life on the grid

Ode Quick Review

2017-12-07T19:26:00.001+00:00

Ode quick review: Another interesting indie title from the devs behind Driver and Grow Home. A short but sweet musical and visual extravaganza where you hop around collecting and tagging orbs while the music evolves as you go. http://pic.twitter.com/4bhSylLEUR

— LifeOnTheGrid (@lifeonthegrid) December 4, 2017

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Editorial: Why does Castlevania need to be 3d?

2017-05-07T00:23:00.001+01:00

Though I am not versed in the ways of Simon’s Quest, I am someone who believes in the importance of modern history, in the context of games. I believe we have enough modern classics in some franchises to have an informed discussion without having played the ‘golden oldies’, so I will primarily be dealing here with the Castlevania series from 1997’s Symphony of the Night onwards.

So what is the best way to move on within a much-loved franchise? Do we take the parts that we love, and concentrate on developing them and taking them further while keeping everything that works, working? Or can a deeper change be the only real way to move on?

In 2010, Konami seemed to believe the latter. Their thinking was that in order for the series to evolve and stay current, it would have to transition into the third plane.

This is a common assumption by many developers, which in this gamer’s opinion, seems not dissimilar to the assumption that every game nowadays must have an epic storyline with extensive, melodramatic dialogue, likely entailing explosions and the good guys winning in the end.

So, along came Lords of Shadow, the flaws and merits of which could comprise an impressive list each. The most notable of the former however, was that it felt like a patchwork blanket, stitched together from pieces lifted directly from other contemporary games (most notably God of War and Shadow of the Colossus), with some mythical creatures thrown in here or there, to give a smattering of the Castlevania flavour.

We did get some werewolves

The fact is though, that LoS became the best-selling Castlevania game in the history of the franchise.

Is this because it appealed to simpler gaming tastes and blockbuster sensibilities? Frankly, I believe so. In and of themselves, the game’s marketing and AAA aesthetic don’t make it a bad game, especially as there are plenty of great things to say about it. However these flashy elements by no means automatically make a good game either. The mixed reception and sales success of the following two games in the series, which trod a similar path, illustrate this point.

So if 3d plus werewolves do not a good Castlevania game make, then what does? And how does Castlevania make the ‘inevitable’ jump to 3d??

Well, let’s go back to the golden age of Castlevania, which began with Symphony, and continued in the resulting, influential subgenre ‘Metroidvania’, (denoting incremental exploration of an interconnected 2d map in gameplay similar to the games of the Metroid and Castlevania franchises), up to and including 2008’s Order of Ecclesia.

The importance of Symphony lay not just in its quality as a game, but also in how it defined what came after

In particular all of the handheld titles released in this period garnered critical acclaim, with Symphony itself appearing on many a ‘Greatest games of all time’ list, as well as being the best-selling title in the series up until the release LoS.

My proposition is that with this magnificent 2d pedigree, a move into 3d may have been at best, unnecessary, and at worst, misguided for the franchise.

“So should all new Castlevania games just be Symphony clones??” I hear you protest!

Indeed, all of the handheld titles following Symphony did carry the torch of its greatness, but not just that, however—they also continued to explore and improve the formula even further—The greatest example of this being 2005’s excellent Dawn of Sorrow.

But just because something is created in 2 dimensions, does not mean it is limited in how great a game it can be; a game can be expanded or improved by more things than an extra physical dimension. Brave ideas, like Symphony‘s inverted castle revelation, or new elements, like the tactical soul system introduced in 2003’s Aria of Sorrow pay testament to this truth.

The tactical soul system enabled Soma to do funky stuff like this through —duh— stealing the souls of monsters

There is a list as long as my arm of incredible 2d games, just in recent years (games such as Muramasa: The Demon Blade, Ori and the Blind Forest, and even the innovative classic Braid come to mind), the trouble is that gamers and developers alike seem to think of 2d as old, and old as bad.

Even if it could be seen as such however, then recent history actually tells us that this should not be a bad thing, when one looks at the astronomical success (critical and commercial) of the ‘old-school RPG-style’ Souls series; there exists a great majority of gamers who no longer just want something new and flashy purely for the sake of its being so—what they desire is the substance beneath the shiny 3d carapace.

With the LoS trilogy, we can see a game series struggling with its identity while trying to develop. I truly believe the series could have made a successful transition into 3d here, however out of fear of falling flat, it grabbed on to too many things around it at the time; what all the other cool games were doing (combos, quick time events, finishing moves, climbing…), and this polluted its identity to the point where it felt characterless.

Konami had decided to move away from a style of game that had brought them much praise, for the chance at something new and bigger, and there is no shame in this.

Unfortunately however, I feel many game developers, and gamers themselves, fall prey to the trap of the AAA aesthetic, because they begin to think of games too ‘vertically’ (bigger, longer, better graphics). Alas, this can be defeating, as it leaves little energy for thinking laterally (new ideas, systems, ways of playing), and this is where Konami got lost—they put so much effort into thinking about how best to transition to the blockbuster world, that they hadn’t thought enough on whether they should, or on what it really is that makes a great Castlevania game.

Enter legendary producer Koji Igarashi (Affectionately named ‘Iga’ by his fans): A passionate man and one of the minds (many would say the mind), behind Symphony. As a result of his heavy involvement in all of the greatest titles in the series, he has come to be recognised to some extent as the soul of the series, and as someone who acts as the barometer for that certain ‘Castlevania quality’.

Now creating a new game entitled Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Iga wanted to demonstrate to potential funders the demand that still existed for 2d Metroidvania-style games, and so he created a Kickstarter campaign for the game. The total funding target was optimistically set at $500,000.

Ultimately the campaign ended up raising a total of $5,545,991—over eleven times its original goal.

The prospect of Iga’s new game prompted gamers to smash the Kickstarter ceiling

Iga had done it, and then some. It is hard to think up something that could more definitively prove to developers the ongoing relevance of 2d games. The money had spoken volumes.

Now, as Konami’s future is uncertain to say the least (they recently announced that mobile games ‘are the future’, and that they will be concentrating most of their energies on that from now on), it does not make me glad that we may not see another 3d Castlevania game on consoles, as I truly believe that there is some way for it to work.

I am glad however, that there was one who was never taken by the pull of perceived vertical progress, and always kept the spirit and gameplay of the series in the driving seat.

Iga’s victory, I feel, has been a humble victory for games.

This guest post was provided by Rory Gibson.

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Layers of Fear Review

2016-03-24T16:22:00.001+00:00

Layers of Fear piqued my interest when a friend pointed it out to me while it was still in Steam Early Access and an unfinished yet promising state. It had been “painted” *rimshot* as a spiritual successor to the likes of the Silent Hill series where psychological horror and the surreal abound. I decided to wait for a full release and enlisted the help of a few “co-op buddies” to play through the game in segments by passing the controller around. With the team and game ready to go, we dived into Layers of Fear.

What’s under the sheet?

The game takes place from an entirely first person perspective, with the player taking on the role of a troubled painter endeavouring to complete a great masterpiece painting. As he does so, he travels around his large home and this is when things all start to go wrong. It becomes evident that the artist’s mind is not quite what it used to be. The fabric of begins to shift and crumble, as does the layout of the house, as the painter goes in search of the unique materials required to complete his masterpiece.

Things start to go south quickly

As he moves through the halls of his mansion, the layouts constantly shift, opening new paths and passages that did not exist before. The path through the game is created this way and is mostly linear but this is understandably done this way to allow for the narrative of the game. A few times you are given the chance to explore optional routes but little usually comes of them.

Some corners are best left unexplored

This constant shifting of the house is initially quite unnerving but sadly is heavily over-used and gets to become quite routine and eventually even expected. You will recognise the pattern that when you have hit a dead end, what was behind you has probably changed to unveil a new way through and this aspect of the atmosphere ceases to be scary.

Some situations can become a little predictable

Another large narrative device includes finding notes and pieces of paper along your route that provide exposition regarding the artist’s life, his family and how everything came to be in the current state that it is. Some of this is genuinely chilling to read and if you pay close attention to your surroundings, you can later connect dots between events you have seen and things you later read about them, tying past and present stories together well.

Newspaper articles and the artists scattered notes provide insight into the events surrounding the game.

With this being a game about artists and art, most would expect the visuals along this journey to be of a high standard and Layers of Fear definitely does not disappoint in that department. Every environment features a high level of detail and is masterfully crafted. The visual effects caused by the artist’s questionable state of mind are brilliantly realised and give you a real idea of what it could be like to be descending into madness.

Well that doesn’t look quite right.

Being a horror game, it would not be complete without jump scares. There are a few in Layers of Fear but not a great deal as the game is more focused on psychological horror. There are also 3 different endings you can achieve depending on actions taken (or not taken) during the course of the game. These actions are quite obscure unfortunately and without a walkthrough detailing them, you are unlikely to get anything but the default ending.

Layers of Fear Review Summary

Layers of Fear should be applauded for trying something new and different. Being one of the few games that tries to simulate mental illness, (another example being the GameCube’s amazing Eternal Darkness) it is in a rather niche genre but it could also be classified as “a walking simulator,” a term given to newer games such as this, Firewatch, SOMA, etc. where a player explores environments while being told an interesting story. There is not a great deal of interactivity to this game, except for some fairly basic puzzles dotted around the place. One lengthy puzzle near the end of the game was much more annoying and repetitive than fun sadly. For someone looking for a lot of action this game may not be for you, but if you like a good story filled with tension and nerves, this is definitely worth checking out. It can easily be completed in a single evening and should run about 3 hours.

Final Score 3/5

Many thanks to Evolve PR for providing this game to me to review.

For more information see the Layers of Fear website

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P.T. Review

2015-08-27T14:29:00.001+01:00

Like most people, I had heard all the buzz and theories around P.T when it came out and afterwards as well. But not being in possession of a PlayStation 4 at the time, sadly I was unable to play it. And also like most people, I was deeply saddened to hear about Konami cancelling the full game Silent Hills which P.T. acted as a proof of concept for. I was saddened again and shocked when they also decided to pull P.T. from the PlayStation Store completely not even allowing those who already owned it to re-download it. Effectively erasing it from history. So anyone who missed their chance to download it at the time or who had it and deleted it will never get it now unless they buy a machine with it pre-installed or go through some quite lengthy procedures to share it with a friend. Fortunately for myself however, a good friend of mine was one of the lucky ones who did download and keep it on his PlayStation 4 so we teamed up with a third friend to brave what has been called the scariest game ever made to see if all the hype was true.

The first person view and narrow hallway makes things very claustrophobic

The entire game takes place from a first person perspective. So you see everything as your character in the game sees it. This different viewpoint choice which contrasts from the usual third person of previous Silent Hill games seems to have been done mostly for cinematic reasons. The older Silent Hill games feature a lot of combat so the third person view is important to be able to place enemies and yourself effectively in battle. P.T. features no combat and the first person view is in place specifically to limit your field of view. From this perspective you can only see what is in front of you and not anything that is behind you. But that’s not to say you won’t be able to hear things behind you… Whether you turn around to see what’s making that noise is a choice that you have to make yourself.

Oh fuck

The basic premise of Playable Teaser is that you are stuck in a long L shaped corridor. This corridor consists of a couple of chests of drawers that have various objects on them, a bathroom and a door in and out. The game operates in cycles and you must perform certain actions in this hallway to make the door out on the far end unlock. But once you go through this door, you will be back at the start of the L shaped corridor where you came in. However, each time you do this, things change a little and you must do something different to unlock the door again and get to the next “cycle”. That is the basic premise, but as usual, the nuance is in the details. You do not know who you are or why you are here. Maybe if you’re lucky you can piece together some of it….

Various pieces of family history and life are strewn about the corridor revealing snippets of the lives of the people who lived here

You will be introduced to a hostile ghost very early in the game referred to as “Lisa”. Lisa is a tall woman who appears to have had an eye gouged out and wears a single high heeled shoe. The first time you encounter this creature is nothing short of terrifying and this terror is enhanced by the first person perspective as well as the feeling of being locked in this narrow corridor which no way to escape and no way to defend yourself. This game utilises jump scares quite readily (usually with Lisa) but they do not feel cheap or just there to try and artificially make things more scary than they are. This game is already extremely scary even without jump scares so they are just one more trick it has to make you afraid. Lisa’s single piece of footwear also gives her a distinctive clip-clop sound of her footsteps which is utilised excellently to increase your paranoia.

OH FUCK

As you progress through multiple cycles of this corridor, things get stranger and more disturbing. Without wanting to give away too much or spoil anything, I can only say that it goes to some very unnerving places. There is a radio in the corridor that will sporadically announce local news reports giving you pieces of the story and allusions as to what might have happened in this house. It will also occasionally break the fourth wall and talk to you directly or begin to muse on what could be happening to you which only adds to creepy and unsettling atmosphere.

JESUS FUCK

The atmosphere is definitely the outstanding element of Playable teaser. Veteran gamers who have played a lot of survival horror games have probably now developed a high tolerance for the strange and disturbing things seen in horror games, but Playable Teaser brings it to a new level. Having played and seen played many horror games myself, I am here to tell you that this is genuinely the most frightening game I have ever seen or played. As mentioned before, I played it “co-op” with two other friends and each time one of us completed a cycle and moved into a new iteration of the corridor, we passed the controller on to the next person. Each time, the player relinquishing the controller felt a huge sense of relief and the player being passed the controller felt a great sense of dread. It had us all inching forward and peering round corners slowly and carefully in apprehension of what horrors we would see next.

FUUUUUCCCKKK

The one weak point is what at times feels like artificially imposed difficulty which is caused by the extreme obscurity of some of the actions you must perform to progress through cycles. In the early cycles, they are not too difficult to find and can be figured out with some exploration and experimentation, but towards the end of the teaser, the last few actions in particular are all but impossible to figure out on your own without spending hours or days hoping to come across them by sheer luck. Our time was limited the evening we played this so we were forced to resort to a walk through to complete the last section and once we saw what we were meant to do, we all were in disbelief at the pure obscurity of it.

The mood lighting is not helping. FUCK

P.T. Review Summary

Playable Teaser is without a doubt the next step forward in horror games and is a horrifying vision of what the next Silent Hill could have been. Sadly though due to Konami killing it off, P.T. will be forever relegated to the pages of history as a tale of what could have been. For anyone who downloaded it at the time and never played it or has access to it on someone else’s PlayStation 4, I highly recommend you give P.T. a try. It can be completed in a single evening if you are brave enough and is a piece of gaming history that everyone should witness first hand. I can only hope that something, anything, can come of this amazing proof of concept. At least is has inspired some others to have a go themselves.

Final Score: 4/5

Okay time to leave. FUCK.

I played through this game with my good friends Eugene and Tommy, the latter of which is the PlayStation 4 owner kind enough to let us join in.

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The Evil Within And DLC Review

2015-08-25T17:24:00.001+01:00

Anyone who has played any games in the Resident Evil series, particularly the newer action orientated ones and especially Resident Evil 4 will find a lot of familiar ground in The Evil Within. The main reason behind that being that it was directed by the main man behind Resident Evil, Shinji Mikami. As mentioned, it shares most in common with the ground-breaking Resident Evil 4 and feels like a natural evolution of the game-play from that game. Allow me to elaborate.

Things start weird and only get weirder

In The Evil Within, you play Sebastian Castellanos who is voiced by the main character Cullen Bohannon from the excellent AMc series Hell On Wheels. This southern twangy accent gives him the feeling of a modern day cowboy which fits into the theme of the game well. Sebastian is a member of local law enforcement who has been called in to investigate a disturbance at a nearby mental hospital. The minute you set foot in the door you can feel that something is very wrong in this place and as you investigate things rapidly go downhill. You are immediately and inexplicably brought to a strange and disgusting place full of hideous creatures and can do nothing but run the hell away. As you progress, you collect weapons and various other means of defence but you always feel extremely vulnerable as you move from one horrifying place to another again each time with no explanation as to how or why it is happening. This creates a strong feeling of disorientation and confusion leaving you on the back foot always trying to figure out the mystery of what exactly is happening while trying to not die at the same time.

What in god’s name?

The one place you are brought to which does offer a small piece of solace and act as a sanctuary is the abandoned hospital which you can travel to by staring into cracked mirrors (very little in this game makes sense). This abandoned hospital is staffed by a single nurse and plays music that is strangely familiar and soothing.

This nurse is clearly trying to comfort and calm you with and uses mostly the right words but her voice shows no concern or emotion whatsoever so her efforts are quite in vain. In this hospital you are safe from the monstrous creatures that hound you and can further comfort yourself by saving or collecting bonus items or upgrading your weapons and skills. This theme of a safe haven where the danger cannot reach you has been a common theme since the first Resident Evil game and carries through them all even to this spiritual successor of the series. But this time, your happy place is larger and has more ways to aid you. But as comforting and safe and warm as this place is, you know you can’t stay there forever. You know that once you’ve done everything you came there to do that you will have to leave this oasis of calm and once again go out to face the horror and defeat it.

The hospital and it’s peculiar nurse is your only bastion of safety

As you progress through the disgusting and disturbing places, you will realise just how scarce ammunition is. Over the course of the game you do collect a decent amount of firearms, but ammunition to put in them is incredibly scarce. You do not have anywhere near enough ammo to kill everything, or even half of everything, using your weapons so you soon learn that wasting shots is a definite no-no and if you are going to shoot, shoot to kill and do not miss. This scarcity of ammo further reinforces your feeling of vulnerability in this terrifying and disorientating place and forces you to find other ways to dispose of your enemies such as sneaking up on them and going for the stealth kill or using the environment around you as a lethal weapon. But there are still some situations where none of these options are valid so the only thing you can do is run away and hope for the best. Being able to identify how to handle different situations and identifying which ones are no-wins that you should run away from is one of the trickiest things to get used to in the early game and early uncertainty may cause quite a few deaths before you get a feel for it. This is not a game where you run forwards feeling confident and powerful dealing with anything that comes your way easily and on the fly. You creep slowly into each new room carefully and feeling very unsafe evaluating it and it’s contents thoroughly and gradually developing a plan of action.

Go carefully. Go very carefully.

Some ways into the game, you are provided with a unique signature weapon for which you can craft a variety of special ammunition. But again, the materials to do so are quite rare so even this becomes a special use weapon as well reserved for dire circumstances. It does however provide some pleasant variety to the usual by the numbers array of hand weapons. There is also the added bonus that some enemies will not stay dead unless you set them on fire. And as usual, your means of doing this are limited. So it is another tense gamble trying to guess which ones will rise again and which will not as well as trying to cluster multiple enemies together into one fireball.

Fire is (sometimes) your friend

One other thing that you will notice as you move through the chapters and acts of the game is there there is no real continuity between them. It is unclear how one location is connected to another and sometimes you can just be mysteriously brought to a new location with no rhyme or reason. This disjointedness of events and areas with no logistical or physical coherence again heaps onto the mountain of madness that is occurring around you and over time starts to make you question the sanity of your character. He is losing his mind? Is everything I’m seeing an illusion? Is this place real? Was the last place real? All you can do is press forward and hope you can find out.

Now just how do you think you got here?

As you press forward you will also become acutely aware of his revolting the set-pieces are as well as the creatures that inhabit them. This is especially true of the boss monsters that you will encounter which at times can be almost nauseating and genuinely scary when they are running at you full pelt. One unfortunate aspect of some of the boss fights is that they are linear and scripted requiring you to perform specific actions to damage the boss or move to the next area. This can sometimes cause the player to feel lost unaware of the correct action to take and result in death or worse, wasting bullets. Thankfully, there are not a lot of boss fights like this and most of them are quite enjoyable challenges and extremely satisfying to see these hideous things go down at your hands.

The boss monsters are all very unique and panic-inducing

The Assignment DLC

The Assignment has you taking on the role of one of your associates from the main game, Kidman, who is mysteriously absent through most of it and only pops up inexplicably every now and then. In the assignment, you find out the answers to some questions that were left rather ambiguous in the main plot line and you also discover that Kidman is not quite who she claimed to be.

Take control of one of the main story’s side characters in The Assignment

Sadly, the game-play of The Assignment is an enormous let down compared to that of the main game. Whereas in the main game, you have plenty of choices of how to deal with situations in the form of shooting, fire, environmental hazards, stealth, etc, in The Assignment for 99% of the game, you only have one option: stealth. The number of times you have a weapon capable of killing an enemy can be counted on the fingers of one hand and for the rest of the DLC episode, you must make your way through purely by remaining unseen. You must avoid the enemies, hide from them, distract them but never confront them.

All stealth, all the time

This drastic change of pace was a huge disappointment for me as I despise being forced to use stealth. It’s okay to be able to sneak up behind an enemy and take them out quietly. But to have to sneak past and leave them alive and keep sneaking past repeatedly, usually failing and dying many times, completely rubs me the wrong way. Sadly the added exposition of the story could not save this extremely annoying stealth based DLC episode and it was much more irritating than it was enjoyable. Even the boss encounters had you sneaking around trying to stay hidden and then sneaking up behind them to strike a blow in the back of the head before turning tail and running again. Not the way I like to play a game at all. I prefer my fights face to face. Avoid this one unless you’re desperate to know all the answers.

The Consequence DLC

The Consequence takes a slight turn for the better with some more options and additional combat spaced throughout it (you actually get a gun!) but sadly there is still too much forced stealth in it for my liking. Most of the same thoughts from The Assignment apply here. You play as Kidman again and it provides a few more answers to questions but in my eyes, it’s still not worth trudging through the maddening stealth sections.

Even more stealth in The Consequence

The Executioner DLC

The Executioner episode is an extremely drastic departure from the previous DLCs and everything else in the game so far. In this one, you play as one of the nastier boss monsters from the main game and do so in first person perspective switching briefly to third person for some of the nastier finishing moves. In extreme contrast to the all-stealth-all-the-time Kidman episodes, the executioner is all attack all the time. The Executioner DLC is essentially a boss rush where you step into the shoes of a huge and horrifying monster and engage in a number of head to head battles with even huger and even more horrifying monsters.

Step into the Executioner’s shoes to bust some heads

As soon as you realise this, it quickly kills the initial rush you get from being in the shoes of such a powerful character. When you start this episode you will think that it will be a walk in the park because your character has so much capacity for destruction. However when you realise that most of your time will be spent fighting even stronger beasts, that feeling of superiority quickly wanes and you will soon realise that you are on the back foot again. Only at least this time, you can smash things in the face with your huge hammer and toss the smaller enemies around like they are made of paper.

Then immediately get your head busted by some even nastier monsters

You acquire additional weapons and items throughout the course of this adventure and can upgrade them much in the same fashion as you do in the main game but you will rarely stray too far from your trusty giant hammer. Unlike both of Kidman’s DLC episodes, the Executioner’s is much more enjoyable despite being much less relevant to the story.

The Evil Within And DLC Review Summary

The Evil Within is a worthy successor to the mantle of the Resident Evil games. I would have preferred this to have been Resident Evil 6 rather than the actual Resident Evil 6. Just replace the bulk of the monster enemies with zombies and bingo. It provides a well-adjusted balance between fear, stealth and fight or flight game-play where no situation has an obvious solution and each one requires careful planning and forethought. The one weak point is the plot and this just seems to have been hobbled together as an after-thought to allow the designers to create the environments precisely how they wanted and string them together with little regard for having to worry about disturbing the narrative because there basically is no narrative. Besides this lack of coherence, The Evil Within is one of the best survival horror games in recent years because instead of going full retard and all out action like the newer Resident Evil games, it provides a more thoughtful and balanced approach to the game-play. It mixes the excellent action with stealth that is not overly tiresome, the need for careful resource management and countless horrifying and WTF moments. An easy recommendation to anyone who enjoys the action or horror or stealth genres as it provides a superb mix of all of them.

You’ll have a lot of fun with The Evil Within. Trust me.

Unlike the main game, the Season Pass for The Evil Within is a bit of a mixed bag. The first two Kidman based episodes add a little more to the story but are big let downs unless you are a lover of stealth and the Executioner episode is a jolly action romp change of pace but quite inconsequential to the story.

Final Score: 4/5

The Evil Within on Steam
The Evil Within Let’s Play footage

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Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China Review

2015-08-20T17:18:00.001+01:00

Anyone who has played Klei’s Mark Of The Ninja will find a lot of familiar territory in Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China. Both are 2.5D side scrollers. Both place an emphasis on stealth but do have some combat mechanics. Both involve sneaking around, hiding, taking enemies unaware, and confronting them if necessary. Where Chronicles differs is that it puts the Assassins/Templars story into the mix and is quite a lot more difficult.

Those sneaky Templars are up to their usual tricks

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China tells the story of Shao Jun in 1526 who has been trained by the legendary Ezio Auditore. Keen fans of the Creed series may recall her appearing in the animated film, Assassin’s Creed Embers. This time around she is chasing a mysterious box stolen by the Templars which is suspected to contain a Piece Of Eden. These McGuffins are long standing key items in the series which were left behind by an ancient race and are key to saving the human race in the future.

Get skooled by the legendary Ezio Auditore da Firenze himself

One of the first things you will notice about this game is the gorgeously hand drawn artistic style for all the game-play as well as the story book cut-scenes. This gives the whole thing a great fantastical feel as everything is rendered in soft water colours and is very pleasing to look at from start to finish.

Everything is very easy on the eyes being rendered in a hand-painted watercolour fashion

The majority of the game-play is quite similar to the aforementioned Mark Of The Ninja where you move through the levels either avoiding or eliminating enemies in your path. Some levels will contain environmental puzzles and some contain scripted scenes where you must escape the level within a time limit. While scripted scenes like this are tense and exciting sometimes it is unclear which way to go which will usually cause you to die and have to restart somewhat breaking the tension and immersion. Depending on how stealthy you are at the end of each level, you get a score and are awarded points which can be used to buy upgrades to your character and new equipment. Besides just getting through them and/or killing targets, levels also have extra bonus objectives like freeing prisoners which will net you more of these points.

Go out of your way to complete bonus objectives and you will receive handsome bonus points

Being an assassin you do have some special tricks up your sleeve. The trademark Eagle Vision of the assassins comes back once again in this game allowing you to see the paths that guards will take which puts you in a better position to evade their routes or get behind them to eliminate them entirely. You can also see the cones of vision that each guard has further aiding your path finding, timing and evasion. Having all these abilities would lead one to think this game is quite easy, but you would be wrong. It’s actually still quite difficult because the guards are very plentiful and have cleverly thought out paths that will make getting past them quite tricky especially when there are many of them around. Many sections, especially in the later game, will require careful planning and multiple attempts to get through. Sometimes it is all but impossible to get through completely undetected and you must run the risk of combat or being spotted and running away like a champion in the hope of losing your pursuers. There are also a small number of boss fights some of which are scripted events and some of which are free for all combat. Again, the scripted events are not always very obvious and can result in many deaths.

Scripted sections can sometimes leave you confused as to how to proceed properly

Unfortunately, some of the controls are less smooth and can be a little sticky at times causing incorrect climbing and falling when negotiating the landscapes as well as not always performing lethal take-downs when meant to. This can cause guards to be alerted instead of dying and combat to ensue. On the topic of combat, it is something that you preferably want to avoid if possible. It is possible if you are stubborn and persevere and have built your character towards offence, but it is heavily dissuaded as you can only take a couple of hits before dying. Blocking is possible, but also a little flaky and difficult to regularly get to work. The enemy skill levels as well as the damage they do ramp up quickly so taking them out with surprise/stealth is usually the best way as combat in later game is almost always suicide especially if there is more than one enemy involved.

Direct combat is doable, but very difficult to escape from alive

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China Review Summary

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China is one of the few games that does stealth and get it right so that it is not maddeningly frustrating to play. Long-time readers will know by now that normally, I am not a fan of stealth and prefer to brute my force through most stealth sections. For me, stealth is more often than not incredibly trial and error and results in countless retries any time you put one foot wrong which can get incredibly frustrating. However Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China and Mark Of The Ninja are two stealth based games that do stealth in a way that does not make me want to rip my own face off. Yes, you will fail and have to retry sections, but it is a lot less trial and error than most stealth games and if you are determined and ready for it, you can still fight your way out of situations if needs be. And this is the key difference between an enjoyable stealth game and an un-enjoyable one to me. Being able to successfully execute a plan B of killing your way out if needs be. Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China makes executing this plan B challenging but definitely possible. I would recommend this game to any fans of stealth games or people who have previously tried stealth games and been over-frustrated by them. This one will be a lot more fun. I promise.

Final Score: 3/5

Stealth is hard to get right, but Chronicles China nails it

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China on Steam

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China Review Let’s Play Footage

The post Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China Review appeared first on Life On The Grid.

Super Time Force Review

2015-08-19T14:40:00.001+01:00

A few years ago, I played Capybara Games’ fantastic musical adventure, Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP and have been following them keenly ever since. I am still waiting patiently for their similar game, Below, but in the meantime, I was more than happy to play their more recent and silly title, Super Time Force.

Super Time Force must travel through time to sometimes save the world and sometimes to do other stuff.

This game was originally exclusive to the Microsoft consoles, XBox 360 and XBox One but in time did come to PC (with the suffix Ultra and some extras) and is slated to come to PS3 and PS4 sometime in 2015. But I could not contain my excitement and wait for the PC version, so for the purposes of this review, I played the XBLA version on XBox 360.

The great pixel art holds up well on any platform

The basic premise of Super Time Force is just as it sounds. You are a time travelling special forces unit that visits various periods in history sometimes to prevent catastrophes and sometimes just to fix minor inconveniences like browser updates. The plot line is just an excuse to go side-scrolling through history blasting apart bad guys and using time travel. There are a variety of characters for you to use and unlock and each has their own special skills such as extreme fire-power, ricocheting shots, blocking ability, explosives and so on. While there are a good variety of characters and powers, I was able to go through almost the entire game using just the explosives expert. Perhaps the other characters would be more necessary in harder difficulties and such but in a straight run of the normal game they are not terribly necessary.

Different characters have different skills. Some more useful than others.

The art and writing style are one of the main appeals of the game with the pixel art being extremely detailed and well together. The many one liners, catchphrases and pop culture references that come from your commander help to keep things light and are quite genuinely funny without ever feeling too forced.

Your C.O. Commander Repeatski is a very funny guy.

As you can probably guess from the name of the game, the main mechanic is that of time travel. Despite being a single player game, it is widely touted to be a single player co-op game. The reason behind this is that you can rewind time any time you die (or just any time at will) which creates a clone of yourself. If you can stop your previous self from dying by killing whatever killed him first, then he will continue to live in a paradoxical time situation and continue to run along with you aiding you in the fight until he dies again. Employing this mechanic, you can have multiple versions of yourself on screen at once repeating your previous movements and attacks and then carrying them on as best as they can. Most levels have a short time limit so using this mechanic to keep improving your “team’s” performance to get through the level faster is crucial. While this is fun and useful in the side scrolling levels, the real stars of this game are the boss fights. Most of these will only have a one minute time limit so you must spawn many copies of yourself to be able to kill these beasts within their short time limits.

The boss fights are some of the most frantic sections of the game

For a while, I was having difficulty figuring out how to best manipulate the time mechanics towards victory, especially in these very time limited boss fights. I was trying to use rewinds to get as much damage in as possible in real time. It wasn’t until it clicked that I had to maximise the killing potential of each rewind (because the number you have is limited) by rewinding to the start of the boss fight each time and doing as much damage as possible before dying and rewinding again that I started to have an easier time killing these bosses. Once you have defeated each boss, you are treated to seeing the fight in real time which shows the chaos of multiple copies of yourself spawning and fighting and dying over and over again within sixty seconds creating your very own personal bullet hell to rain down upon the huge bosses. The sheer chaos of these fights in real time makes you glad that the time travel mechanic exists and slows it down for you making it more manageable.

The madness is only made manageable thanks to the time travel mechanic

Super Time Force Review Summary

I was expecting to like Super Time Force but it easily passed my expectations with its great use of humour and excellently implemented time travel cloning mechanic which makes it possible for mere mortals to unleash absolute clone terror over and over again in a highly satisfying manner that makes you go “whoa, did I do that?” once the dust has settled. This is an easy recommendation to make to anyone but will be of particular appeal to fans of side-scrolling shooters and classic bullet hell shooters

Final Score: 4/5

Join Super Time Force and embark on super-important missions today!

Super Time Force on Steam

Let’s Play Footage of Super Time Force

The post Super Time Force Review appeared first on Life On The Grid.

The Banner Saga Review

2015-07-31T14:11:00.001+01:00

This game started off life as a Kickstarter which was successfully funded and was recommended to me by my sibling, Jason who knew my fondness of turn based strategy games. After researching it a little more, it seemed like it was worth a shot so off I went to Steam to get it.

Prepare to do battle in a Nordic era

The first thing you will notice about this game is the fantastic hand drawn art style that everything is rendered in. The art style is influenced by that which was used in very early Disney films, particularly Sleeping Beauty. Everything has a great amount of detail and nice touches to it and it makes everything very pleasant to look at.

Every detail is lovingly hand drawn

You play from the viewpoints of various members of a Nordic tribe who are travelling across the land to escape a force of mindless automatons referred to only as “The Dredge”. The tone of the game overall is very bleak with the only real goal most of the time being to stay ahead of The Dredge and stay alive in the hope of finding a safe bastion somewhere. You are always on the back foot and always feel pressured to keep moving to survive. As the game progresses, more enemies and problems begin to pile up and it can feel like there is no way out and no escape from the situation. All you are doing is delaying the inevitable as foes close in on all sides.

You must keep your caravan moving with ample supplies and good morale

The main selling point of the game is the tactical turn based combat and although it is well implemented and satisfying to execute, it is not too frequent. You are also presented with choices at several points that can reduce the amount of combat you get to do even more meaning if you are not a fan of this combat, you can end up doing very little of it. But seeing as this is one of the main draws of the game that would be a bit pointless. The turn based combat itself is mixed up a little by a few different mechanics one of them being that health and strength are linked. So if your character has taken a lot of damage, his damage output will also be drastically lowered. This means you must be careful to keep damaged characters off the front line unless you want to use them as bait. There are also a number of special moves available to each character but these mostly seem very special case use so aren’t often deployed and are wasted for most characters. The rest of the turn based mechanics are quite normal allowing you to level up the statistics of the character over time and adding new members to your team as the campaign progresses. But overall, the low difficulty and rareness of these sections made the feeling that it was not actually meant to be the focus of the game and it left me wanting more from the combat aspect.

The turn based combat is enjoyable, but fairly infrequent and unchallenging

The rest of game is spent travelling across the land with your group and the caravan with various events popping up as you travel and you are presented with decisions that must be made about them. This aspect of the game is quite reminiscent of the classic Oregon Trail. Like Oregon Trail, it is quite unpredictable and random as well as difficult to know how the different choices you make in the game will play out. On more than one occasion, I made what I was sure would be the best choice only to have it blow back in my face with severe consequences. This unpredictability further adds to the atmosphere of desperation and despair when you don’t know what is going to come along and make your life harder next. Some of the biggest events and largest surprises happen in this travelling mode.

All kinds of surprise events pop up as the caravan rolls on. Some easy to deal with. Some not.

The only real negative point that I had about this game is that when playing with a PC controller, the central dead zone seems quite off even after much repeated calibrations which caused the cursor to move on its own a lot. I never did get this resolved but it was a minor gripe so I did not research it extensively.

The Banner Saga Review Summary

Overall, I thought The Banner Saga was an enjoyable mix of two usually very separate genres but these are two genres that should probably stay separate. A pure turn based strategy game like Fire Emblem Awakening is better because of the increased focus on combat and depth of the system. Likewise a pure travelling simulator like Oregon Trail or Organ Trail would be better because of more emphasis on this aspect. The Banner Saga felt like it had its attentions divided between the two areas too much so neither is as strong as they could be. It is part of a planned trilogy but at this point, I am unsure if I enjoyed it enough to carry on with further entries in the series. If you are looking for something a bit different and enjoy turn based strategy and/or Oregon Trail you can give this one a quick go as it is fairly short clocking in at around 7 hours but it may well leave you wanting to play something else similar that has a bit more depth to it.

Final Score: 3/5

All you can do is keep moving. Hoping you can find somewhere safe.

The Banner Saga on Steam

Let’s Play footage

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Donkey Kong Country Returns Review

2015-07-30T14:04:00.001+01:00

We haven’t heard from the Donkey Kong Country series since the rather disappointing Donkey Kong 64 which was for most people, just a means to acquire the very difficult to find N64 Expansion Pak. Since Majora’s Mask was the first major game to require this accessory, most people tried to hunt one down after getting the game with little success. The only reliable way to get them at the time was to buy Donkey Kong 64 which also required the Expansion Pak and came with a free one in the box. Donkey Kong 64 itself was quite underwhelming so a lot of people just bought it for the Expansion Pak and never played the game. Unfortunately, I did play the game and was very let down by it overall. But now, Donkey Kong Country is back on the Wii and has allegedly returned to form. But is it true?

The Kongs are back!

First of all, let me get one very large gripe out of the way. I played this game co-op with my co-op buddy Phil Wilson and we had both heard the game was quite difficult, so we hoped having two of us would alleviate said difficulty giving us a backup should one person die and so on. How wrong we were. Like the older entries in the series, Donkey Kong Country Returns maintains a lives counter and if you run out of lives, game over. However, one of your lives is removed every time either player dies and respawns. But should both of you die, then a further two lives are taken off your total. This is an extremely harsh and cheap method to artificially enhance the difficulty and on the more difficult levels, you will be chewing your way through lives at a staggering pace leading to many many game overs. With that main gripe out of the way, let me get to some of the games good points.

Extra lives can be bought in shops, but you’ll still run out. Fast.

The art style in the game is excellently put together. Levels are well varied having many different themes and are full of colour and life with things going on in both foreground and background. The soundtrack is also very well suited to the levels remaining pleasant and ambient on the slower more careful levels and increasing the pace for faster more frantic levels. Many of the old mechanics from previous Donkey Kong Country return here like the blasting barrels, mine cart levels. Sadly, Rambi is the only animal friend to return and I would have liked to see more like Blinky the frog or Enguarde the swordfish. A number of new mechanics are also introduced like rocket barrels that have limited and difficult controls and grass surfaces that you can grab on to climb across ceilings. The mixture of new and old help keep a good balance of nostalgia and freshness at the same time and none of them are ever over-used making them tiresome.

Jetting around on a barrel is fun but like most things in the game, quite difficult

The bosses are still the real star of the show though. Each world’s boss is an extremely formidable character and they are all original, well-thought out and tough as nails. Sometimes you will instinctively be able to tell what they are going to do, but for the most part, the first time you play each boss, you will probably die many times just because you don’t know what their patterns are. But having said that, even after you know the patterns, knowing and doing something with them are two separate matters. They are still very difficult no doubt about it and each boss will most certainly result in many many game overs.

The bosses are both awesome and bone-shatteringly difficult at the same time

Donkey Kong Country Returns Review Summary

Donkey Kong Country Returns is a definite return to form for the Donkey Kong Country series and provides all the fun and variety of the older SNES entries in the series. If you enjoyed Donkey Kong Country 1-3 but disliked the N64 Entry, Donkey Kong 64, then you will definitely enjoy this Wii version. But as mentioned before, the difficulty level is quite high especially on co-op where having a second player is actually more of a hindrance than a help. This game was later ported to the 3DS which includes an easier difficulty level so if that is a major problem, the 3DS version could be the way to go. It requires two systems and two game cards though.

Final Score: 3/5

Great game, but man is it difficult.

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Not A Hero Review

2015-07-29T14:00:00.001+01:00

This game kind of came at me out of the blue. I had not heard much about it prior to its release but then started to hear more and more about it as its release neared and after checking out some game-play footage, it looked like it would be a lot of frantic fun so I decided to pick it up on Steam and boy am I glad that I did.

Get ready for some early morning murder.

The simplest way to describe this game is a 2D cover based shooter. You are sent on various inane missions by an anthropomorphic rabbit called Bunnylord who for unknown reasons must become Mayor to prevent the world from being destroyed. According to him, the largest aspect of winning a political campaign is murdering lots of bad guys in the morning. So this is what you are sent off to do. From start to finish, this game is an absolutely and totally utterly insanely fast paced adrenaline rush which has you rolling, ducking, dodging, shooting, exploding and generally causing as much chaos as possible at a break neck pace. You can take cover behind most objects to avoid bullets, but there is no hiding from the melee enemies that appear later on and you just have to kill these guys before they can get to you. There is a good range of different enemy types that are introduced over the course of the game and some of them are so unbelievably and instantly lethal they will have you dreading the sight of them. There are various limited use weapons enhancements you can pick up along the way such as explosive rounds or extra powerful bullets and these become practically essential in the later levels.

KABLAMMO

The difficulty ramps up a lot towards the end of the game. And I do mean a lot. It can be quite maddeningly difficult at times because there are no checkpoints whatsoever so if you die, you must do the whole level over again. This is again especially annoying in the later levels because these are both very difficult and very long so you will have to do the bulk of these levels many times over. But you want to persevere. You want to keep going. Because of the frantic pace, you don’t have a lot of time to get irritated at the game and just want to keep getting back in there blowing fools into pieces. It’s no Hotline Miami, but it is quite difficult in the final stages. Seemingly unintentionally at times because there are many sections where you must roll and/or jump between buildings with judge drops below you. As one would assume, a large fall is instant death and at times, it is difficult to ascertain exactly which way is the correct one so sometimes experimentation in these scenarios can also be very lethal. The health system is based off a regenerating one that slowly restores your health if you avoid damage, but you do not have a lot of it to begin with, so just a handful of quick shots are usually enough to do you in and all melee attacks are instantly lethal.

Many different enemy types will try to murder you.

There is a great variety of characters unlocked as you progress all of who have different special skills, weapons, speed of movement and such, but I found that only a couple of them are genuinely useful and most of the rest were more hindrances than helpful. My favourite for most of it was the most basic and very first starting character but he was later replaced with a slightly better one in the endgame. All of the characters have hilarious cockney, Scottish, Welsh and English accents from various regions. Their speech during the missions is also extremely vulgar and entertaining so it’s worth trying each character at least once to hear what kind of stuff they come out with in the heat of battle.

Samantha is from Wales

One negative point I found is that the controls can be slightly fiddly at times. Particularly with the fast-paced frantic game-play sometimes you will end up rolling into a hail of bullets or a sword instead of taking cover like you wanted to. Also, the dialogue is very funny most of the time but occasionally feels a little forced and is being just a little too wacky for the sake of being wacky. This is usually when Bunnylord is giving you your briefings and feels like he is just being random in an attempt to be funny which does not always work.

Some of Bunnylords briefings are funny. Some are not.

Not A Hero Review Summary

Not A Hero is an extremely enjoyable new twist on the cover-based shooter genre. The humour and the breakneck speed add greatly to the overall sensation and atmosphere. Once you are in the groove, you will be sliding through the levels at blistering speed with a huge smile on your face as you decimate your enemies in the name of Bunnylord. And then you will be screaming profanities like a sailor with Tourette’s when you die over and over again. But you will want to keep going back and do it again because it’s just so purely enjoyable.

Final Score: 4/5

No frills. Just death.

Not A Hero on Steam

Not A Hero Let’s Play footage

The post Not A Hero Review appeared first on Life On The Grid.

Lifeless Planet Review

2015-07-27T14:09:00.001+01:00

I picked this game up totally out of the blue after seeing a video of it recommended to me on YouTube and it reminded me of a space walking simulator I had played before. After I had found out a little more about it, I was intrigued and decided to pick it up and was very glad that I did. Read on to find out why.

What happened here?

The game takes place on the titular planet which is lifeless. You play a member of a ISSA team sent to this planet which is hopefully full of life, but the mission crashes and you find out that the planet is actually lifeless. You also can not seem to find your comrades initially so you set out to find them and a truly fascinating tale of mystery and wonder unravels before you as you explore the world.

The early sections of the game involve you finding your mission comrades

This game gives you a brilliant sense of vastness and isolation in the enormous almost totally empty desert planet. You feel insignificant and lonely as this tiny person exploring the gigantic planet with no allies and no way to call for help. I haven’t felt this kind of vibe and atmosphere in a game since the likes of Super Metroid, Ico or Shadow Of The Colossus where you are totally alone against it all.

Lifeless Planet Review

The story unfolds in a genuinely intriguing way and is one of the strongest points of the game. You want to keep going. You want to push on and explore more of this place. You want to find out what’s going on. Even if you are doomed to stay there forever, you want to unravel the mysteries that you keep finding around you. The exposition and background stories revealed in notes and such that you find around the planet are also for once genuinely interesting. You find yourself actually reading them in their entirety and wanting to find more of these notes and find out more of what is going on. This is quite an achievement in itself because avid gamers will know that most notes found in games are usually just collectibles to be skipped through but in Lifeless Planet, they truly are worth reading more to unravel more of the mystery and are a large part of the story. I want to avoid giving spoilers as much as I can to preserve the strong story so you will just have to trust me when I tell you it is the games best point.

This game has some of the best in game logs ever.

The visual are simultaneously a weak point and a strength. While most small scale models that you can see up close such as the characters and other smaller items are a little crudely rendered, everything on a larger scale such as the backgrounds and landscapes are masterfully crafted allowing you to see for miles in the distance in detail. They cause you to cast your eyes out over the horizon and wonder “What’s out there?” further increasing your sense of wonder in the mystery. However, due to some landscapes which are at times relatively featureless, it can be a difficult to know where exactly it is you’re meant to go in some sections. This leaves the player to fumble about trying out various routes, but I would argue that it has to be this way some of the time because after all, it is a “Lifeless Planet” and a lot of it is going to be featureless. Nevertheless, sections like this do pop up from time to time and are irritating. Particularly so when you reach one that is intended as a puzzle platform section, you can be left bouncing high and low and dying many times trying to find the correct route. The same thing can happen with other environmental hazards later in the game where the route through is not easy to find as a lot of it all looks very similar.

One of several points where it is quite easy to lose your way.

There are also a number of scripted sections where your oxygen is low and you have a limited amount of time to find a new tank. While these do add tension to the proceedings, they feel as if they are somewhat forced due to being scripted. Why can you wander around for hours with no oxygen troubles, but as soon as you hit this section, you run out?

Your oxygen levels have suddenly dropped. I don’t know why. *shrugs*

Lifeless Planet Review Summary

Lifeless Planet is an excellent indie title that provides mystery, exploration and a sense of wonder in a tight package. There is no combat whatsoever in this game but it never feels lacking. The story and hunt for answers is more than enough to drive you forward and provides very satisfactory conclusions once you reach the end of the journey. At just under 4 hours long, it is also a fairly short game that can be completed in a single evening with ease. For anyone who enjoys a feeling of solitude and a great expedition while searching to uncover the truth, this is definitely worth your while.

Final Score: 4/5

Lifeless Planet on GOG

You have to keep going. You have to.

The post Lifeless Planet Review appeared first on Life On The Grid.

Final Fantasy Tactics Review

2015-07-24T14:03:00.001+01:00

I have been a semi-long term fan of the Final Fantasy series and like many others, Final Fantasy VII was my first proper introduction to the series. I played all games since and went back into the series past to play the previous entries but despite the amazing reputation it gets, Final Fantasy Tactics was one game that I had never played. Until now.

Final Fantasy Tactics has long been a gap in my Final Fantasy series coverage

The main difference between Tactics and main entries in the Final Fantasy series is that while the main entries are traditional JRPGs where allies and enemies stay static in an area and automatically move back and forth to attack. Tactics is a turn based strategy game instead. Wherein you have control of your team’s movement around the map as well as their actions. This allows for greater control and is a sub-genre of RPG that I have always loved so I was keen to try this one out.

Great control over movement and direction is given in strategy RPGs

The mechanics of this system are quickly explained and becomes intuitive very fast so you will be manoeuvring around and flanking your enemies in no time. But while the early game is quite easy, once you get into the mid-game, the difficulty does start to ramp up quite a lot so you will need to grind a lot of optional missions in order to level your team up enough to be able to tackle the more difficult main missions. This came off as a slightly cheap way to force you to space out the story missions and slow your progress down. Padding, some would refer to it as. While this is common in classic RPGs, it is not so common in turn based strategy RPGs so I found it a little odd to have such a difficulty wall like this in a game of this genre. The difficulty does even out and then drop again towards the end of the game due to the acquisition of some new and extremely over-powered characters (who some would even call broken) so I think a little more difficulty balancing throughout would have improved the overall campaign progression.

Some sections are far too easy. Some are far too tough.

The game retains the class mechanics of earlier Final Fantasy games like Final Fantasy III and Final Fantasy V where each character does not have a set role, but can be switched as desired to a number of various different classes such who specialise in particular fields like healing magic, offensive magic, sword attacks, defence, ranged attacks and so on. There are a limited number of classes available at the start but more are unlocked as the campaign progresses and you can unlock even more specialist classes by levelling up existing classes enough. This allows you to tailor your team any way you see fit. As is my tradition, I went for all out bone-shattering offence with ninjas who can wield dual weapons for double the damage and it worked out very nicely for me.

Your team can be built and kitted out as per any tactics you want to deploy

Being a late PlayStation 1 era game, the graphics are as expected, not great by today’s standards, but they are quite impressive for the hardware at the time and are done in a simple cartoon character manner which has made them age well even by today’s standards so it is by no means hard to look at.

It even had some pretty snazzy visual effects for special attacks like summoned monsters.

Sadly, one weak point of this game is its story. While being a huge and epic tale about the fallout following an enormous war which involves upper class royalty looking down on lower class peasants and said peasants fighting back to gain equality and some control, it is very difficult to follow the nuances of the plot. It is presented in a very unclear and confusing manner with multiple sub-plots going on at once which makes it difficult to see an overall picture of everyone’s current status. This game was remade in later years for the PlayStation Portable in the form of Final Fantasy Tactics: The War Of The Lions, and the plot was re-worked slightly in this to make it easier to follow. Sadly, choosing to play the PlayStation original, I was lumbered with the original interpretation of the plot which as mentioned is difficult to follow at times. This took away some of the immersion and at times felt I was just fighting for the sake of fighting, not know what the real goal behind it was.

What’s going on here? I have no idea…

Final Fantasy Tactics Review Summary

Final Fantasy Tactics provides rock solid turn based strategy game-play with a very deep and customisable battle system that can be tailored to the exact way you want to play. This is both deeply satisfying to set up and a lot of fun to implement. If you are a fan of turn based strategy games, there is plenty to like here and the game is well deserving of its stellar reputation. The only small issues along the way are the sometimes obscure story and uneven difficulty levels. If these are an issue, there is always the option of playing the later remake on PlayStation Portable or mobile devices which it was also ported to.

Final Score: 4/5

Final Fantasy Tactics is a no brainer for anyone who enjoys strategy games

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Batman Arkham Knight Review

2015-07-23T13:59:00.001+01:00

I will start my Batman Arkham Knight Review by first disclosing that I played the PC version. I know, Shock horror. But I seem to have been one of the lucky few that experienced little to no problems despite the PC version of this game being so horribly broken. My gaming PC was fairly high end when built, but that was over 3 years ago now so it is pretty much middle of the road now being kitted out with an i7 3700K and a EVGA GeForce 670 SC 4GB which is only one card model above this game’s minimum requirement of a 660. So the auto hardware detection suggested settings for my machine was to have almost every visual setting set to off entirely or low. Despite this low bar and the fact that the PC version is missing quite a few of the nice visual effects that the consoles got, it still managed to look very pleasing to the eyes anyway and maintained a steady frame rate throughout after what seemed like a few choppy patches early in the game. It’s remarkable to see how far Rocksteady have pushed the aging Unreal 3 engine to deliver these visuals.

Even on low PC settings, it’s hardly an ugly game

Now onto the game itself. The main focus of this game is the Batmobile. And the Batmobile is amazing. It does everything you want it do just the way you want to. In this battle for Gotham, you have to engage enemies larger than an oversized thug, namely automated tanks, so you need larger means to tackle these threats as they will cut you to ribbons if you try it on foot. Enter the Batmobile.

*growling sound*

It’s a car, it’s a tank, it’s a main character, it’s essentially your pet with the way it whines in delight as you call it and growls as you jump in and engage battle mode. It shifts between driving like a car normally and strafing around as a tank with one button allowing you to dodge incoming fire as easily as you would on foot. It can be called with a button as long as you’re somewhere near a road and you will never tire of calling it from a rooftop, jumping off the roof and landing in the Batmobile as it skids to a halt underneath you.

This is never not awesome

It’s also very cleverly involved in a lot of the environmental puzzles and with a little bit of work, environment manipulation, and the Batmobiles special abilities such as boost and grapple hook, you can get this vehicle almost anywhere you need to. It’s a refreshing change from other games with vehicles where you just drive it somewhere, get out and leave it there. You involve the Batmobile a lot more than just a means of conveyance in your fight for Gotham and it’s very satisfying.

The Batmobile is used in all kinds of clever ways

There is also a great variety of different activities in crime solving on your quest to save Gotham. Reconstructing crime scenes from previous games re-appears as well as a lot of clever uses of new Bat-gadgets. Speaking of which, as usual, you are regularly given new Bat-toys and add-ons for your suit and car so the action never has time to get repetitive or boring as it is being constantly refreshed and mixed up with new additions and skills. The same goes with both regular foot enemies and automated tanks that the Batmobile tackles. Newer and stronger types with new abilities and tactics are regularly introduced keeping you on your toes in combat too both in and out of the Batmobile. One downside to the on-foot combat however is that it is generally quite a lot easier than previous games and Arkham veterans will find most of the thug battles very easy.

Only the really really big thug battles will prove a challenge. Veterans will sail through most with ease.

The over-arching plot is sadly one of the games weak points with the main villains for the most part feeling like tired over-worked cardboard cut-out enemies. There is some intrigue in finding out the identity of the mysterious Arkham Knight, but it never feels terribly urgent and at the end of the day, he is just another goon to be foiled. What is a lot more interesting and humorous as well as insightful is the banter that is supplied by another character that accompanies you throughout the game. This characters presence is much more welcome and his role in the endgame is far more pleasing than anyone else’s.

Most of the villains kind of suck.

Speaking of the endgame, in what could be felt as a radical step, in order to get the true ending to this game, you must 100% everything possible. What you get for completing the main story leaves a lot of questions unanswered. That includes dozens of quite lengthy side-quests and hundreds of the traditional Riddler trophies. I did not feel the urge to go through this 60+ hour long journey so I merely looked up the ending online and while it does answer some questions, it ends up just raising more and leaves you wanting to know what really happened. But it is likely the developers Rocksteady left this ending deliberately ambiguous as they knew it would be their last game in the series.

What will become of the Batman?

Batman Arkham Knight Review Summary

Batman Arkham Knight continues the solid legacy of the Rocksteady Batman Arkham series after the underwhelming Arkham Origins which was developed by a different software house. This is a true return to form of the excellence of Arkham City and Arkham Asylum but still adds enough new material, mainly the Batmobile, to keep it fresh and stop you from getting Bat-fatigue with the series. Some dislike the addition of the Batmobile but I thought it was an excellent and extremely well implemented addition to the game that complements the existing material very well.

Final Score: 4/5

How could you not love the Batmobile?

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Guacamelee! Review

2015-07-22T14:13:00.001+01:00

Being a long-time fan of old-school 2D brawler beat-em-ups, I was excited to hear about the release of Guacamalee! But it remained exclusive to PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita for a while after its release with hints of a PC release later. PC being my preferred platform, I patiently waited and in time it did come to PC so I dove in to it with my regular gaming co-op buddy Eugene.

Pretty much every game is better with co-op

The entire game is Mexican themed and you start off as a lowly farmer who’s love is stolen you by an undead villain. Said villain wastes no time in killing you after the kidnapping, but while wandering around in the land of the dead, you come across a powerful spirit that bestows upon you a magical lucha libre mask turning you into a powerful luchador wrestler and returning you to the land of the living so you can go save the girl.

Carlos and his goons are a perpetual thorn in your side.

The first striking thing about this game is the art style which is very angular and cartoonesque. It works well with the humour of the game which is extremely well written often making references to popular memes and cultural icons and many quirky characters that talk a lot of sass to you.

Very meme

The basic game-play is quite normal side-scrolling brawler action for the most part. You unlock new moves over time, but there is not much shockingly new or innovative here. Despite having said that, it is still very tightly put together and satisfying combat with the controls being sharp and fast rarely leaving you in the lurch or feeling like they’re letting you down which they often can in this genre.

Combat is sharp and satisfying

The main highlights are the boss fights which vary from enormous enemies who must have specialised tactics deployed against them to even larger enemies who cannot be defeated by conventional means, but become elaborate chase scenes where you must defeat them with the environment. There are also a number of auto-scrolling platforming sections where you must use your special abilities to manoeuvre your way through and/or evade death. There were some of the most annoying sections and I would happily have done with less of these and more combat.

The platforming sections are some of the games weakest

While playing through this on PC in co-op, we did find it a lot more difficult than we expected it to be. The platform sections in particular where precise timing was required to not die were especially difficult. Nevertheless, we persevered about 80% of the way through the game until we arrived at a boss that we just could not defeat. He was too fast for us. So we went to the internet to see if this irrational speed and difficulty was intentional and if there was a way to adjust it. Lo and behold, we discovered there was a bug in the PC version where if VSync was disabled, the game would run at nearly 3 times its usual speed. We re-enabled VSync and the game returned to normal speed which now seemed ludicrously easy in comparison to the earlier speed so we sailed through the rest of the game with ease.

But the boss sections are some of the best

Guacamelee! Review Summary

Guacamelee! provides lots of reliable 2D side-scrolling beat-em-up action so if you are a fan of this genre and old classics like Streets Of Rage or Golden Axe, you really can’t go far wrong with Guacamalee! Team up with a co-op buddy for even more fun and enjoy the hilarious pollo filled ride. But if you play the PC version, be sure to turn VSync on!

Final Score: 3/5

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Editorial: The Tipping Point

2015-07-13T15:38:00.001+01:00

It happens sometimes, you hit a certain point in a game and suddenly your whole aim in that game is drastically changed. It might be the moment you decide “screw it, I’m never gonna get 1000/1000 on this game” when you notice one irritatingly difficult/time consuming achievement. Or it might be the moment you’ve been stuck on the same puzzle in Zelda for 2 hours and decide the time has come for a quick trip to Gamefaqs.

Whatever it is, whenever it happens your self imposed rules are torn up. Once you succumb to a game guide for one puzzle, you’ll be quicker to do it again when you hit another brick wall. Once you’ve given up on getting all the achievements, those daft little pointless collectables you’ve been hunting out so painstakingly for the last 8 hours suddenly don’t matter at all (think Alan Wake and his Coffee Flasks)

I most recently experienced this while blasting through Trials Evolution, right around the time I started onto the “Extreme” tracks. My aim up to then had been getting a Gold medal on each track, and I’d been doing pretty well with only a handful of tracks so far still sitting on Silver medal status. The fact that some of those Golds took me an hour of effort to get didn’t bother me at all, I enjoyed the challenge. It took about five minutes of the first Extreme track for that to change though. I knew I had absolutely no mission of ever getting Golds on all the 8 Extreme tracks. Suddenly the goal I had been striving for was seemingly unattainable, and in the blink of an eye my goal was now just to finish all the tracks and forget the Gold medals. And I was fine with that.

So, yeah, I pussied out and gave up on my challenge. I was a quitter. So why don’t I care? Because in my opinion I’m not admitting defeat. I probably *could* get all the golds if I spent enough time, I just don’t want to any more. It’s reached that point where it just wouldn’t be fun to me – it would be more of a chore. Above all else, gaming is meant to be fun. It’s a hobby, it’s something that you pay money to do in your spare time and it shouldn’t feel like a chore. If it ever does, maybe you should remind yourself of that and change the rules, or change the game completely.

The completionist in me makes me want to beat every game I start, but there’s so many amazing games out there nowadays that if I’ve completely lost enjoyment in a game I’m not gonna keep playing for the sake of it. Towards the end of Disc 2 of L.A. Noire I grew tired of the seemingly random nature of the interrogations and the old Rockstar trademark of dragging out a story with too much filler so I haven’t played it in about a year. The beauty of it is you can go back to it any time you want should you fancy another crack at the challenge. In my case I’ve spent long enough away from the fantastic atmosphere and change of pace gameplay of L.A. Noire that when I go back to finish it off in the next few months I’ll enjoy it a lot more than I would have if I had just ploughed through it back when I started it.

Every game comes with its own set of rules and gameplay constructs, but don’t forget who’s really in charge of your gaming experience.

Hint: It isn’t Bill Gates and his achievement points.

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D4 Dark Dreams Don’t Die Review

2015-07-01T21:39:00.001+01:00

After playing Deadly Premonition last year and loving it ,despite the PC version being probably the single worst PC port I have ever seen, I was very excited to hear that the next game from designer Swery was being ported from XBox One to PC. I was a little apprehensive at first because on it’s original XBox One platform, D4 was a very Kinect heavy game so was unsure how well this would transfer to a mouse or controller alone. Read on to find out how well pleased I was with the entire package in my D4 Dark Dreams Don’t Die Review!

Things start off weird and only get weirder

The best way to describe this game is simply as total and utter madness all the time. Everything and everybody is ridiculously over the top, quirky and wacky to the extreme. And while some may this this would make it tiresome, it really does not. It just makes the different characters, locations and events stand out when they are all very memorable and original with their own mannerisms and quirks so you are unlikely to forget anyone or have difficulty differentiating between people.

You’re unlikely to forget or mix up any of these larger than life characters

Most of the gameplay consists of walking around areas and interacting with objects and people to extract and piece together information in your hunt for the infamous D who you have vowed to hunt down on someone else’s behalf. The sheer amount of interactivity is staggering and almost every object and person you come across can be interacted with in some way. You can use your “vision” (kind of like a sixth sense) to easily figure out what the key objects and people you need to interact with are but pretty much everything has some beneficial outcome for you examining it and half the fun is to just explore and investigate everything so you can find more comedy gold and weirdness. Almost all objects and people can be interacted with and many of them will give you side-quests to perform to rewards you with items or boosts to your health and other statistics. As expected, these quests are also ridiculous and can range from racing around checking creaky doors or answering air-plane trivia.

Examine every little thing. You never know what benefits you may reap.

The other part of the gameplay which is much less frequent is a series of quick-time events which usually take the form of extremely over the top fight scenes where everyone involved pulls off nigh on impossible acts of co-ordination, gymnastics and grace. Again, these are totally ridiculous and will have you in stitches as you struggle to make sense of the telemetry of it all.

The fight scenes don’t happen to often but when they do, they’re great

There are many dialogue options ranging from purely provocatory to straight-laced straight man and you are given extra rewards to “stay in character” as a serious cop. But this can be quite hard to do at times as it’s not always clear what kind of tone you should be taking as it switches regularly between flippant and serious.

What would you say to this guy if you were a Boston detective?

Your main goal throughout the game is to find important objects filled with memories called “Mementos” and use these to dive into the past to search for clues to help you find the mysterious “D”. Doing this, you spend a lot of the game in the past searching for clues and the parts that take place in the present day are centred around finding more of these mementos to investigate the past more.

Find mementos in the present and dive into the past to investigate!

One minor complaint is that the controls can be a little awkward with the right stick being used to both look around and move forwards and backwards which is done in an “on rails” fashion only allowing you to move between designated spots rather than totally free roaming. This is most likely done to have more artistic control over the set pieces and how you get to see them.

Movement is not free and is guided along set waypoints on paths

You never get to stop completely because even during cut-scenes there are small quick-time events that will give you more bonus points and money for examining things during cut-scenes so if you want to get as much as possible, you have to stay on the ball at all times!

Apparently cats operate shops on airplanes in the past

D4 Dark Dreams Don’t Die Review Summary

Dark Dreams Don’t Die is a total riot and is enormously entertaining start to finish with little to no let up at all. The only problem is that this is going to be an episodic series and only season 1 is available so far. It is also not a terribly long season at maybe 3-4 hours going quickly and about 10 if you want to do and see absolutely everything so you will be left begging for more by the time you have finished it! Can’t recommend this one enough.

Final Score: 5/5

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E3 After Thoughts

2015-06-28T14:30:00.001+01:00

Having seen everything on offer, here are my E3 after thoughts on the games that interested me. I think overall, I got about half of the things on my wish list as well as a few more nice surprises. Not bad at all!

Bethesda: a mixed bag warm up

Doom 4! Loved all of the Doom games especially Doom 3 and it’s expansion so looking forward to more of this.

The classic Doom Revenant. Now with more death.
I will play Fallout 4 but I’m not gushing for it like a lot of people are. Fallout 3 was decent enough but New Vegas was fairly boring to me.
I don’t care at all about Dishonored 2. I didn’t think much of the original. It was decent enough but again, nothing special. It took me about 4 hours to finish running through shooting and stabbing everyone I could see.

Microsoft: lots of unexpected and varied news

I like the new XBox One controller, that will finally be compatible with Windows and has lots of customisations. Sadly unless it comes down in price a lot, it will be too much money at $150, probably over £100 by the time it gets here.
The Gears 1 remake looks nice. It has the extra missing chapters that Gears 1 had on PC that XBox never got and is coming to PC. (it’s picked up some colour in the remaster). Gears 4 also looks good with a darker more sinister air to it. Gears is always fun for co-op and I’ll be getting these for sure.
The Rare compilation of classic games is a very awesome idea but I don’t think I’ll get it myself as I would likely never be able to finish the half of them.
Halo 5 will be the game that finally sells me an XBox One. Buck vs The Chief! Oh no!

Buck from ODST. Then and now.
Ashen looks to be an interesting little indie title.
Backwards compatibility with XBox 360 is great! Maybe I can finally retire my 360. I Just hope they expand it out and keep going with it. It requires users to re-download an emulated version of the game to hard disc rather than just using the disc.
Phantom Pain. Oh my god. Oh my god. This will be one of my biggest games of the year.
Recore might be good. Solid developers behind it like the Metroid Prime team.
Rise Of The Tomb Raider is coming along nicely. If I have an XBox One at the time I might as well get it on that. If not, I’ll wait for a PC version.
I tried Dark Souls a while back. Didn’t like it so not too fussed about Dark Souls 3.

EA: more from all your favourite franchises

Need For Speed shows promise. Despite going back to the underground street racing scene.
Mass Effect Andromeda is very exciting. A whole new galaxy! Had to be really after the ending of Mass Effect 3…. But this whole new galaxy seems to have a lot of common elements from out one.
Unravel is a platform game that has a lot of charm but I predict much sadness. and EA needs more stuff like this.

Unravel has a small studio indie vibe to it.
Fucking Mirror’s Edge 2! Now called Catalyst. Finally with a release date. It will be open world but probably not really I’d suspect. I’m guessing it will be like a modern Far Cry where it’s open world between missions but the missions will be channelled into smaller linear areas.

Ubisoft: all online, all the time

I still haven’t played The Crew and now I kind of don’t want to.
More DLC for Trials Fusion! Yay?
The Division and Rainbow Six Seige look good but I just don’t care about multi-player. I wish they’d stayed single player or at least included a good single player campaign.
Ghost Recon Wildlands does look great though. I thought it was Far Cry 5 at first. It should also good for co-op.

Ghost Recon goes open world. Just like every other game recently.
I’m going to play Assassin’s Creed Syndicate either way. I just hope its more like Assassin’s Creed Rogue and less like Assassin’s Creed Unity.

Sony: 3 Enormous pieces of earth-shattering news

Oh my fucking god. Final Fantasy VII remake. It’s finally happening.
The Last Guardian has come back to us. I knew it would. I never lost hope. But it’s moved to PS4 now, so one more reason to get it.

I never stopped believing The Last Guardian would come back to us.
Shockingly, I have never played either Shenmue game but I know the love people have for it so I might try it now…
Uncharted 4 looks great as expected and will most likely be the game that sells me a PS4.
Firwatch looks like a playable Pixar film. Should be cool.
Horizon Zero Dawn is the next big thing from makers of Killzone which I have been a long time fan of. There are hints of Enslaved Odyssey To The West in it.
Tacoma is another indie title from the makers of Gone Home. But will it be a game?

Nintendo: kind of phoned it in

A new Mario RPG game with Paper Mario mixed in? Could be fun, but not quite the Mario game we wanted.
The 3 player co-operative Zelda, Tri-Force Heroes, looks like the earlier co-op Zelda, 4 swords, only with 3 players not 4.
Yet another Animal Crossing game? I haven’t played this series since the Gamecube original.
Starfox Zero just looks amazing. Glad I don’t have too long to wait for it.

Hard to say no to a new Starfox game.
Mario Maker is probably great for the creative type but that I am not so it may not be of much use to me.
I so badly want Yoshi’s Wooly World with an amiibo. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I want amiibos so bad.

Square Enix

Adam is back (from the dead somehow) with religious symbolisim abound.

Deus Ex Mankind Divided has a lot to follow up from Human Revolution. But so far, it looks like it’s well set to do so.

Miscellaneous

Call of Duty Black Ops 3 has a co-op campaign. Finally. Love me some co-op shooting action.
A new Hitman? Cool I guess although the last one wasn’t great
Transformers: Devastation. Oh yes. Everything Transformers is gold. Everything. And Platinum games is making it who also make solid gold. A winning combination.

Hard to go wrong with Transformers. G1 Transformers, that is. Michael Bay got it pretty wrong….

PC

Gears Of War Ultimate Edition will come to PC the same day as XBox One

It’s very good to see things like the Gears remake, No Man’s Sky and Killer Instinct coming to pc. Most things are launched on the same day now instead of months or years later. PC is finally getting the attention it deserves. Probably in part due to PS4 and XBox One being the same architecture as PCs now.

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Kane & Lynch 2 Dog Days Review

2015-06-11T18:16:00.001+01:00

Probably not the nicest area of Shanghai

I played Kane & Lynch 2 Dog Days originally not long after it came out in co-operative split-screen mode and decided to replay it again recently. Co-operatively again, only this time online on PC so without split-screen so this could be considered a re-review if there is such a thing.

Good luck shooting guys.

This game got truly slated in most reviews. Every reviewer said that they didn’t like it and that it was bad and ugly and nauseating to play and many other derogatory comments. But I found this to be very unfair as this is a game that is very very easy to misunderstand. The problem was that most people just didn’t seem to get what the developers were going for with it. Their design idea being the aesthetics of the game was to make it “authentic and genuine” like a documentary. To this end, the game is intentionally designed to be disgusting and does it extremely well. Everyone in it is an ugly asshole. The majority of the game is set in the slums of Shanghai so the streets are littered with dirt and rubbish. The “background music” is rarely more than a buzzing white noise. Every light is abrasive and neon and causes strobing and lens flare obscuring your vision. The whole thing is shot in a “found footage” motif with your point of view being from a camera man who is following the unlucky pair of Kane and Lynch. He does a good job keeping up with you most of the time but it’s this point of view that causes your view to wobble around constantly especially while running and to be obscured constantly by blood splatter, dirt and even more lens flare leaving you unable to see most of what is going on for a lot of the time which just adds to all of the chaos and confusion.

Can’t see anything? Get used to it.

Despite being primarily a cover-based shooter, the shooting is loose and has no feedback. You can’t easily tell if you are hitting your target or not until they fall down dead, which is probably what real shooting is like without all the electronic aids. Aiming is rarely any more accurate than running and shooting from the hip. You regularly get knocked down flat on your arse when you get winged with minor damage causing you to scrabble to get to your feet again in an undignified mess.

You’ll get knocked down. A lot.

The 2 main characters are completely unlike-able terrible people who start off in a dicey situation doing an illegal deal and keep getting into progressively more and more awful situations only making them worse every time they try to solve them. But at least they’re honest about being bastards. They don’t spend the game-play murdering everyone they lay eyes on and then play the role of reluctant hero in cut-scenes like some protagonists do. They’re just bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling 100% of the time. They also usually rarely have any clue what they’re currently doing or are going to do next and just fumble through areas screaming incoherently at each other (and sometimes themselves) further adding to the feeling that you never ever for one single second have any kind of semblance of control on the situation and that everything is just on a continuing downward spiral towards even worse things. It’s a hell of a wild ride trying to escape the city as all kinds of shit hits the fan.

Some of the nastier injuries will be pixellated out

It’s a video game nasty. It’s a straight to DVD film release. I just wish they would make one final entry in this series. Without spoiling anything, I can only say once you see the ending, you will know why.

Hey, remember DVDs?

Kane & Lynch 2 Dog Days Review Summary

In every single conceivable and quantifiable way, it is absolutely terrible. But somehow, it all comes together. It all works. It’s a beautifully honest, brutal, unashamed disgusting chaotic, haphazard nausea-inducing mess and I love it. And if you give it a try, you just might find that you love it too. Or not. Not everyone will get it. Those of you who get motion sickness easily may want to turn on the “steadycam” option which steadies the camera in the hands of the film-maker a bit more. I probably haven’t explained it very well just how good this is. But trust me on this one. It’s a work of genius and it makes me sad that it never got the recognition that it deserved. That’s why I will keep spreading the good word.

Final Score: 5/5

Kane and Lynch are not nice men.

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Review: The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt

2015-05-26T15:47:00.001+01:00

A word of preface before starting: this review was written from the point of view from someone who has played the 2 previous Witcher games just over a year ago, so while I am familiar with them, it was quite a while ago and my memory of them may no longer be crystal clear.

Just starting out

I got a massive feeling of Deja Vu when playing The Witcher 3. Much like Mass Effect 3 was almost mechanically identical to Mass Effect 2 but with a different story, The Witcher 3 is almost mechanically identical to The Witcher 2 but with a different story. With only small game-play adjustments, much of The Witcher 3 will feel very similar to anyone who has played The Witcher 2. There is also an enormous amount of lore which is not often explained or recapped, so those who do not remember much of the plot-lines or characters from before hand may often be left wondering “What the hell is going on?”

First of all, “The Good”:

The most satisfying part is once again the combat which despite some difficulties with clunky controls works very well and makes you feel like a bad-ass monster killing Witcher especially when you start to unlock some of the later very fancy skills.

The Witcher 3 is the new Crysis

There is a truly staggeringly huge amount of content in this game and will give tremendous re-playability and extra content to go through. It took me 30 hours for a fairly swift play-through of mostly just the main plot quests with a small amount of secondary quests. CD Projekt Red were probably not exaggerating when they claimed it would take 100 hours to completely do everything in the game.

It is also a stunningly beautiful game. I mean my god. You can just get lost just walking around and gawking at all the sights. The dynamic weather is also a fantastic addition allowing storms and blizzards and such to descend at any time. One particularly excellent example of this is in swampy areas when large wind and rainstorms appear and you can hear the wind howling and the trees swaying and creaking and the rain lashing down. It’s quite a sight to behold. It also made my GPU weep tears of pain as I desperately tried to push a stable 30-40 FPS out of it. With an overclocked Intel i7 3700K and overclocked GTX 670 I could only comfortably manage medium presets. But I mean just look at it.

Forests are the best

Next up, “The Bad”:

Equipment degradation is one of the worst ideas in the history of gaming but sadly it was put into this game. So your weapons and armour will regularly reduce in effectiveness or break entirely so it is necessary to keep going back and forth and spending money (which is quite scarce in early stages) to get them repaired or else you will be totally neutered in fights. Yes, it’s more “realistic”, but it’s a terrible idea for a game and should die forever.

Because the world of The Witcher 3 is a huge open world, you need ways to get around it quickly. One of these ways is your horse, Roach. While this means of conveyance is faster than walking in theory, a lot of the times it is not. The horse can theoretically autopilot along marked roads but it rarely succeeds at this and will often just fly off the road into obstacles and get stuck. It also seemingly gets stuck on every twig and pebble even when manually controlled so quite often unless I had to travel a truly huge distance and had no other option, I would tend to favour just legging places on foot.

Boats are another means of conveyance

The game’s fast travel system is also almost total trash. You can only fast travel to map signs when you are standing beside another map sign. But the problem there is that quite often when a quest ends, you are left stranded in the middle of nowhere with none of these signs around for miles. One occasion I was left on a remote isolated island on one side of a mountain with the nearest sign being on the other side of the mountain so the only options were to either scale the mountain or go around it just to get back to civilization.

The controls also seem a lot clunkier than they were in the previous games somehow often causing various problems such as getting stuck on scenery, drowning and getting stuck on your horse while being cut to bits by an angry mob. I tried it both on keyboard + mouse and controller and controller seemed to be the more comfortable but still not without it’s difficulties. Swimming controls are especially difficult with trying to control things while diving underwater being damn near impossible.

An open meadow where you’re less likely to trip up on things

And “The Other”:

The depth that the quests can sometimes get to is both simultaneously great and tiresome. While it’s good that the story has great depth to it, it can get a bit annoying after the seventh or eighth link in quest chain when you start out wanting to do something simple, but to do that, someone wants something else and to get that, you need help from someone else and to get help from that person you need another thing and on and on and on. It can feel like it takes an eternity to get even the simplest of things accomplished. This made the game feel incredibly slow at times and lacking in momentum.

I came across many less bosses in this game than I did in the previous two games. Which did tone down the epicness of the tale a little when there were not that many huge hulking obstacles in my way.

Just taking in the sights. I did this a lot.

There were also many less difficult choices where it’s hard to make any kind of decision. In The Witcher 1 and 2 there were many many choices you had to make where it was very hard to tell what you should do and how this would have consequences down the line. Most choices seemed fairly cut and dry and easy to tell what would happen when you picked various options. That may have been due to the fact that this is the end of Geralt’s story and there were limited ways things could pan out, but it took away a bit of the bewilderment the previous games had. I made a concious effort to be a jerk throughout most of the game so I got what definitely felt to be “The bad ending”. From what I have read, there are at least 3 different main endings and minor variances within them depending on the choices you made.

Summary

The Witcher 3 overall feels like more of the same of The Witcher 2 with some of the rough game-play edges smoothed out and a few new rough ones exposed. There is less linearity than there was in previous games and shedloads more quests and activities to partake in. But sadly, a lot of the greyness and ambiguity in the world that made the previous games so interesting and tricky to completely figure out seems to have left too making it a bit more black and white and simplified.

It’s a no brainer if you played and enjoyed previous games. You just might find that it’s a little different this time round as the trilogy comes to a close.

And it’s also a no brainer if you haven’t played the previous games. It’s still an excellent action RPG. Just a little slow paced at times….

What’s next for Geralt?

Final score: 4/5

Watch video footage of my play-through right here:

Review: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD

2015-02-18T19:04:00.001+00:00

The already timeless visuals look even more beautiful now in crisp sharp HD

An almost unbelievable 11 years after the original release, I return to this new HD remake of one of my favourite Zeldas, The Wind Waker. Promised many enhancements and game-play tweaks as well as new HD graphical upgrade, this remake provided a way for the Zelda team to cut their teeth with familiar material on the new and unfamiliar Wii U hardware before making an entirely new Zelda adventure which is to come in 2015. The visuals have held up superbly well being quite simple and clean to begin with. The enhancement of HD only serves to make them look even better.

Tingle is now officially obsolete.

The Wii U gamepad enhancements allow you to swap items super quick on the fly without having to pause the game. It can also act as a dungeon map, sea chart (including treasure maps) and interface for messages in a bottle, called Tingle Bottles which replace the Tingle Tuner. Only the few that did connect a GBA to their GameCube in the original game will remember the Tingle Tuner, but it was in essence a second screen assistant that could provide local maps, an on demand shop and allow a second player to assist in minor ways. Since the Wii U gamepad performs the most important of these functions now, it only makes sense to retire the Tingle Tuner and this is a much appreciated addition to the game greatly speeding up menu navigation which has always broken up the action in Zelda games. Almost everything that was needlessly slow and tedious in the original game has been tweaked and sped up in this remake. Some notable examples include:

Much faster extraction of treasure from the sea bed.

A swift sail which doubles sailing speed and auto-redirects wind to your back can be won at the auction house

The Triforce chart pieces quest has been significantly shortened

Pictographs are immediately rated upon taking them and you can carry 12 at a time

Pictographs from Miiverse can be submitted for statue quest

Grapple hook can change direction while in motion

Sailing across the beautiful Hylian sea is now easier and faster than ever thanks to the new Fast Sail

And many many more smaller less noticeable changes which will still be of benefit. Needless to say in remastering this game, the developers took a lot of feedback and listened to it because almost every flaw with the original has either been removed or reduced to have less of a negative impact. The most notable of these being the double speed sailing (take note, you should acquire this Swift Sail from the auction house as soon as you can) which greatly reduces the tedium of navigating the oceans and greatly cutting down the length of the Triforce quest in the game’s closing chapters.

A “mandatory side-quest” to collect Triforce pieces

While I do certainly approve of cutting down the Triforce quest, which always like it should have been a side quest rather than a main one to me, I am less enthused by the cutting down of sailing time. Yes, sailing can definitely get tedious at times especially coming to the game’s close or if you choose to do more of the optional side quests, but I always felt that the sailing was an integral part of the game and added to the experience. It was there to convey the vast empty openness of the ocean that you were travelling. You could sail for quite a while without ever seeing anything other than the occasional rocky outcrop or enemy post if you were unlucky or just searching for something you did not know the location of yet. But that was the point. The ocean is big. You are meant to get lost and you are meant to spend time out there. It’s often been said that this game was the closest Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto has ever come to his original vision of The Legend of Zelda which that was a child entering a dangerous cave all alone and overcoming the dangers therein. For that, and many other reasons, it remains one of my favourites in the series and is definitely worth a re-purchase and replay in this stunning new HD version.

The Wii U gamepad additions are extremely helpful particularly for mapping and item management

Summary

The Wind Waker HD is a beautifully executed remake that sets the bar to a new high for HD remakes that will appeal to both experienced veterans who have played it before and also to Wind Waker virgins who can now experience the game with a lot of the annoyances removed and extra bonuses added on. Bravo Nintendo. Expert job.

Final Score: 5/5

Review: Ryse: Son of Rome

2014-10-24T11:35:00.001+01:00

To say this is a pretty game is quite an understatement

I got this just out of morbid curiosity more than anything else after hearing not great things about the XBox One version saying that it was just all quick time events. But after recent big award winner disappointments like Destiny and Shadow of Mordor, I thought I’d give an underdog a chance and I’ve always been a fan of the developer, Crytek. Turned out I had a lot more fun with this than either of those combined. First off, the most obvious point that smacks you across the chops immediately is that Ryse looks gorgeous. Like, properly gorgeous. So much so you may well find yourself stopping regularly just to gawk at the beautiful scenery. Likewise, all the actors in the story are amazingly well represented and the voice acting is actually surprisingly good too. The plot-line follows a re-telling of the well-known Roman legend of Damocles who is wronged by his commanders but returns from the dead to seek revenge on them.

“‘the Sword of Damocles’, an allusion to imminent and ever-present peril faced by those in positions of power.”

Although not the most original of stories, it also plays out nicely and at a good pace with build up to major plot points being tense and atmospheric. And so, we come to the part that most complaints are centred around: the game-play. Yes, it can get quite repetitive. Yes, there are only a handful of basic enemy types and skins and you will see them repeated very frequently. Yes, a large part of it is quick time events. But despite all this, I still had a lot of fun with it. It is quite satisfying to cut and bash and chop your enemies apart in increasingly gruesome manners. You gain experience and build this up to unlock more numerous and hideous executions as well as better gain abilities. The gain abilities are used to recover health, gain extra EXP, focus or combat bonus after performing a successful execution. Executions can be performed after softening a target up sufficiently and then triggering a time slow down followed by a series of button colour coded quick time events which perform fantastic limb chops, shield smashes and all kinds of other unpleasant things.

It is also a very messy and brutal game

That is the core elements of the combat. There are other moves available such as dodges, blocks, taunts and such to help deal with the massive hordes of enemies you will face as well as your focus ability. Once you have chained sufficient combos and filled your focus bar (with blood) you can slow down time again and become an almost unstoppable killing machine rapidly chopping and slashing through most defences instantly. This becomes especially handy in later levels when the tougher enemies become much more numerous. I think the PC version of this game became available to me at a good time after being frustrated and disappointed by numerous big release season games that tried to over-complicate what should have been simple things. Ryse on the other hand, is very simple but what it does, it does very well.

“A modern take on a classic 2D brawler”

The best way I can describe it is that it’s a modern day version of an old school brawler like Streets of Rage or Golden Axe dressed up in super super HD visuals. Yes, they were simple and could get repetitive, but they were also immense fun to play and were usually short enough that the repetitiveness never had time to become a huge issue. The same can be said of Ryse with it taking me little over 5 hours to complete, but this felt like a good duration for this type of game to me. Any longer and the repetitiveness may have become a bigger problem. I think that the problem it faced at the time of the XBox One’s launch was that due to its gorgeous visuals, people were expecting an immensely deep game underneath that wasn’t there. But to me, that doesn’t seem like Crytek’s thing usually. Their way of doing things seems to be to make an immensely pretty game that is simple to play, but a lot of fun. Much like the Crysis games.

And when I say brutal, I mean brutal.

Summary

It’s probably not going to win any game of the year awards and it’s no thinking man’s game, but Ryse is a short and guilty pleasure that provides a lot of bloody fun while it lasts. However, if you’re someone who always craves depth and huge epics even in a combat game, you may be better looking to something along the lines of the Batman Arkham games.

Final Score: 3.5/5

Check out my Let’s Play footage below for a complete play-through

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh2oETQSyOwQqCDvIAxc8XBAtIEJbJIbX

Review: Middle Earth - Shdaow of Mordor

2014-10-24T11:21:00.003+01:00

Many reviewers are touting this as a potential game of the year candidate. Sadly, I was not quite as impressed with it as they were. Read on to find out why.

Shadow of Mordor is an extremely impressive game in the visual department also needing 6GB of VRAM for maxed out settings on PC.

The combat is excellent being quite similar to the Batman Arkham games combo, counter, dodge, take-down system. It’s a good system but you are quite unequipped for larger and prolonged battles in that you are not able to take much damage before going down. High priority targets such as Warchiefs also often come surrounded by dozens of lower and middle tier enemies making actually getting to them quite tricky and trying to combat them specifically in a huge crowd even trickier.

“You know how to fight six men. I can teach you how to engage six hundred.”

There are not a lot of main missions but quite annoyingly, they are regularly padded out by other objectives which at first seem optional but then later become mandatory for you to complete before you can move on to the next main mission. There are also a huge number of systems to get used to such as at multiple different ways to unlock abilities, upgrades, equippable weapon skills, focus (bullet time), context sensitive actions, etc. These are all introduced at a blindingly fast pace with little explanation or time to get used to using them so many may go unnoticed making your life harder.

“One does not simply walk into Mordor”

The much lauded Nemesis system where the power hierarchy of the Orcs is interesting, but doesn’t really add a lot to the game unless you want to get heavily invested in it which I didn’t want to really. The Orc Warchief, Bodyguards and Captains can be killed off making some more vulnerable or allowing some to be usurped but they can never all be killed permanently as they just endlessly replace each other. Kill one and another takes his place. It also breaks the flow of combat every time you get meet a noteworthy foe in combat for him to say his piece and tell you his name. While novel the first few times, this gets old quick as it even does it in the middle of combat totally breaking the flow. Also should you die and go back to fight the same Orc again, you are reintroduced in the same manner each and every time which can get very very tiresome.

The Nemesis system is a novel idea but in reality adds little to the game-play unless you go very far out of your way to get mileage out of it.

It feels like this game is trying to aspire to be a true next-gen open-world game by adding in so many extra systems and concepts and optional side-quests. But all these optional events turn out to not be optional at all and if you try to do the main missions without buffing yourself up through “optional” side-quests first, you’re going to have a bad time. And seeing as the whole point of an open-world game is that it should allow you to play it your own way, I think it has failed quite badly in this aspect because it forces you down one path and to play it “the proper way” or else face an insurmountable difficulty wall.

“Mandatory side-quests”

I didn’t end up finishing Shadow of Mordor because about 9 hours in, quite close to the end when I was reaching the end of the SECOND optional-but-not-optional Warchief culling, it ate my save and put me back to the start. I decided to call it there and never touch it again as it had already irritated me quite enough.

Interrupting an intense battle to introduce an Orc with some smarmy lines. Cool the first few times. Tiresome after the twentieth.

Summary

Shadow of Mordor provides some excellent combat, stealth and free-running mechanics which work very well when they do. But sadly, they are buried behind myriads of side quests that you are forced to do to be equipped to survive through the main campaign. This is a major let down for me as I just wanted to play through the story of the campaign and not 100% all side-quests. If you are the type of player who loves doing absolutely every last thing in a game, this will probably work better for you. But if you prefer just to do main missions, you will have a hard time. Due to me falling into the latter camp, I cannot personally recommend this one.

Overall Score: 2/5

Mini Review: Watch Dogs Bad Blood DLC

2014-09-30T12:54:00.001+01:00

T-Bone is a much more easy-going character to spend your game time with

This first major piece of Watch Dogs DLC take place after the main campaign is finished, which seems to be quite standard for most DLC now, and stars hacker/crafter T-Bone who was your associate in the main campaign instead of Aiden Pearce. T-Bone is a much more likeable character being very fun and jovial rather than Mr Sad Face, Aiden Pearce who may have had a hernia trying to crack a smile. T-Bone's move set and unlockable skills are largely similar to Aiden's only you begin the DLC campaign with a good portion of them unlocked for you already and you gain unlock points quicker allowing you to quite easily max out an entire branch of your choosing during the main story missions. These main story missions, of which there are 10, will take you roughly 4 hours to go through if you are doing them at a brisk enough pace and just like the main game, there are many other side missions and collectables to find. Some of the new side quests like cracking Blume Corporation's tracking of Aiden Pearce or side jobs given to you by cop friends are interesting twists on what we have seen before in Watch Dogs and add variety.

Your remote control car, Eugene, gets you out of many sticky situations

As with most DLCs, this one assumes you have already finished the main campaign and sets the difficulty bar a little higher because of this with most missions featuring large numbers of tough enemies that will readily flank you from all sides. Personally I preferred this though as I much prefer the unsubtle approach of going in with a large machine gun and simply shooting everyone between me and my objective so it was good to have some challenging targets for a change. One well-advertised new gameplay element in Bad Blood is T-Bone's remote controlled car, Eugene who gives you the ability to sneak into tiny tunnels, remote hack, stun, explode and much more. Because T-Bone is not only a master hacker, but also a master engineer, as demonstrated in his crazy booby trapped car lot when you met him in the main game, he is able to craft quickly and easily including any replacement Eugenes should he get destroyed. This remote control car adds an interesting twist to a lot of missions because its defences are limited but can go a lot of places T-Bone can't so you must work together with Eugene to get into previously inaccessible locations. Sadly, most of the same graphical glitches that I witnessed during the main game are still present in the game engine such as wall colours flickering and lighting not behaving as it should. I was hoping they would use the opportunity of updates to fix some of these rather unsightly problems, but it does not appear to have happened.

Large shoot outs with many enemies are commonplace. But I never choose the escape option

Summary

Bad Blood offers mostly more of the same Watch Dogs game-play but adds a much more likeable main character and some genuinely interesting new twists in to the mix. It seems to be becoming a common trend for Ubisoft to play a main game safe and then try different more interesting things in following DLC. It's a trend I like and I'd say if you weren't too fussed on Watch Dogs' main campaign, this may help sway you the other direction.

Overall Score: 4/5

The end of the backlog

2014-05-19T21:29:00.000+01:00

Well, it's finally happened. After almost 5 years of concentrated effort, my backlog is finally finished.

Many less appealling games had to be culled from the list as well as games that I had just got for no reason or for other people to play but I never ignored any of the games I truly wanted to play and over the last few years, I have worked my way through hundreds of games to get to this goal. And at the same time, I managed to keep ahead of the new releases and never felt behind in the gaming world.

So where to go from here? Well, there is still a wishlist of 45 or so games that I keep. About half have yet to be released and half of them I have just never got around to getting. So I'll delve into these over time and as the unreleased ones appear. 2 of these are due to come out tomottor: Wolfenstein the New Order and Transistor so these will keep me busy for a little while and then, the much touted (and future successful franchise) Watch Dogs appears next week so you can rest assured I will have plenty to say on all of these.

There are also a number of franchises that I have never delved into at all or very briefly:

Kirby
Castlevania
Phoenix Wright
Secret of Monkey Island
Professor Layton
Ratchet and Clank
Jak and Daxter
Fable

I feel I have missed out on so these will be more avenues to research. Along with plenty of favourites that I want to replay, huge games I want to play more of and piles of DLC that I have saved up, there will still be plenty of Life on the Grid to come yet.

It feels like a great achievement to have finally finished my backlog and I hope that everybody else still battling with theirs sees that it can be defeated and is not an impossible goal.

Here's to the next phase of gaming.

The backlog is finished

2014-05-16T20:26:00.003+01:00

The backlog is finished.