, something that clearly wasn’t meant to be happening for a ending.
The bugs and general story of God of War Ascension were abysmal, making for a terribly inconsistent and annoying game. I barely understand what happened with the story, but that may have been more because of the bugs and audio problems than the story telling itself. What I will say about Ascension though is: it makes me ashamed to call myself a God of War fan. Every God of War game up to Ascension was breathtaking; they all had fantastic stories, all delved deeper and deeper into the insanity that made Kratos who he is, and all bought something new to the table. Ascension confuses itself by trying to refine the same things that came before it, and fails spectacularly. If you enjoyed my previous reviews of God of War games, and enjoyed them yourselves at one point, stay away from Ascension. It was a story not worth telling, and will only bring sadness and despair.
2/5
I loved Rayman Jungle Run when it was first released on iOS last year. I felt that the mechanics of a platformer translated perfectly to a touchscreen phone/tablet when you made sure the player was always moving on your behalf. Rayman Fiesta Run was released last fall, and along with it came a new urge within me to play this game to completion like I did the original. Does Fiesta Run manage to maintain Raymans recent high surge in production value? or does lightning really not strike twice?
You start Rayman Fiesta run with only the ability to jump, just to ensure newbies are introduced to the game slowly and can get used to it before the levels get harder. Although this is easy, and does get boring, there’s at least something for more hardcore players in the collectibles on each level, with lums hiding in mysterious places out of sight you’ll be jumping and revisiting levels continuously trying to get 100 on each level.
As the game progresses, you get the ability to hover in the air (by either using your hair if you’re Rayman, hands if you’re globox, and magic if you’re a teensie) and the ability to punch. These mechanics may sound easy and without challenge, but it’ll prove you wrong in a heart beat if you take it so lightly. Controls of each character are tight and well made, with your character automatically moving across the screen with no problems or glaringly obvious bugs to speak of. Althought the movement may not change, it’s the levels that do, and it’ll be your knowledge of these simple moves that’ll keep you going throughout the rest of the campaign.
Levels are follow a traditional progression like they have in previous games, with the easier levels being in green fields with next to no dangers to your health, and later levels being in lava filled pits or hell itself, ensuring you know the difficulty of the stage just by looking at it or the colour scheme used. Each level is unique in their challenge and difficulty, meaning that most of the time you’ll need to retry after your countless deaths to ensure each level is mapped to your muscle memory. (muscle memory is for levels that require so fast reactions that you’ll have to remember what’s around each corner before you get there for fear of not reacting fast enough to avoid the danger). This pre-emptivity and muscle memory is needed to progress through Fiesta Run, as without it levels are just too difficult and impossible. With 72 levels in total, you’ll have quite a lot of time to practice and master the mechanics of Rayman Fiesta Run, as frustrating as they may be.
Going around the map completing levels gives you lums to spend on extra characters and wallpapers. These characters are purely cosmetic, as the size of each character makes no difference on your collider. You will still hit walls or die on the pre-set collider thats around your character, which seems a little unfair at first, but you eventually learn it was done for the mechanics, meaning that no one has the advantage on leader boards across the world.
Speaking of leaderboards and social features, did somebody say social platforms? because my god is Rayman scattered with Facebook likes and posts all over the place. Gone are the days you could play Jungle Run purely for the game itself, this time round Ubisoft wants you to use your own Facebook to advertise their game for you, with the incentive of getting extra lums to spend if you do. This doesn’t rear its ugly head until you perfect a level, asking you to brag to your friends about it by posting to your Facebook for an incentive of 100 extra lums. It may not seem intrusive, but when they are in every single menu and can be seen wherever you go, they are certainly annoying.
At the start of each level you can purchase help throughout the level. You no longer get better items or help for playing the game like normal, with Fiesta run you now have to pay to get power ups. You get to pick from a heart which allows you to get hit once more (it’s normally insta-death), a golden heart which allows you to be invincible, a guide which shows you how to go across the track (and I mean, it literally tells you exactly when to jump and punch to get everything in each level), a glove that allows your punch to travel across the screen once and finally, a golden version of the glove which is unlimited. These items all cost anywhere from 10 to 80 lums (as of writing). It’s literally a fee-to-pay game, where you purchase the game for £1.99 at the start and then have to pay to get through levels.
Rayman Fiesta Run is a fantastic sequel in its own right, and manages to get the same tight platforming feeling of the original so well. What lets Fiesta Run down is its reliance on purchases before levels, and it’s over-zealous use of social networking features, which makes for an otherwise frustrating game. If you enjoyed the original then by all means buy this one, but be warned; the constant social media drove me crazy.
3/5
