The Stuka is one of the major symbols of the German Blitzkrieg during World War 2. It is a Dive Bomber which had one denoting feature, the siren. When the Stuka dived in for the kill there would be a terrorizing wail accompanying it, causing panic. As stated, the Stuka is a Bomber, and while historically it had a wider selection of possible bomb load-outs in War Thunder the choice in Stuka Bombs depends more on the model, rather than your “unlocks”. In this Guide we will explore the different Stuka Models available in War Thunder, together with their respective strengths and weaknesses.

The Stuka G-1 or G-2. You can identify them by the oddly shaped cannons.

War Thunder: Why the Stuka?

The Stuka is known for a number of problems. It’s slow, un-dexterous and unlike bigger bombers it can only carry a small payload, then return for more. Up until the D-5 it uses only machine guns for self-defense against enemy planes, and when you reach the G-1 and G-2 you lose both your bombs and cannons/machine guns for two larger cannons with highly limited ammo capacity. Why then would you want to fly a Stuka? I can name a few possible tactical reasons. The Stuka is a smaller plane, when compared to other bombers. That means it might be a less interesting target. It has a machine gun or cannon, unlike bombers, that the pilot can use. This means that the Stuka can engage in self-defense or even air attack, far better than other bombers. Lastly, the Stuka can be very precise. Because of its main designation a Stuka can focus on a single Ground Target, and destroy it, unlike bigger bombers that might need to be at a much higher altitude and hope for direct hits. Later on the Stuka has Cannons capable of taking out heavier vehicles without the need for bombs (D-5,G-1 and G-2).

In other words, the Stuka has a decent mix of firepower and bomb load. It is neither as good as a fighter nor as a bomber, but in the future, when players will have control over their tanks and armies the Stuka might prove its worth further by surgically taking out enemy ground targets. Even at sea a Stuka can bomb enemy ships, but this calls for bombing the ship horizontally, and its cannons will be ineffective, so you have at best one or two chances at sinking an enemy.

Let us now proceed to the list of Stuka Planes that will be available to you.

Ju 87 B-2

This is the first Stuka you can get your hands on. Perhaps surprisingly, it is the Stuka with the biggest bomb load, even if its bombs are not the heaviest (4 x 50kg and a single 250kg). As mentioned before, you only need a 50kg bomb and a direct hit to take out a Heavy Tank, so a Stuka B-2 is well capable of taking out a number of Heavy Tanks with its bombs, if you are accurate. It is mildly fast, for a Stuka, and although not as agile as some of the later models it is a good introduction into the Stuka family. Since it is cheap to repair and upkeep you will not suffer heavy penalties for losing it (and it has an INCREDIBLE number of alternative skins).

The B-2 is the only Stuka (for now) with a mounted Siren. It activates at around 400 km/h and deactivates once your speed goes below 350 km/h. While it is a nice little touch to the game you are the only one that can hear the siren, so you will not signal the enemy with your presence. At the same time, you can get annoyed with the constant wail, if you travel too fast.

Ju -87 R-2

This Stuka is similar in many respects to the B-2, but it is slower, has a smaller bomb load but a higher climb rate and rotation. In other words, you are slightly more agile, sacrificing speeds and bombs. In terms of the later D-3 and in comparison to the B-2, the R-2 is not your primary choice of Stuka. While it is a bit more agile the smaller bomb load makes you much less useful in your primary role. I almost entirely skipped over the R-2 to the much more favorable D-3.

Ju-87 D-3

The D-3 is in many respects an improvements over the B-2. It carries three bombs (A single 500 kg and two 250 kg bombs). While it is faster on paper the added load from the bombs will make it more sluggish. The D-3 needs a longer runway because of this, and sometimes starting off with the D-3 might mean a close call with the trees (depends how good a pilot you are). The larger bombs will allow you to take on far more challenging targets, and you will be more than capable of taking out pillboxes and perhaps even a Light Cruiser.

Ju-87 D-5

This is another step up from the D-3. On paper you are almost exactly the same, with one difference, the 20mm cannon. This darling is normally also mounted on fighter planes, like the Bf-109, and you do not have access to any special “Ground Target” ammo. However, the 20mm is both well suited for taking out enemy vehicle and planes. The 7.92 mm machine gun becomes obsolete against more heavily armored targets (like the Il-2) so the upgrade to the 20mm gun is a welcome change. You may take out Medium and Heavy tanks with this cannon, but it’s a huge challenge.

Ju-87 G-1 and G-2

The G-1 and G-2 are almost identical. Their key difference is ammo capacity for their 37mm Cannons. The G-2 can hold 24 rounds (12 “shots”) while the G-1 has only 12 (6 “shots”). If possible you should skip to the G-2, since the G-1′s inferior ammo capacity will come back to bite you in Historical and Full Real Battles. As mentioned before, the 37mm cannon will absolute annihilate light targets, and heavier vehicles will be much more threatened by it. However, the lack of bombs makes your “battle time” highly limited. You have to make every shot count and then head back to reload. On the positive side, the 37mm Cannon is extremely powerful against planes as well. You might find that accurate hits to the wing or tail can shred an enemy plane instantly. It will not be as effective as the 50mm but it will get the job done.

Read more: War Thunder: The Guide to Stukas

Another day, another Free to Play MMO… Although is this technically an MMO? Hard to tell. War Thunder is what one could call “World of Tanks”, but with Planes instead of tanks. Both War Thunder and War of Warplanes were announced more or less at the same time and I had the pleasure of playing both games. Now, I know it will be very hard not to compare World of Warplanes and War Thunder, especially since both are in their respective Betas. While I enjoyed World of Warplanes I enjoy War Thunder much more and in this article I will tell you why.

Somebody is about to get a nasty surprise…

War Thunder: What Is it About?

War Thunder, in its current state (May 2013) is an Online game where you fly planes during World War 2. The first key difference between World of Warplanes and War Thunder, War Thunder gives you WAY MORE choice. You can fly a fighter or any number of different bombers. War Thunder does not appear to be afraid of telling you, “Hey, you ever wanted to be in command of the B-17 “Flying Fortress”? Here you go!”. This is the first selling point for me. Of course, just like in World of Warplanes you have to first reach a suitable level to pilot and purchase better planes. This takes time and “Lions” (the in-game currency). More expensive and demanding planes will cost more. Leveling up will get steadily tougher, but with each new “level” you unlock a number of different planes, so it is not like the model in World of Warplanes/Tanks where you slowly progress from one tank type to the next. Here you unlock a number of aircraft per level, and whether you want to focus on one plane line, or have a wider selection is up to you.

The next major difference, your plane slots. What I really like in War Thunder is how many planes you can have, and how you can allocate them. There are currently five “nations”. USA, Axis, UK, Japan and USSR. When you create an account you will have three crews for each of these nations, each crew with its own starter plane. Crews are like “Slots” in World of Tanks, but unlike in World of Tanks you do not have to pay Premium Currency to unlock new slots. You pay in-game Lions for the vast majority of items in the game. Of course, subsequent slots costs you more Lions, but that’s to be expected. Another aspect of the Crews/Slots is how you can allocate planes to them. To be more precise, if you plan on having a crew focusing on Bomber related skills and you unlock new bombers you can train your crew to man each new bomber. This costs just a bit of Lions and there are no penalties for having a crew with numerous Plane Qualifications. You can have a number of Crews, in each nation, each one trained to use a specific type of plane.

Now, here is a bit of a confusing part. Your account gains experience through battles. Your personal level does not seem to influence anything, except for unlocking some achievements. Then you have “Nation Levels”. You get experience (or Rank) with Nations by using that nation’s planes. Then, each plane you use has its own experience. Plane experience allows you to unlock more ammo variation, weapon layout, and additional equipment for that Plane. Plane experience is independent of Crew Experience. Your Crew gets its own experience, and its skills are moved to whatever plane it is piloting (they do not lose any experience, or suffer any experience drops). Then there is Free Experience. Free Experience is gained over the battles and it may be applied to rapidly level a Nation’s Rank. HOWEVER, turning Free Experience into Nation Experience costs Premium Money.

When it comes to your planes I am often tempted to say “Ranks” (ie. Plane Levels) do not play a major role during a battle. That’s both a false and a true statement, a lot depends on your own skills and your plane. Some planes are sturdier than others. Some planes might have Cannons instead of machine guns. A bomber might be very easy to shoot down or be a flying fortress (Damn you Wellingtons). Unfortunately, skill alone will not win the battle. As I found recently, a pilot in a “Peashooter” (Rank 0 Plane) cannot outrun and out-gun a Stuka D3 (Rank 5). While you can still defeat tougher opponents in a weaker plane it takes luck, tactics and a lot of knowledge.

There are a number of general Game Modes, as well as Campaigns, Single Missions, etc. Let us focus on the Game Modes. There is Arcade, Historical Battle, and Full Real Battle.

Arcade is the “lightest” of the three. Planes are not influenced by physics as much as in the other modes. For example, if I was flying down in my Stuka in Historical Battle at 700 km/h I presume not only my landing gear but all my wings and tail would drop off. In Arcade you do not have to be worried about such things. Arcade also allows you to use all of your planes from a chosen nation. So if you have five different American Planes you will be able to respawn in them if you lose the previous one (each plane has only one “life” however. unless you spend Premium Cash for replacements). The Arcade Maps tend to be smaller, and you can reload your guns and bombs in the air. You will still have to land to repair your plane. It’s a good mode for beginners, and people looking for a more action-oriented experience.

Historical Battle is one step harder from Arcade. You have to take into consideration the physical limitations of your plane. You will have no help with guiding your shots or bombs (turns out, only Dive Bombers do not get support, ordinary bombers still do). The maps are much bigger, and I have been in battles lasting close to an hour at times. It is more demanding than Arcade and as such far more suitable for more experienced players or those seeking a far more challenging environment.

Full Real Battle is even tougher than Historical Battle. For one, you cannot leave your cockpit. This is as close to an actual flight simulator that you can get. As such, Full Real Battle calls for a lot of experience and a Joystick. I did not play much of Full Real Battle, since I lack the experience, but I found Historical Battles to be very entertaining, and Arcade was a good “Let’s have some quick fun!” distraction.

The objectives you may receive differ slightly. Most of the time you will win by shooting down all the enemy planes (including reserves). Some maps will call for the destruction of all the enemy ground forces, and this is not always easy. Heavy Tanks and Pillboxes are very sturdy. I found that you need a number of 250kg or a 500kg bomb to effectively take out a Pillbox or Heavy Tank (smaller bombs can also succeed, but you have to be accurate). In other words, you will need better bombers to take out these troublesome objectives. Thankfully the ground forces are “scaled” depending on the average battle rank (or so it seems). So in a lower tier battle you will face Armored Cars and maybe Light Tanks, while in a higher Tier battle you will have to tackle Heavy Tanks and extremely dangerous AA guns. Take note that you might also face Naval Units, and these call for even more practice in taking down.

Read more: War Thunder: I Love This Game

In my mad “Free MMO” spree this time I would like to talk about Neverwinter. The name Neverwinter is that of a city in the world of Faerun, in the Forgotten Realms setting. The Pen and Paper game, Dungeons and Dragons, is what people typically see when playing any game set in this universe (Dungeons and Dragons Online was set in a different setting). I am the “old-fashioned” fan of the 3rd and 3.5 Edition of Dungeons and Dragons, while Neverwinter is set in the 4th Edition. My first reaction when playing a mage in Neverwinter was that they deliberately made the Wizard more action oriented. Turns out, at least so my friends told me, this is what a 4th Edition Mage is meant to be… But before I spill the beans, let’s talk a bit about Neverwinter first.

Spoiler: You kill this guy, very, very early on.

Neverwinter: What Is It About?

In Nevewinter you are just another hero. The thing with MMOs is that no matter how much whipped cream and cherries they put on your character being called a “Great Hero”, while standing next to a Knight in heavy armor riding the spider the size of two horses, does not exactly make me feel “Great”. You crash land on a beach and have to help the city recover from a siege. The Intro/Tutorial is mildly useful, I cannot complain about that aspect of the game. Let’s jump ahead though, what’s the feel of the game? The good news for myself is that the game feels a bit less like an MMO and a bit more like an RPG, at least during quests. That’s me pulling on logic very heavily but the game has some very interesting plots as you play along.

I did not get too far in the game (currently level 24 out of possible 60) but one of my favorite plots involves a wizard desiring to become a god, in a demonic sort of way. The events in this smaller plot unfold in a very “Story Worthy” manner. There are also some other very intriguing additions to the game. For example, each character has a different “Skill”. Arcane, Dungeoneering, Theft, Religion and Nature. In each dungeon/area there might be items that can be harvested using these skills to obtain useful loot (for Professions or enchantment). Sometimes this goes further and a skill may be used to reach an inaccessible chest or area! If you lack a Skill you can use a “Kit” that may be bought at a Vendor or found randomly.

So far I was met with only one puzzle that kept on being repeated three times in the same area. There are traps, and you may be able to “spot them” (if you are a rogue the traps might be highlighted). There is a variety of tasks, but they tend to boil down to a few cores. Escort, Kill a certain number of creature X, or collect a certain amount of item Y. It’s really hard to make a quest with any other type of objectives in an MMO but the game becomes predictable and you tend to get similar quests. For example, when fighting Orcs, first I had to kill a certain number of Overseers, later on a certain number of Shamans (before that I had to kill “Just Orcs” to collect tokens). At least the quests come from different NPCs, even if they were located in the same area. Thankfully most of the quests from a single NPC can be completed in the same general area, so I ended up multi-tasking a lot of the time.

The core of this game is the combat, and since I played a Wizard I found it surprisingly fun. Unlike in Dungeons and Dragons Online, your Wizard is not limited to a handful of spells per day, depending on your level and Intelligence. In Neverwinter your mage can cast spells like a machine gun. However, the game only reaches a suitable level of “fun” once you unlock more abilities, and for me that meant reaching a level somewhere between 15 and 20. That is when I started to have a broader selection of “spells”, and I could adjust my choices depending on the task ahead. To tell the truth though, I ended up using the same spell choices over and over. Most enemies, irregardless of size, could be manipulated with ease, and as such when fighting a giant Ogre I could freeze him in place, just like a much smaller goblin. This only does not work for certain Boss Battles, and some enemies might have resistance to specific spell effects. In other words, you cannot always Solo (technically). What I found as a bit annoying is that it is not until later in the game that you get items with regeneration properties. They are all sorts of “game breaking”, because now you can go Solo.

To illustrate the above, in a specific dungeon I had to constantly use potions or altars to heal myself as I progressed from fight to fight. If I had a regeneration item I could stand in place (after a battle), go make myself some tea and then return to a perfectly healed character. Your characters do not regenerate health by default, only mana (but if you are a cleric, or have a cleric companion, you can self-heal anyway).

The Gist of Neverwinter

Let’s put it straight, is Neverwinter worth your time? It is not a bad MMO, that’s for certain, but how does it differ? I would say that the combat is its strongest element. You can dodge away from enemy attacks, work together with team mates to defeats enemies and form parties to complete certain challenges. What I was relieved to see is that team mates who engage a creature you are attacking, or vice versa, will also seem to be rewarded. In other words, when in the “wilds” and fighting random spawns you will get joint credit for kills, without a formal party being setup. There is a queue system but not a perfect one. At first I was not sure whether it worked at all. It was not until much later into the game that I realised that all I needed is patience… and lots of it. The Skirmishes were not as much fun as the dungeons. Skirmishes are just “kill waves of enemies”. Dungeons offers more cooperation. What of the PvP? I found it to be nothing exceptional. You just fight other people with a limited set of abilities. You can almost predict what will each foe have to offer. So, the PvP is “So-So”.

Now comes the big unseen cherry, at least for myself. Player Generated Quests. Eventually I got bored of playing the main quests so I checked out what the player base had to offer, and I was absolutely shocked. Some of the quests were so incredibly designed I was wondering whether these quests could become “Canon” within the game’s world. Granted, there is a mix of good and bad quests but if you crawl around the game list a bit you will surely find something for yourself.

What of the Quest Design software, ie. Foundry? I gave it a crack and I found a designer had a lot of freedom with what he could do. On the other hand, there are also a lot of limitations, mainly with the Foundry itself. For simpler quests it’s good, but some of the quests I have played would had benefited from more complex options. Let me straighten out my ambiguous statements. You have set limits of how many rooms, creatures, props, etc. you can have. When you place a room you can attach another room to it thus creating a “door” between the two rooms. A single corridor could have numerous doors. You can set dialogue options, or mechanisms to close or open specific doors. I found that most of the things you have seen in the main quests can be copied in your own quests… not everything however. There are not that many props or room types available by style. For example, I did not see any “dank” Crypt Setup, only a big “well lit” one. You also cannot set loot drops or numerous rewards. There will be only one chest at the end of the quest and even then the loot is randomly selected for you (depending on your level).

If you played such games like Neverwinter Nights 1 or 2 the amount of customization and level/quest/campaign design you can have there is much greater. That is not to say the Foundry is bad, but you have to tone down your expectations on creating vast, complicated and intrigue filled campaigns.

“So, is it worth my time?”

The short answer is, “Depends what you like in your MMO.”. While the combat element feels fresh, and players can create their own Quests and Campaigns, is this enough for you? The graphics are nice, yes. There are a number of different races and classes to choose from. There are not that many classes, as such. My major “flaw” with Neverwinter is the seeming linearity in your class progression. I might be wrong but from what I have been having so far, sooner or later you will have all the abilities unlocked eventually. Initially it might be important which of the abilities you unlock and which you improve but by level 60 none of that might matter anymore. Later on you choose a specialization but that still feels somewhat insufficient.

Since this is a Free to Play title perhaps it is best if you tried it yourself. Here I should underline that at the time of writing this (May 2013) the game was still in Open Beta, so there are bugs and more stuff will be added. I did not meet that many Bugs, although a number of times quests would complete themselves without my help, or the quest tracker would get confused if I logged out mid-quest. It’s not a bad Open Beta, all in all, though I will keep my hand off my wallet until we get to see the full release.

Alex “WriterX” Bielski

Read more: Neverwinter: Undead, Rats, Orcs…

There are a few games that I did not play when they were popular (at least, when there seemed to be a craze around them). With LoL this was the case as well. I had so many other things to do and the game mode did not appeal to me the same way an ordinary RTS or RPG normally would. Over the past few weeks I have been jumping into the world of Free to Play MMOs and among them was League of Legends. League of Legends is what I would call an RPG/RTS Hybrid. From what I read it was initially a Custom Game Mod for Warcraft 3 that has evolved into two major titles, League of Legends and Dota 2. I opted for the options that I was more familiar with (a lot of my friends were playing League of Legends). So, what was it like?

Even a a creature of the Void needs to dress the part.

League of Legends: What is it About?

In League of Legends you are Summoner. As far as I understood the Lore of the game, Summoners use champions on Arenas to decide upon the Fate of the World as we know it (in game). You have three different games modes to choose from: Classic, Dominion and ARAM. There is a total of four maps, so if you are hungry for choice there is very little in the Map Department. As I started playing LoL ARAM was added very recently so previously there were only two Game Modes and three maps.

Classic is focused around destroying the Enemy Nexus. There are three “Lanes” that lead from one base to the other, and along these Lanes are the Turrets of both your team and the enemy’s. These turrets are very strong and tough so you cannot Solo them. Throughout the game you will have to clear the way for your minions (by killing enemy minions and champions) so that then they can act as your “meatshield” while you try to take out the Turrets. Once inside the “base” there will be an Inhibitor for each lane. If you destroy the Inhibitor for a specific Lane then each “wave” of minions will spawn with a “Super Siege” Minion on that lane, who is very tough and mildly strong, compared to all the other minions. If you take down all three Inhibitors each Wave will have two of these bad boys. Inhibitors respawn after some time so you can halt the enemy’s super units up until they respawn. The Nexus is protected by two turrets. In order to damage and destroy the Nexus these Turrets have to be destroyed first.

Dominion is the second game mode. Here you play on a map with five locations that may be captured by either side. When a location is captured it will drain the enemy crystal’s “life”, and minions will spawn from the location. There are no turrets, but the “flags” may fire at champions. The side which destroys the enemy’s crystal wins (to do so you need to hold the majority of the locations). You can drain the crystal’s health faster by killing enemy champions. There are power-ups present on the map, so you may choose to move inland to recover them.

An example of a Turret Attack. The Champions in Blue are engaging enemy Minions, located just under a Turret. This could go awry very quickly.

ARAM is the newest game mode. It’s a single lane”push” and it is very similar to Classic. There is an Inhibitor and Turrets. However, unlike in Dominion and Classic, you do not have a Spawn area that can heal you. You may only access the Shop when dead or freshly spawned. Once you leave the Spawn area you have to collect “Health Packs” (as I call them) that spawn along the lane. Some Champions can heal your team mates so that is also an option. Oh, and you do not get to pick your champion. Your champion will be randomly selected from those available to you. If you do not like your choice you may try to Re-Roll or swap your champion for another player’s champion.

There were a few important things I learned about League of Legends after just my first few games. You do not want to get killed, EVER. If you die the champion(s) that killed you gets gold. Gold is used to buy items that can GREATLY improve the performance of your Champion. There are “cheap” items that offer weaker or fewer bonuses but if you are determined you can save up for some incredibly deadly items. So whenever you are too injured to continue; Recall back to base, heal up, then head back in. Trying to be brave when left with an eighth of your health will mean your enemy just got an awful lot richer. You get gold in other ways as well. By destroying turrets, minions and neutral creatures (in classic). If an enemy is on a killing spree, killing said champion will grant you a money bonus (up to 500 gold). How much is a lot of gold you might wonder? The most expensive items cost just over 3,000 gold. Since you get 300 gold for killing a champion you need to kill ten enemies to have a single Legendary item. You also get gold passively, and since you are bound to kill minions this is also a way of earning some quick cash (and safer than killing champions).

Each Champion has different abilities. Some of them might be useful against groups, some against individuals. It is good to know your own Champion but even better to know your enemy.

Your Champion may reach a maximum level of 18, and you will normally have all the possible powers at his disposal by that time. The only exception I read of is a certain Voidborn who can have three out of four possible evolutions (if I understood it correctly). Each Champion has unique powers. For each level you have a single “Unlock” point for their powers. It is important to know which powers to unlock in first order and then which ones will you improve.

For example, Warwick (somebody I will mention later on) may choose one of three different powers at level 1. Hungering Strike (single powerful strike that heals you), Hunters Call (self and local area Attack Speed Buff) and Blood Scent (enemies below 50% health and within a certain range of Warwick grant him a speed boost, very useful when fleeing or ganking enemies). If you had to choose one of these what would you go for? The obvious thing to not pick, in my opinion at least, is Blood Scent. Both Hunters Call and Hungering Strike will let you damage Minions, Neutral Monsters and Champions more. Blood Scent would let you follow a wounded enemy but your early level standard attack is not that powerful. Many classes pose similar dilemmas. A lot depends on your situation and initial plan. Do you want to take out champions or Minions? Do you want to act as support?

Your Summoner (as in, you) will also level. As you level you unlock Masteries, that offer small bonuses to different actions, spells and stats. You can have different Sets of Masteries, which means you can have a different set for each of your Champions, in order to maximize their different skills. You also have two Summoner Spells. As you level you unlock more of them and they range from the simple “Health” or “Mana” boosts to teleportation, speed increase, damaging enemy champions or shielding your own. The choice of these spells is as important as your purchasing of equipment or selection of first abilities. If you pick the wrong Spells you might lose a practical edge against your enemies. There are also Runes, that give small bonuses (you may purchase more powerful Runes, but you need the correct level to use them).

A Corporate Mundo Skin Champion facing off against the Gentleman Cho.

There is the “Free Currency” (Influence Points) and then Riot Points. Both may be used when unlocking champions but only Riot Points may be used to unlock new looks for your Champions. There are also boosters and other actions that need Riot Points but most of them are purely optional, so you do not technically need Riot Points at all. I will tell you though, getting enough Influence Points for the Champion you want can be a drag… On the up note more expensive Champions are not necessarily more powerful, but they sure are cool looking.

That more or less sums League of Legends. It’s not everything but the rough gist of it.

Read more: League of Legends: I am a Predator!

CR 2.9 is a long awaited release (though not as long as RC 3.0, though we take what we get). Since the last stable version of Project Zomboid numerous things have been changed, added and reworked. One example is that of combat. In the Stable Project Zomboid Build you could take on an entire HORDE of undead with a spiked baseball bat and win. In Project Zomboid RC 2.9 you will die to hordes, a lot, even when armed with the best possible equipment. You have Thirst, Perishable food, Illness, Temperature and of course the Zombie Infection waiting around the corner. This is, by no stretch, the once easy and friendly game that people might had once knew. It is going in the direction of a proper, full-fledged Zombie Apocalypse Simulation, and so far it has kept me hanging on the edge of my seat.

I am a terrible survivor…

Project Zomboid RC 2.9 – What Does if Offer?

There are a few things that I will have to mention about RC2.9 for you to get a solid idea just how nicely Project Zomboid is maturing. We have two Game Modes (there will be  Story Mode still), Survival and Sandbox. Survival has a set difficulty, and it is, as some people put it on the forums, a way to share your “Top Score” with others (since the settings cannot be manipulated everybody is on equal grounds). Then we have Sandbox, a Mode which lets you set how you like your Apocalypse. What I LOVE about Sandbox are the settings for both the World and the Zombies that you may use. You can set how the Infection Spreads, how long does it take for an infected to die and reanimate, the zombie speed, their “Intelligence” and Senses (they could be blind like bats, if you like). You might even want to make 28 Days Later style “zombies”, with sprinting, keen senses and an incredibly quick infection time. The World Settings allow you to set the pacing of your game (you can even set the Time to “Real Time”, so each hour in game is a real hour in our world, though you can still speed time up), number of zombies, where the zombies congregate and when will you lose access to Water and Electricity.

Once you are done playing with the World settings you can jump to making a character. The first major difference? You can now play a Female Character. Other than that you can choose a Starting Profession for your character (each one has a certain benefit) and then select your Traits. The Traits work on a point system, so in order to have a positive Trait you first need a negative Trait. Some Traits may be more useful than others, depending on how you plan on playing the game (and your world settings).

World Settings at a glance. You can see the “World” settings on the left and the zombie settings on the right.

Once you are in a game you will find yourself starting somewhere in this vast world. The Map has been expanded. It is so big I cannot even tell you how big it is, since I usually died too soon. You have your Urban, Rural and Wild Areas. I once got scared of zombies and decided to go into the Wilds. After about two days of travel, half-starved and thirsty, I found an entire warehouse full of stuff! Without much thought I decided to set up camp there. I did not see any zombies around so I felt safe… That is when I entered the last unexplored room in the building, right into the warm embrace of two zombies. Only because there are much less zombies does not mean there aren’t any.

Food is perishable, and almost every item in the game has some value. Weapons will break, food will rot, water will run out. You can setup a camp in the wilds and grow your own food. You may choose to be a scavenger in the city (a very short-lived idea). Perhaps a bit of both? Have a camp just outside the city and head to the shops, searching for what you need? With looting I should mention the new container system. You can carry around items that may be used for extra storage. If you lack the extra storage space you could find yourself overloaded, very quickly. Even with a simple Plastic Bag I could carry around an awful lot of items (though I am sure there will be some fine tuning, such as with the shotgun and cooking pot that do not take up that much space yet). Instead of just doors you can climb through windows and over certain fences. If the door is locked you can force open a window, or break it. Zombies can and will follow you though. A fence or broken window is not much of an obstacle to a hungry zombie!

This is what looting looks like now. On the right you can see what containers you may loot or what is on the floor. Meanwhile on the left I can choose where will I put my loot (“pockets” or plastic bag). You can still left click objects to try and search for loot in them but with the Loot window open you could find previously unnoticed crates or shelves. Sometimes this system does not work and you still have to left click some furniture to “open” it.

The longer I played Project Zomboid RC 2.9 the more I realised that this game would become incredibly fun with Co-op. This is something that is planned by the team but unlike in the previous builds this becomes apparent in RC 2.9. I can see one person acting as the Decoy for the zombies, luring them away from a building, for the other survivors to try and search the place for useful items. Perhaps an entire community building houses and forts, with farms to keep everybody fed? NPCs are not in the game just yet, I imagine that making them useful in this game will be far more challenging than any other part of the game (hard to substitute a living, thinking human mind).

Let us talk about combat. Yes there are guns, but there is never enough ammo and while guns offer you the advantage of range you are by no stretch a marksman. You will miss, you will waste ammo and there will always be more zombies than you have bullets. Melee is just as demanding. A single zombie might be easy to kill, but anything beyond that will be a challenge. A single zombie scratch or bite could take you out completely. Meanwhile a whole horde will rip you to shreds in an instant. You can knock down a zombie with a melee weapon and then you have to make sure it is dead by striking down at it. It’s not as easy as swinging a baseball bat and killing thirty or so zombies in a single go.

You can build an awful lot of stuff using your hammer! And the crafting system has been a bit reworked. There are more things for you to do! Or, you know, you could get eaten by zombies… that’s what I usually end up doing.

My Character, armed with a frying pan and shirtless. Due to the hot weather outside and him wearing a sweater he overheated a bit so I took off his shirt to “cool off”. This was my first and last safe house for this playthrough.

The Models are still being worked on, as are the animations, and there are still a lot of bugs popping up. I enjoy the 3D animations, both on the survivors and the zombies, even if a things do get a bit confusing at times. On the other hand, even with the occasional crashing and breaking the game offers a save system that lets you continue from when the game crashed, so you do not lose your game (unless your save gets corrupted).

If you already own Project Zomboid  you can go to the Forums and download the newest RC 2.9 build (there are sub builds, with fixes, you do not need all of them, just the newest one). I will not say what my survival record is, it’s not pretty.

A few tips though, if you play on playing the RC 2.9 builds. The E button is used for Interaction. It can open windows, close blinds, climb through windows (if you hold down E) and open doors. When facing a window with blinds E will close the blinds while the mouse click will open or close the window. Right clicking on certain objects offers you more options (such as breaking windows, drinking, filling bottles, etc.) . Crafting works like this: You Shift + Click objects you want to try and combine and then Right click on either one of them. In order to build stuff equip your hammer as your PRIMARY and then right click anywhere. That is all I figured out for now (or found on the forums), so good luck out there! I will need it myself…

Alex “WriterX” Bielski

Read more: Project Zomboid RC 2.9: What Has Changed?

Don’t Starve is a rather complex and enjoyable experience, for the sort of people who like a challenge. I for one find it demanding to survive past a certain point, but that does not mean you cannot eventually complete the game and “Win”. In order to improve the chances of your survival in Don’t Starve I collected these 10 Tips. While useful they will not be “Game Breakers”, so there will be no special spoilers, only useful things to take into account as you are playing. Let’s jump right to ‘em!

In a World where everything is against you a helping hand is always welcome!

10 Survival Tips to Don’t Starve

Your Beginnings - The first thing any survivor should do, gather everything and anything in the area, regardless of how useless it might look at the time. Grass, Twigs and Granite will allow you to produce numerous “Beginner” Tools and Equipment. You should also have a decent chance of finding Carrots, Berries and Seeds. Here is the catch, gathering absolutely every piece of food you see might seem like a good idea at first but you will quickly realise that later on this could work against you. Most plants that you can gather (Carrots, Flowers, Evil Flowers) will not regrow after being picked. Flowers may be replanted by capturing butterflies and planting them, but carrots and Evil Flowers have no such method of growth (Carrots may grow on farm plots). Seeds may be cooked or planted on a farm, and since they are randomly dropped by birds there can be a near endless supply of them (though they are not always available). Berry Bushes will yield a handful of berries every few days.

Perishable Resources - All food resources, equipment and most clothing is perishable. In the case of food you can keep it safe for longer by building a fridge (this is a demanding project in terms of resources). Equipment and Clothing should be used when needed, so do not use your Ear Muffs when it’s not cold out, and do not use your crafting tools for combat. That way you will be able to use them for longer.

Storage - As soon as you can you should build chests. One Chest is good for a start, but you will quickly realise that you will need more and more chests to store everything you find. Be careful when obtaining the wood to build them, or you may awaken the Tree Guardian. The alternative to Chests are backpacks, as they can be thrown on the ground, but they are not as spacious and collecting enough resources for them might be more difficult than cutting down enough wood. If you find a Eye Wand you will have a Chester! This is one of the sweetest things ever, and it acts as a moving or stationary storage device! If you drop the Wand Chester will remain near it. You cannot make Eye Wands, they may only be found in the “wild”. If Chester Dies he will respawn on the next day (but he will drop all the things that were stored in him).

Sanity - Sanity is just as important as Hunger and Health. Sanity does not hold a major negative impact until it is below 100, and becomes dangerous below 30. The world around you will change as your Sanity drops. The two most most “felt” differences is the appearance of Beardlings (Bunnies that become “Monsters”) and Hallucinations. Hallucinations at first appear as spectres, spawning randomly around you, but not interacting with you directly. They might follow you, taunt you or simply observe you. Below 30 Sanity they may start attacking you, and at 0 sanity you will have to face a group of them. When you have little to no equipment Hallucinations are very dangerous foes.

Increasing your Sanity - Sanity may be recovered in a number of ways. These are divided into two categories, “Actions” and “Items”. Actions include research, picking flowers and eating specific types of food. “Items” are primarily different pieces of clothing that when worn will increase your sanity. Under difficult circumstances the clothing might not be enough to stop a Sanity drop from happening but they may still reduce it. For an exact list of beneficial items check the Don’t Starve Wiki.

Decreasing your Sanity - Why would you ever want to reduce your sanity? Nightmare fuel. At some point in the game you will need it, and while Spirits in the real world might drop it Hallucinations have a higher chance of doing so. Once you have enough equipment you may choose to perform a number of “Insane” actions to rapidly reduce your sanity. Just like in the above case there are “Actions” and “Items” that may reduce sanity. Actions include: picking evil flowers, using Worm Holes and eating rotten food. There are not that many items reducing sanity early on in the game. Weather alone may reduce your sanity, as will the night. For a list of items that reduce your Sanity check the Don’t Starve Wiki.

Winter: Food - Eventually, if you survive long enough, you will be forced to endure through Winter. If you did not prepare a large stock of food you will be forced to search for it in the wild. Ponds will be frozen and farms will grow much slower, but bushes, rabbits, birds and Beefalo will still be present. You may also decide to kill your fellow Pig Men for nourishment, but remember that killing innocent creatures en mass might summon Krampus.

Winter: Freezing - With Winter comes lower temperature and this may kill you faster than the hunger. How to keep yourself warm? There are a few methods. The most common one will be to start a fire, since its flames will keep you warm. While this is feasible when you have an awful lot of wood and food stores it is more likely that you will have to leave the camp, once in a while. In order to stay warm you need warm clothing, such as Ear Muffs. Clothing does not allow you to stay in the cold indefinitely, it only allows you to stay in the cold longer, before freezing. So the more warm clothing you have the better. A Heat Stone also helps in this. It works like a portable fire (almost), and it charges up when you stand near a fire. Warm Clothing is Tiered, so the harder the piece of clothing is to make the better its durability and the longer it will keep your warm (use common sense though, a Top Hat does not keep you warm). You can check the Wiki for details on this.

Sustainable Development - When you gather resources, be it wood, berries or silk from spiders you must realist that if you mess things up you might kill the local habitat. You could kill off all the Beefalo, thus cutting off your access to Meat, Fur and Fertilizer. You could burn down all of the local trees, the same goes for bushes. You might also end up collecting all of the flowers, thus not being able to replant butterflies as new flower patches (Butterflies spawn from Flowers). Plan your work carefully. Do not go on a wild chopping or burning spree, since that could leave you completely resource-less. If you need Silk plan your trips to the spiders, do not outright destroy all of their lairs or you will have to go even further to find the Silk you need.

Pig Men Villages - One of the best ways to keep yourself safe at an early game is to find a Pig Village and settle down there. The Pigs will not pose any threat to you and they will gladly engage any monsters that might appear near the village and thus your camp. Using Pig Men in such a way costs you nothing in terms of “Karma” and any meat and leather that they drop may be used by you later on. Take note that if the Pig Men “Win” they will proceed to eat any meat that was dropped. This might result in Werepigs, if they eat enough Monster Meat.

This would be all from this short Tip List. It does not include a lot of information overall (such as coping in Adventure Mode, how to fight different bosses, etc.) but it offers you some key basics so that your early games will be much easier.

Alex “WriterX” Bielski

Read more: Don’t Starve – 10 Survival Tips

At the start of April I noticed a special offer sale for Poker Night at the Inventory and its sequel, Poker Night 2. Aside from the shorter name what caught my interest are the characters who would be entertaining us during the game this time. We would have Brock Sampson (from the Venture Bros Series), Claptrap (From Borderlands 2), Ashley Williams (From The Evil Dead) and Sam (From Sam and Max), with Glados acting as the Dealer. While waiting for Poker Night 2 I decided to play as much of Poker Night at the Inventory as possible and I was pleasantly surprised. The humour was rich and interesting, the inter-changeable decks, table covers and chips added something interesting to the game, and the random occasional rewards spiced things up for my Team Fortress 2 account. I had one major issue with Poker Night at the Inventory, and that would be the surprising Hardware strain on my Laptop. I was armed with similar expectations when I finally entered Poker Night 2, and I was very pleasantly surprised.

Poker Night 2: Mainly for “Pros”?

I am not a professional Poker player, even though I did play it online, for free, not for real cash either, for a number of years. I mainly played Texas Hold’Em so that is what I was prepared to play (since the first Poker Night had only Texas Hold’em). Here it was no different. It was your traditional Texas Hold’Em, with one difference, the buy-in and stakes were twice as big. That fooled me at first. I was overly confident and during my first hour of gameplay I got dragged into a huge “debt”. As I started to learn from my mistakes, and practiced by the end of the first evening I gathered three of the five trophies and all but one of the full “Sets” of unlockables. Today in the morning I got the fourth collectable and I am sure that I would fully complete the game (with all of its achievements) either today or tommrow. What my initial experience made me want to do is to reduce the difficulty, since that was possible in Poker Night 1. It turned out there was no such option. If you are “bad” in gambling games then I imagine Poker Night 2 will be extremely difficult for you.

I was genuinely afraid I would not get any of the trophies, or even win a tournament, but the longer I played the more I figured the game out, and my opponents. They are not as cunning as they look. The game features a tutorial, so if you are new to Poker you will have an opportunity to start from the basics, however the game itself might be hard if you are completely new to Poker. I am mixed here. Is this game for experienced players or for everybody? I will stay by my view that it’s mainly for those who already played Poker in some form, rather than for complete beginners.

The Dealer and your Opponents… Except for Max. He is hiding… somewhere…

Here I should also mention that aside from Texas Hold’Em you also have Omaha Hold’em. Very similar rules but the main difference is that instead of two cards in your hand you will have four, so games might become far easier or much harder, depending on how good you are.

Poker Night 2: What is it about?

In Poker Night 2 you are “The Player”. You come to the Inventory to take part in Poker Tournaments. That’s the gist of it. From dialogues with other characters you learn that you are in some way privilaged, and that the owner of the Inventory tries to safeguard you from harm. That pretty much sums up the backstory to Poker Night 2 (it’s surprising there is one!) so let us talk about the game mechanics.

Each Tournament is played between the player and the four other characters. The aim is to eliminate all the other players. In Poker Night 1 that was all you did, with the small chance that a player would “cash-in” a special item you could win, for TF2. In Poker Night 2 the story is a bit different. After your first game you will be introduced to the Challenge Randomizer. In order to play for a Trophy/Collectable you will have to complete three random tasks. These might be trivial, such as buying two other players drinks, or demanding in terms of both skill and luck, such as winning three pots in a row or activating a specific “Gaming Set”. Once all three challenges are complete your next tournament will be played for one of five trophies.

Three Random Challenges for you to complete, if you want to win a Trophy/Collectable.

As long as you are not eliminated as the first player you will win Inventory Tokens. These Tokens are used to purchase new Card Decks, Table Toppers and Chips. If you activate all three elements from a set the room you are playing in will also change to fit the specific theme, and the player associated with that theme will have a slightly different appearance. The music will also change, and I must say that playing against Brock in a one on one Showdown in a Sam and Max “40s” Interior, with Jazz playing in the background, is a wonderful experience.

Read more: Poker Night 2 Review – When “Just Poker” is Not Enough

I decided to give Don’t Starve a crack, after a longer pause, to see just how much has changed since my last game (the date of this playthrough would be the 23rd of April, 2013). To do that I decided to start a new game and see how long I can survive, noting down key events that happened to me, throughout. Some things were similar, I found, but it felt like an entirely new experience on different levels. More items, the Winter, drying (and perishable) food… … Walruses, and even a more “Physical” Magic element… including Madness. Compared to what I had about four months ago this felt like Don’t Starve 2.0, and I am glad the game has evolved so much. Although I only made it to day 23 in this playthrough I rather enjoyed it! What, in the end, was my downfall is lack of knowledge of the game (as it currently is) and a complete lack of preparations for the Winter. If you want a lengthy story on me attempting (and failing) to survive, read on! Just so you know, I played on “Default” world Settings, and with Wilson. The substantial lack of images was caused by my software deciding it does not want to cooperate… so I only include the screenies that I had.

That is more or less how I felt throughout this playthrough.

Day One

Looked around for Flint, Twigs and Grass, plenty of all three around. My scouting and searching also provided me with a lot of food, and I even found an odd skeleton in the middle of nowhere. Made myself some improvised Grass Armor (hope I will not actually need it), basic tools (Axe and Pickaxe) and setup camp. Noticed for the first time the “Intelligence” (or Sanity) bar. It went down by twenty points over the course of the night so I am starting to wonder how to replenish it. Food was just enough to keep me full.

Day Two

Checked what I can build and craft. While the selection was highly limited I figured I could try finding enough Flowers to make the Garland, it might help replenish my sanity. As it turned out picking flowers recovers that as well! So I spent a good portion of the day exploring my surroundings and gathering flowers. While I did not gather enough flowers for the garland I did find plenty of food, so for at least the next few days I should have enough to keep me fit. I also found a body with a pickaxe… how curious… To my horror it started raining during the night, and in order to save wooden logs I chucked in as many twigs as I could to keep my fire alight. It stopped raining just before sunrise.

Day Three

Made a Garland, and as I thought, it allows me to recover a bit of sanity over time. I continued exploring and (finally) found a Pig Village. I setup permanent camp there, built a campfire and science engine. Eager to see what I could produce now I discovered that the research system no longer operates on “Research Points”. Instead you walk up to the Science Machine and if you have enough materials to build a prototype you may craft it (after you make a prototype you can craft the item away from the machine). Thus I made a Shovel, Backpack and a Razor. The Pig Men were not exactly friendly but I did not have time to introduce myself as the night was approaching (before settling down for the night I desecrated a grave, finding a Red Gem). I spent the night turning the mushrooms I gathered into cooked shrooms. Thankfully I did not die from this experiment. Also, found another dead body, with Twigs and Grass Armor. It seems the skeletons are the bodies of those who are much less fortunate than me.

Day 4: My small camp…

Day Four

The day seemed uneventful, although I focused a lot of my time on researching as many crafting materials as possible. Managed to make some Planks and Cut Stone, thus being able to make myself my first Chest! I stored some of my less useful junk there and then as night approached decided to turn all of my food items into cooked foods. What I observed is that Red and Green Mushrooms are opposites of each other. Cooked Red Mushrooms decrease sanity but improve health, while Green Mushrooms decrease health but increase sanity. I wonder what can I make out of them? Another thing that caught my attention are the different “Sciency” things, that let me check the temperature and precipitation levels. In other words (or as far as I can guess) when will Winter approach, and what is the likelihood of rain.

Day Five

Went on an expedition to get more food and supplies. Plenty of both. Found Nitrine… another element I have no idea what I can do with, yet. Built a Sign, placed it in my camp… For no reason. I began to realise that in order to progress and survive I would need the alchemy engine. This means I need to obtain Gold, lots of gold. At the same time I feel I should start my first farm. I plan on visiting the Field nearby, gather some poop, chop down some trees and start my first farm.

Read more: Don’t Starve: A Survivor’s Journal

Be it Dinosaur or Human, there are things that you have to learn about your respective classes, strategies and a few tips and tricks to cope better both in groups and alone. The aim of this Guide is to provide some basic information on Primal Carnage, its classes and all the other tid-bits that you might be interested in. While I will not tell you how to “win” (there is never a formula for that) I hope that you will gain something new from this guide, or if you are new to Primal Carnage some basic, yet crucial, information. Let us begin by jumping into the basic controls. Jump ahead for into on different classes or to the far end for some Hints and Tips.

Are you the Hunter or the Prey?

Primal Carnage: The Basic Controls

Primal Carnage has mildly simple controls. You move around with the AWSD buttons, sprint with shift, jump with the space bar crouch with Ctrl. You use your primary attack with the left mouse button and your alternate fire with the right mouse button. You then press Q to use your Dinosaur roar, and E to Eat or Use a Med Kit or Ammo Crate. Your reload by pressing R, but if your weapon ever becomes empty and you try to fire the empty gun again you will reload your weapon. With the Machine gun for the Commando you have to press the right mouse button to reload your grenade launcher when it is empty. You will know when it’s empty because none of the three grenades will be highlighted. The Pathefinder’s Flares are thrown with the Right Mouse Button. Some classes have more than one weapon, namely the Pyro, Scientist and Trapper. You can swap your weapons around by pressing 1 or 2. Sometimes depending on how hard you press the Space Bar certain dinosaurs will jump higher or lower (this is especially the case with the Raptor). Every Human class has a Melee attack that they can use by pressing F. The Pyro has two melee weapons, the chainsaw (when he has fuel via Right Mouse Button) and he may also use his whole contraption to bash dinosaurs, when out of fuel (F Button).

Primal Carnage: Game Modes

There are currently two game modes in Primal Carnage. Deathmatch and Get to the Chopper. Deathmatch is more precisely Team Deathmatch, where Survivors fight against Dinosaurs, and whichever teams gets the needed or the most points wins. Get to the Chopper is an objective game Mode for survivors. As the Humans you have to reach certain areas and wait in a zone denoted by visible markers. Once the zone is “Captured” that objective is complete. Some Objectives progress your Spawn Zone, while others are only objectives that have to be completed. When a Zone captured by humans is cleared (by dinosaurs) before it can be fully captured the capture bar will empty after a few seconds, unless a human enters the capture zone again.

Primal Carnage: The Classes

Ready to die? (From Left to Right: Commando, Pyro, Pathfinder, Scientist and Trapper)

Humans

The Humans are all equally squishy. Some might appear to be less or more squishy but in the end they are all equally squishy, be it when trampled by a T-Rex, or shredded to bits by a Raptor. Each class differs in its weapons and abilities, and while you may all be easy prey to organised dinosaurs knowing what is at your disposal is crucial for survival.

Commando

The Commando carries a heavy machine gun with a grenade launcher. His melee attack is a simple strike with his very own rifle butt. The Commando’s weapon has a number of strengths and weaknesses. The primary strengths are a fast rate of fire and the grenades themselves. A direct hit from a grenade will kill all smaller dinosaurs and severely wound anything bigger. It takes a lot of practice to hit a fast moving dinosaur, but an organised group of three Commandos can take out any threat with the mix of their machine guns and grenades. The MAJOR flaw of the Commando is his lack of accuracy. His Machine gun, while rapid firing, has an incredible spread. As such, if you want to snipe down a retreating Dino this might be impossible. On the other hand, the large spread may just be useful when firing at a big dinosaur group, or when trying to stop a Raptor Pounce or Pteranodon snatch. However, just like in the case of the Pathfinder shotgun, you will do far more damage up close, because more bullets will hit the target. The further away the enemy, the harder things become. (The Following seems to happen at random, during a recent gameplay none of the gameplay unloaded on their own, it might be an occasional bug) Take note, when you resupply at an Ammo Crate any Loaded Grenades become Unloaded. So after getting a fresh batch of ammo reload your grenade launcher.

Read more: Primal Carnage: The Basics Guide

Bioshock: Infinite is the third hit from Irrational Games, and frankly the weakest of the three. I know saying that has just ignited a lynch mob and is bound to fill the comment section with people screaming STFU, but please hear me out.

I acknowledge wholeheartedly that Irrational has created a sweeping experience that slowly carries the player from a place of ignorance to one of enlightenment. It’s a long series of carefully placed clues intertwined with a satisfying story to bring us to the story’s twist (just as there was in Bioshock). And we as players get so bent on looking for and anticipating that moment of revelation that we’re willing to forgive and forget a lot, but it has to be said that the experience Bioshock: Infinite presents is simply not as solid as its forebears.

First, I’ll sing the game’s praises and hopefully tiptoe through the explanation of its weakpoints without giving away any spoilers. So allow me to give a stream of consciousness regarding my first few moments playing.

RAGE at paid day 1 DLC. I already paid a fucking arm and leg for the game, Xbox, and TV. I’m not throwing more money out for the DLC, Xbox Live, and internet when there was no reason other than greed on earth, heaven, and in hell for this business practice—Wow, cool music video! Fuck the season pass store! Rowing, rowing, rowing, learning I’m playing as Booker Dewitt, an ex-cavalryman who served at Wounded Knee. Being talked about like I’m not there by a couple of bickering Brits. Now I’m being stranded. Now I’m reading a threatening note from a creditor that can’t possibly have been placed in such a remote area by anyone other than an inhabitant. Find religious tripe. Repeatedly. Then, oh blue fucking Jesus, a man’s been tortured to death…which I suppose is historically appropriate for religion too. Alright, stuffed into a rocket, then shot into the sky—Where I find the sublime dream of an America that never was in gold, white, and blue. Is this heaven? Crap. They’re all Christian fanatics and I’m seeing triptychs and iconography reminding me of a combination of several cults and architecture pulled from major churches of the Latter Day Saints… This won’t end well.

Bigotry. Religion. Prejudice. Yup. ‘Murica

Columbia, the city in the sky, is a metaphor (both in the glories presented and the evils hidden) of a society governed entirely by a unified religion. It’s a metaphor for the promised land that was the American Dream, and our character is a metaphor for the lowly immigrant who ventures across dangerous waters and uncertain circumstances for the hope that the dream is a reality. It contrasts sharply with Rapture from Bioshock, a forward thinking society that had cast out all religion. The subtext of Columbia, whether implied or just plain unavoidable, is that adherence to any one creed in word and not in deed brings about the same earthly evils as any society with or without a religion. The joke whose intentions I’m still questioning is that adhering to any creed in deed will bring about horrors of a different but equally terrible nature. It maintains both capitalist and segregationist overtones while presenting its citizens in a fashion that I think qualifies as uncanny valley.

Unlike in Bioshock, where you arrive to find Rapture already in ruin and are left to piece together in your mind the splendor of yesteryear, Columbia is filled with living, breathing citizens. They say a few words as you pass by. But you can’t respond. And their mood is both so peaceful and bland (reminding me of the Eloi from The Time Machine) that you realize the entire city (with its peoples) is based on The American Adventure pavilion at Epcot Center. There’s even an homage to it with an animatronic George Washington at the floating boardwalk. That in itself could be enough of a hook to pull us in. Sadly, it doesn’t really go anywhere. They all simply disappear when the shooting starts. There are no murmurs of dissent or slowly changing popular opinion as the game progresses and the city spirals further into dystopian ruin. It’s simply a stage early in the game that’s just as easily forgotten, and to match as gripping an experience as the first Bioshock requires that each element of the story and stage of the game lock together to create a tapestry that flows and moves, each piece of the utmost important to the whole.

That doesn’t happen here. You run across segregationists and ant-segregationists, and just leave them as you found them. The same with a floating version of the Ku Klux Klan that hails John Wilkes Booth as the slayer of the Great Tyrant. You are pulled in as a sort of Anti-Christ figure in their religious mythology, but you’re never given a choice. And since one of the major themes in Bioshock: Infinite centers around the choices we make and their consequences, being railroaded throughout the game just doesn’t make any sense. You are presented with a macrocosm of ideas, possibilities, and ideologies, but have only one way of doing things.

Heads or tails? Doesn’t matter.

Take for example theft. There are areas in the game where you are guilty of theft and attacked if you pick up things off the ground. In other areas it’s considered scavenging and perfectly fine. I would happily pay for the items rather than steal them, but I’m not given the option. So I’ve gotta be branded a thief and kill a bunch of people unnecessarily.

On the other hand, I have many options when it comes to using my Vigors, Columbia’s version of Rapture’s plasmids. But I only use whichever one I currently have equipped since they all pretty much do the same thing. I can fling them directly at the enemy or use them as booby traps, firing with my gun all the while.

Gameplay in Bioshock: Infinite is diminished due to a lack of strategy. Your enemies all have guns. They shoot at you. That’s it. In Rapture my enemies were armed, unarmed, acrobatic, heavily-armored, navigating a maze of ruined art deco buildings and half-flooded apartments. My ammo was limited and my plasmids at best put me on even terms with the enemy. I had to hack cameras, turrets, and other gadgets and take advantage of semi-destructible environmental items to stay a step ahead of the hordes of crazies who wanted to use my skin as a dressing gown. Here I frequent a lot of docks and loading bays and shoot a lot of people screaming prayers, which is what people tend to scream when you’re walking around shooting at random. There’s no strategy. No puzzle-solving. And no story engagement since I don’t ever identify or get to know my enemies. In Rapture I almost pitied the psychotic splicers who had been driven over the edge of sanity by their own warped science.

The only time Bioshock: Infinite breaks from this mold is when you take the skyrails, mixing high-flying rollercoasters with shooting in a fashion I think was done first in the film Zombieland. Still fun as all get out, though. I restarted several times just to play the skyrails over again.

Since Vigors are not used to their full potential, there needs to be a game-changing element here. That element, or so I thought for the first half-hour, was Elizabeth, the quasi-dimensional Tails to your silent and repetitive Sonic. This is the closest to puzzle-solving that you run across. Elizabeth can open portals to other dimensions. She brings you money, salts, and ammunition. And she can even bring into this reality objects and architecture from other realities. But why, if we’re looking at an infinite number of outrageous possibilities, does this boil down to sentry turrets and skyhooks? A year before Bioshock: Infinite was released, Irrational claimed that Elizabeth would be doing crazy things like dropping freight trains onto enemy’s heads and knocking down walls with speeding firetrucks popping out of thin air. They’re working with quantum mechanics and postulating the infinite universes theory here. They could literally pull from anything their sick, twisted little imaginations come up with, and the best they can do is sentry turrets? That’s throwing pearls before swine!

Weapons, wind, half-turning? Criteria for a badass game cover met.

The graphics are breathtaking, and Bioshock: Infinite modulates the mood impeccably, especially when it has a nasty surprise in store, but there are thematic inconsistencies which taint what would otherwise be a satisfying experience. In Rapture, their entire society was based on casting aside their past and full steam ahead to a bright, unfettered future. That future came in the form of plasmids: a substance which could change your genetic makeup and give you unbelievable powers. Rapture’s rise, politics, economics, warring factions, and eventual downfall all revolved around plasmids. In Bioshock: Infinite, the presence of Vigors is not explained. They have no demonstrable impact on society. What’s worse, considering how hidebound and traditional Columbia’s society is, gamechanging elements such as Vigors should’ve been eschewed. Throw in quantum physics, religion, ancestor worship, capitalism, segregation, and there is, in other words, no singular lore to which Bioshock: Infinite ascribes in order to maintain a tight, cohesive world. Your storyline might move along quickly, but in order to plant the seeds of doubt in the player’s mind which anticipates the inevitable twist it sacrifices substance for glitz. Your voxophones, which are recordings you pick up that are meant to give you a greater scope of the world you find yourself in, only encompass a few main characters rather than helping to give the player a grassroots perspective of the situation.

Make no mistake; Bioshock: Infinite does many things well. The voice-overs and dialogue are toe-curlingly good. The character designs are tight. Animations flow believably. The storyline as a whole is radically different from the norm. It will be very hard for any newcomers to take the title from what’s rapidly shaping up to be game of the year. But it doesn’t top the original Bioshock.

And it makes you think in a bad way. While Bioshock made you spend a quiet afternoon pondering hidden meanings, Bioshock: Infinite will have you pounding your head against a wall trying to make sense out of pieces that don’t comfortably fit.

Read more: Bioshock: Infinite – A Minute Macrocosm