Reviews – Page 8 – MMO Fallout

NM Impressions: Crash Force

(Editor’s Note: Copy provided by publisher)

Crash Force is a great looking game with a lot of problems, which is fine since the game is in early access and that is exactly what it is good for. I’ve been playing the game for the better part of the last two weeks, and while the foundation is strong and the premise is fun, the game definitely needs more time in the oven before it can be considered fresh baked.

The premise of Crash Force is simple: It is an arena shooter where you play as hovering ships. As a modern shooter, Crash Force introduces MOBA elements in that each ship is in a way its own class, utilizing various weapons and perks to play the game in different ways. You have lighter, faster moving ships, ships with drones, ships with mines. Some can teleport, some can stun, others can even reverse time and regain health. Throw in a metric ton of decals to customize your ship with and you’ve got an arena shooter worthy of your $10.

Crash Force is your everyday arena shooter. You pick a bot, enter into a match, and shoot at your opponents until they are destroyed with the optimal goal of killing more of them and being killed the least. Your ships are tightly controlled and responsive to button inputs, and all of this takes place on an array of diverse maps with blooming colors, open fields, and tight corridors. You can play the game online, Crash Force automatically substitutes bots when there aren’t enough players who hold their own well enough.

While the game is rather fast paced, Crash Force hits some hitches with the number of stuns that can be played out at any given time. Instead of a simple indicator, the game spells out “stunned” and “confused” with a to-the-millisecond timer for how long the effect is in place. A one second stun seems like forever in a game where ships are whipping around and darting in and out of sight, while stuns and confusions can be useful in a strategic term, in the sense of gameplay they tend to be obnoxious and too common, jolting the gameplay to a halt while you watch your ship blow up.

And here is where Crash Force’s biggest problem lies: The fast paced nature of the game does not gel well with the kind of information that the game pumps into you. You have ammo/health/energy indicators in one corner, powerup cooldowns in another, the map in a third, and rankings in the fourth, with the center displaying your hits and relative combat information. There is far too much spread out too wide for this game, and it makes combat unnecessarily confusing and frustrating. Crash Force’s interface would have worked twelve years ago when most screens were still on 800×600, but you can see in the screenshots that it is far too spaced apart with too much screen space dedicated to large kill text/icons.

I’d like to see Crash Force’s UI get overhauled, and to further that point, I found a stock photo of a minimalist UI (source) to use as comparison. Rather than throwing them to the side of the screens, you could allow the player to keep their attention at the center of the screen by making the health/energy/ammo counts meld with the crosshair, with the cooldowns only on screen when activated and somewhere near the center crosshair. In this game nobody has time to count ammunition.

As a snazzy little arena shooter, Crash Force is turning out to be a solid indie title. It just needs a few simple tweaks to the interface and stun/confuse mechanics to balance it out. I’d like to take an extra look at it once it fully launches and some of the issues are ironed out. Interested parties can check the game out on Steam for $10.

It Came From the Xbox Game Pass: Layers of Fear

Layers of Fear was part of the Games with Gold service back in March, so if you’ve been a Live subscriber and kept up on activating your monthly titles, you already have this in your library. I activated my copy in March and haven’t given it a try because, I will admit, there is nothing that I loathe more than the horror game genre outside of maybe the mobile gaming sphere and the degenerative effect it is having on the industry overall (a conversation for another day).

My problem with horror games is that they so easily fall into the same hole as many horror films, where ‘psychological horror’ has slowly changed to mean ‘gradually increasing music followed by the OOGA BOOGA BOOGA’ jump scare, as we delve into the past of another protagonist with his insanity/dead family/amnesia/drug problem. I will also admit that I’ve been spoiled on great horror. Resident Evil 7 is terrifying on Playstation 4’s VR, Amnesia/SOMA are fantastic games, and we’ve had years of titles like the old Resident Evil games that still spook if less so in the modern era. But Layers of Fear is worse, it is a horror walking simulator.

Let me explain: Amnesia: The Dark Descent was a great (if sometimes frustrating) game because encounters were sparse and you couldn’t fight back, in fact you couldn’t even look at the monsters too long without going insane. Resident Evil 7 starts you out running and hiding and over time you gain the ability to fight back, although it is still a very haunting game. A big part of horror games is the fear of danger, of death, of failure. It’s not enough to just be in a spooky place, you have to believe that there is something that poses a threat. Take that building block away and the game starts to fall apart. Obviously I’m talking in the context of my in-game character with the level of immersion you’d expect to have with any piece of media.

Layers of Fear does attempt to introduce more immersion by having you grip down with the right trigger and pull open doors and drawers with the right joystick. It would have been a nice touch, were it implemented ten years ago, but here it is janky and more often than not you’ll find yourself fiddling with the controls because, despite the button prompt being up, the game doesn’t register that you’re grabbing hold.

And that’s why Layers of Fear lost me within the first five minutes, after I realized that this was a carnival fun house where no matter how spooky things got, nothing could harm me. The premise of the game is simple, you play an artist returning to his home to finish his painting. As you move around through the house, collecting mementos and reliving memories, you slowly piece together what happened in his life to bring him to this state, as he appears to break down into insanity and the world warps around him. In short: It’s very close to every other ‘psychological horror’ walking simulator to come out in the last five years.

Which is terrible, because Layers of Fear clearly has some talented people at the helm. Much of the credit has to be given to the level designers putting together a house that will give you whiplash as you try to find your way around. The level seamlessly warps, entering a room only for the door to disappear when you turn around to go back, for another door to appear where you had just encountered a dead end. The absolute worst thing you could have happen is for the player to witness these changes, but the game perfectly ensures (without taking control of the camera, mind you) that you don’t.

But then you have a list of horror tropes that I can only assume came off of a checklist, and the game suffers for it and in some cases you’ll find yourself laughing at what was probably intended to be a serious moment. For every impressive moment, like a low-tone gramophone that causes the room to melt, you have six that are cheesy and take way too long to finish up. In one scene, the room fills with dolls that vibrate very fast and then disappear, but are poorly place and half-clipped through objects in some cases like the developer just rushed through that scene. As I said, you know a game has missed its target hard when you’re laughing at scenes that were probably intended to be serious.

And then you have this:

So Layers of Fear can be best surmised by this process: Go into room, figure out how to activate jump scare, find memento or item to pick up (if there is one) and then continue. At best, it’s a good resume item for the artists, level designers, and audio engineers because the folks at Bloober Team do some crazy stuff with the Unity engine. The paintings present in the game are beautiful, haunting masterpieces and the soundtrack is just as unnerving to listen to. It’s a pain, therefore, that the story is so sparse and doesn’t really go anywhere.

Your first play through of Layers of Fear will take around 4-5 hours, which begs the question since the game is free: Is it worth your time? If you’re a Youtuber who makes big money off of screaming into a camera, then you’ve probably already missed your chances of cashing in on this title. If you’re looking for something to make your Xbox Game Pass worth the time, then put this down toward the bottom of the list. #90, assuming you can make it through everything else.

Final Score: 5/10
Recommended for: When you have nothing else to play.

Layers of Fear is beautifully designed, but the scares are often so laughably bad that it’s hard to stay immersed in the world or care about the protagonist or his family. Numerous frame rate dips made this difficult to enjoy further as the game became choppy in some areas. There are so many better horror games to be playing right now, with more interesting characters, engaging gameplay, and better presented spooks that Layers of Fear should be reserved for when you have absolutely nothing else to do.

[NM] 100% Completion: Tattletail

Tattletail came out on Steam on December 28 and pretty much flew under the radar until a bunch of Youtubers discovered it and made it somewhat a success (I’m sure it more than paid its development costs and probably put a decent amount of pocket money in the developer’s…pockets). Looking at the Steam stats, it actually still turned out to be a low key title with somewhere between six and twelve thousand owners, which is a disappointment because this game is much more engaging and suspenseful than Five Nights at Freddy’s ever was. Me, personally, I threw my $5 down on launch night.

This is a game with a basic premise: You are a child who opens his Christmas present five days early to find that it is a Tattletail (think creepier Furby) and you have to survive each night until Christmas. Each night progressively introduces you to more mechanics, your Tattletail needs to be brushed, fed, and charged regularly otherwise he will not stop chattering. You have a flashlight which also much be shaken regularly otherwise the room gets dark (obviously), and by sprinting you create noise. The noise mechanic is important because in order to avoid the Mama Tattletail who is out to kill you, you’ll need to keep Tattletail satisfied and your flashlight charged. You actually don’t see any real action until about night 4.

I recommend playing through this game, you’ll get a few hours out of it for a fiver and it isn’t as bad as the screenshots might make you believe. Tattletail has resources that need to be filled, but they go down so slowly that it never becomes obnoxious, and even when he does start screaming about food, the game is basically lenient enough that you can walk from one end of the house to the other and still not have to worry about Mama attacking. The tension in the game comes from the feeling of losing control, as you move around the house, avoiding Mama’s red glowing eyes, while trying to keep your flashlight on and shushing Tattletail. The game punishes you for reflexes, the moment your flashlight goes out your instinct is to hit the mouse button and charge it, causing instant death.

The game isn’t perfect, there are a few instances where you’ll be in Mama’s sights without being able to see her on screen, resulting in an instant death because you thought it was safe to charge your flashlight. There are numerous ways to cheese the game, but you should at least finish the game once before you ruin the experience, spots you can seek out where Mama doesn’t have a spawn point watching over, or when you figure out that your flashlight is only necessary while holding Tattletail (because he’s afraid of the dark) and not charging it doesn’t penalize the player while walking alone in the dark while charging it could potentially kill you.

While I hope that the developer behind this game continues to make games, I hope to never see a Tattletail 2 without at least good reason. What little story is there leaves just enough questions to the player’s imagination, and I’d hate to see sequels for the sake of sequels.

Check it out on Steam.

[NM] Blue Estate Is Everything I Want Out Of On-Rails Shooting

Blue Estate is everything I want out of an on-rails shooter. Thank you, good night.

I suppose I should elaborate. I’ve always been a huge fan of the House of the Dead games, so stumbling upon Blue Estate was like finding the trail to King Tut’s tomb, or Kim Jong Un’s lacy underwear drawer or something of the sort. You know a game is going to be good when reviews on certain mainstream websites are falling over themselves to tell you how offended the reviewer is by the game’s content and desperately trying to peg otherwise positive attributes as negative. I mean, you shoot a guy with your gun and then what? He dies? And it’s on rails? What kind of on-rails shooter is this?

It’s pretty obvious in the jokes and presentation that the folks at He Saw don’t care one iota about the hurt feelings of the internet’s legion of failed journalists turned video game critics, and the developers push that angle at every possible moment. The story is told as an oddly delightful mashup of House of the Dead’s b-movie attitude and Deadpool’s inner monologue as the player character, the narrator, and the subtitles constantly push each other out of the way for attention. It had me laughing pretty hard at quite a few moments.

The story is told from two points of view, with Italian mobster Tony Luciano looking to rescue his girlfriend while ex-Navy Seal turned mercenary Clarence follows in his path and cleans up the messes he leaves behind. Their stories will take both characters to all sorts of goofy locations, from sewers to a wedding, a chicken factory that also serves as a battle arena, and a foggy graveyard to boot. Both characters have their personal flaws, Tony’s hair keeps getting in the way and Clarence stepped in Chihuahua pheromones and finds his leg the target for every horny Chihuahua in the tri-state area.

The whole game is narrated by the nasally voiced Roy Devine Jr., a man who is prone to go on nerdy tangents and regularly is cut off and muted by the apologetic FPS Authority text box. The actors all do a great job of sticking to their script, rarely breaking character and giving an authenticity that everyone in the game is right out of a Frank Miller drama. How seriously should you take this game? The first boss is a Kim Jong Un caricature with a not so secret fetish for wearing women’s underwear. He’s also a ninja because Korea or something and he happens to be friends with Dennis Rodman. Are you getting the satire now?

As an on-rails shooter, I enjoyed the fact that characters seem to have more versatility than your average game in the genre. You have your standard shoot, reload, etc. In House of the Dead, for instance, characters tend to stick to a rail of walking around on level ground and shooting. In Blue Estate, you’ll find yourself hanging upside down, sliding down rivers and mudslides, falling, hanging from rafters, and shooting bad (worse?) guys while your character does all sorts of slow motion acrobatics. The movement is all handled automatically, but it puts on a good show for the viewer and lets the developers do some stuff they wouldn’t normally be able to get away with in a standard shooter.

One area where Blue Estate hangs is in the gun department. Each level effectively provides the player’s pistol plus one limited-ammo weapon that is found along the way, usually an automatic machine gun or rifle. While a nice change, the pistol you are equipped with comes with unlimited ammunition and can already pop most enemies with one shot to the head, making the second gun more of a liability than a treat to be used wisely. There are a couple of guns that are actual detriments, a shotgun and a powerful hand cannon that hit more than their target and can kill a head shot streak and lower your score.

Blue Estate was a light gun game built with the Leap Motion in mind, a motion controller that you stick your hand in front of and use to control the game. From my understanding, Blue Estate works quite well with this controller, using your hand to swipe, aim, and shoot. I don’t own one of these, so I wound up substituting the control with my mouse and likely giving myself an unfair advantage. Enemies in the game operate as though you’re working on either a controller or motion controls, think first person shooters on mobile level of delay before they actually hit you, so if you’re going to play with a mouse I recommend cranking the difficulty up to give yourself a challenge.

Overall, Blue Estate is a nice return to the Grindhouse shooters that we haven’t really seen since House of the Dead: Overkill in 2009. It brings to the table ridiculous enemies, grossly over-the-top stereotypes, scantily clad women in varying degrees of undress, and a story that is very on the nose and throws all forms of subtlety out the window. Clocking in at about 3 or 4 hours for the main story, Blue Estate also includes an arcade mode to rack up points and get that much desired high score and achievements.

Fans of House of the Dead should lap this game right up. You can get it for $5 as part of the latest Bundle Stars package or for $12.99 on Steam. Alternately, console users can grab a copy on PS4 and Xbox One.

Final Score: A.

[NM] Lara Croft GO

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The GO series turned out to be a real surprise hit when Square Enix announced Hitman GO for iOS and Android way back in the far flung past of 2014. You could cut the skepticism for Hitman GO with a knife, a rather cynical look toward what was perceived as the first steps of a company taking its IP down the dark hole of low quality mobile ports.

Thankfully, we were all wrong.

Next to Hitman GO, Lara Croft GO is easily the most satisfying puzzle game in recent memory and will likely remain so at least until Deus Ex Go hits. For the purpose of the review, I played Lara Croft Go on a Surface Pro 4 purchased through the Windows Store. The game is regularly $4.99, but is currently on sale for $1.99 for the next few days (as of July 8th, 2016).

At its core, Lara Croft GO is a fairly simple turn-based puzzle game. Movement of Lara and the creatures that inhabit each level are confined to a grid, forcing the player to take advantage of hanging from walls, using pitfalls traps, moving columns, and thinking several steps ahead to fight her way to the end of each area.

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Creatures in each zone will kill you if you stand in front of them, and can only be killed from behind or the side, or from afar with very limited weaponry. As you get further into the game, these creatures also become part of the puzzle itself, to be strategically herded or pushed to perfectly time your own movements.

There is a tendency in Lara Croft GO to fake the player out when it comes to repetitive puzzle solving. For instance, one level of the game has you using a specific climbing trick in order to trap and kill a lizard in order to clear your path ahead. Directly after, you come across another lizard in what appears to be an identical puzzle. Your instinct is to use the same technique, and for a moment you think the developers got lazy. Then you get to the end of the level and realize that, no, you actually had to get the lizard to tail you so he could flip the switch at the right moment.

And that’s the genius of Lara Croft GO, every time you lose and have to reset you learn a little more about the game. Every failure tends to be accompanied with the recognition of what was done wrong, what step was missed, and how to get a little further the next time around. It also stands to how well thought out each puzzle is that the game lets you think you’ve outsmarted the developers just long enough to make it all the more embarrassing when the game knocks you down a peg.

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The slow paced nature of Lara Croft GO means that, no matter how difficult the puzzle, you always have plenty of time to take in the surroundings and plan your next course of action. For $5, it’s a steal that will last you a couple of afternoons, more so if you decide to hunt down all of the collectibles. Like most puzzle games, there isn’t much in the way of replayability.

Regardless, Lara Croft GO is a gem proving the potential of mobile gaming that leaves you begging for more.

Score: A+ – No regrets

Additional notes – I deliberately left out any mention of the in-app purchases since they are mostly useless. For $4.99 you can unlock the puzzle solutions, which is pointless because walkthroughs exist for free. The game also sells a $1.99 pack of 3 costumes, purely cosmetic and ultimately pointless.

Review: Dead Island Definitive Edition

Dead Island Definitive Edition is a perfect example of how bribery can turn a disinterested customer into a willing participant. Given my massive backlog of games to play and write about, I would normally have no interest in buying Dead Island again. On the other hand, owning both games on Steam meant bringing the price down to a measly $3 apiece. That I can get behind.

It’s been five years since Dead Island first emerged on PC and consoles, and I find it hard to believe that the gaming community has been clamoring for an HD remake. Dead Island and Riptide were a decent product that most of us played and moved on from, spending a bit of time in Escape From Dead Island and wholly ignoring the dumpster fire that was the Dead Island MOBA.

At this stage, remaking the original two games is likely just to satiate the base’s hunger while we wait for the perpetually delayed Dead Island 2.

If you want to sum up Dead Island in one sentence, imagine Borderlands and Far Cry had a love child. You play as one of several characters, each with their own weapon specialty, as they try to survive a zombie apocalypse on a tropical island. You’ll find and upgrade weapons, take missions, earn experience, and level up to put points into a skill tree.

If you like your games unfairly difficult, Dead Island is right up your alley. No matter how much you level up in Dead Island, your character always feels underpowered and ill-equipped. Weapons have the shelf life of a fruit fly, breaking constantly even after fully upgrading them and investing in perks that extend durability. Stamina, no matter how far you level up, is constantly an issue and will result in countless frustrating moments of being knocked to the ground and sitting through the painful process of waiting to stand back up.

The first person nature of Dead Island also plays poorly as a game that requires depth perception in order to properly survive. That, coupled with the fact that the game has clear issues with hit detection, can make it impossible to tell if you’re standing too far away to kick a zombie or if they are simply walking through your foot, because poor programming makes both an equal culprit.

Despite these complaints, Dead Island has its moments of greatness. The zombies themselves are still some of the best in the industry, disgusting creatures with various chunks of flesh ripped out of their bodies, exposing all sorts of organs. The shrieks that some of the zombies emit can be downright terrifying.

There is also a lot of humor to pull from Dead Island, whether intentional or not. Enemies knocked to the ground have a tendency to break limbs, and often their own necks, dying instantly and in rather silly fashion. In one moment, I threw my machete which embedded itself in the head of an approaching zombie. The zombie awkwardly fell, breaking his arm and killing him instantly.

The characters themselves are one-liner spewing robots, inconsiderate of their surroundings. In one mission, a man virtually on his death bed asked me to find and take care of his brother, a diabetic who desperately needed insulin. As I hit the “accept” button, Sam let out a loud and enthusiastic “well shit, why not?”

Weapons, when they are functioning as intended, are immensely satisfying. Sharp weapons have the ability to chop off limbs/decapitate while blunt weapons can break limbs. You’ll find blueprints and rare weapon drops that craft and wield melee weapons that can inflict elemental damage on zombies.

The difficulty hits the underdog gene that many gamers will identify, when the perceived lack of fairness is what motivates you to keep going, rather than to call your investment a loss and go back to whatever you were playing before.

Dead Island does suffer from death spiral, with every death siphoning a fair amount of money from your coffers. Considering how expensive everything in the game is, including the money sink to constantly repair your best weapons, a bad play session coupled with some unfair deaths is all it takes to drain both your in-game wallet and your desire to keep playing.

Ultimate, Dead Island Definitive Edition is a positive if mediocre experience. With all of its flaws, there is still a fair amount of fun to be had and I do not regret the $3 that I dropped on both titles. Leveling is ancillary to the zombie killing and trash weapons are constantly dropping to supplant the other items you use once your one or two decent items need to be repaired.

I would have liked to see more of Dead Island’s technical issues fixed in the remake, problems that feel like they could have been cleared in the original release with a couple more months of development. Several years later, the notion that Deep Silver worked on and re-released both titles without addressing those flaws is disappointing to say the least.

If you own Dead Island and Riptide on Steam, you have until August 1st to pick up the definitive editions of both titles for $3 apiece.

Rating: C – Mediocre

Impressions: Homefront The Revolution

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If there is a recent game that screams “rent me from Redbox for a day,” Homefront is that game. Not mind-numbing terrible, not jaw-dropping awesome. It’s competent, mostly, but has severe problems that might make you want to wait for a few weeks/months until they can be sorted out.

You have to feel sort of bad for the Korean People’s Army, this is the second game that they’ve been a major player in and they somehow manage to be even less competent than their counterparts in the first Homefront. In effect, Homefront tells the tale of an alternate reality where the Steve Jobs of the world isn’t an American hippy, but instead a North Korean who grows his business and not only takes over the tech industry but also becomes the world’s greatest weapons producer. We, naturally, become hooked on North Korean tech, from our smartphones to our weaponry. The United States, meanwhile, ignores all of its problems at home in favor of feeding its never ending desire for war in the middle east, eventually defaulting on its debts to Korea. In response, Korea “shuts off” all of the electronics in America and invades.

This is all you need to know on the “how seriously should I take the plot” meter, and it’s a very important frame of mind going forward to prevent yourself from asking potentially stupid questions like “in what universe would America become a major trader with Korea” or “why is this the second universe where the US is invaded and occupied yet none of our allies evidently tried to assist?” You have to sit back, partially shut your brain off, and recognize that this is a piece of fiction. Stuff will happen because the plot demands it, not because the writers have the capability or time to explain everything.

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One place where Homefront’s storytelling stood out to me is in the resistance aspect. Each zone has a number of chores you can take part in to win “hearts and minds,” (that’s what they call it) of the people, bringing them out of squalor and convincing them that now is the time to fight back. It’s actually pretty impressive to see the zones start out as desolate, depressing, and disillusioned and watch as people slowly begin protesting, culminating in all out riots and slaughtering police and collaborators. You also get to see the KPA become increasingly desperate to try and maintain order, as the public announcements become more aggressive and you start seeing liaisons and important figures popping up to boost support for occupying army.

As an open world game, Homefront mainly takes its cues from Far Cry 3 and 4. Apart from the story missions that help push the game along and act as a method of slowly handing you new weapons and gadgets, you’ll spend the rest of your time taking over territory, performing light jumping puzzles, and tuning radios to the resistance station. While the KPA doesn’t observe US sovereignty, evidently the new regime does abide by the Finders Keepers Accord of 1963, since the oppressive and far superior army won’t make any attempt to take back territory you’ve laid dibs to it. There are far more activities to complete than needed to liberate each zone and gain enough credits to unlock all of the upgrades, a welcome factor since they wear out like cheap sneakers.

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The weapon system in Homefront is a clear successor to that found in Crysis, where each weapon can be modified on the fly to either add on attachments or completely change the function of the gun. The modifications allow the game to take a small variety of guns and turn them into a crossbow, an uzi, a sniper, an assault rifle, a battle rifle, a pistol, rocket launcher, flamethrower, a couple types of shotguns, and more. My personal favorite, although not the most useful, is the freedom launcher, a grenade launcher that shoots red, white, and blue explosive fireworks. America.

The movement system in the game can be maddening at times, and rather helpful in others. The game lets you jump up to higher ledges, but you often have to be looking at exactly the right place and jump at exactly the right spot for it to register and pick you up. Other times, the game physically lifted my player up to a ledge that I had clearly missed by several feet. More often than not, I had troubles getting the game to recognize that the ledge I was jumping up to wasn’t too high, causing several deaths in the meantime. It’s a lot harder when you’re getting shot at.

Homefront: The Revolution has stealth mechanics, in theory. You spend the entirety of the game on the KPA’s hit list and, in one of their few displays of competence, all of the KPA soldiers have your face committed to memory or on display in their helmet hud if they have one. Civilians can be used as a buffer to take attention off of you as you walk the street, but there’s no point. Korean soldiers are so slow to recognize you that you could walk right past a group and round the corner before they even realize that you were there. The AI gets confused when you do crazy things like walk past a small tree or crouch behind a small rock, it stops thinking properly.

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But like the Zerg, the KPA has an extra ace up its sleeve. What your foe lacks in brains, he makes up for in quantity, and the longer you stick around the more soldiers will swarm on your position. Thankfully, or maybe not so much, death is but a mere distraction in Homefront. You lose your trinkets on death, pointless items that only serve to sell for money, and start at the nearest safe house with all of your progress intact.

There are a handful of serious technical problems that need to be addressed. Right now Homefront has this obnoxious little tick where it stalls for upwards of five or six seconds before catching up with itself every time the game auto-saves. Earlier on this isn’t as much of a problem, auto-saves only occur in safe houses. Later on, however, when Homefront starts auto-saving in the middle of firefights, then you start dying. I also noticed a major issue where enemies and allies would blink in and out of existence. A heavy KPA soldier was barreling toward me and just disappeared.

The multiplayer in Homefront is nothing to write home about. A handful of cooperative maps that pit four players against the KPA in a series of objectives. You level up through missions, gaining access to more gear and cooler cosmetics, but that’s it. The original Homefront’s multiplayer was a disappointing Call of Duty clone, this one feels more like a disappointing Left 4 Dead total conversion mod.

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The final words of Homefront, a note from the game director, shine a light on a positive future. We’re not finished yet, he says. There are several expansions coming over the next year, adding new zones and more content to the single player campaign. I’ll probably actually buy the game at some point in the meantime, but after finishing the campaign in two days and having no interest in going back to do more chores or playing the multiplayer, I’d say that this is worth a two day Redbox rental. Six bucks, no regrets.

I’m glad I played it, all things considered.

Beta Perspective: I Can’t Heap Enough Praise On Overwatch

I don’t think a lot of people had much faith in Overwatch when we first heard of it, after all consider the circumstances. Blizzard just got done telling us that their MMO Titan was being canned because it wasn’t fun, but that the remains of the title would be stitched together in a Frankenstein’s monster-like fashion to create a new game. It makes you wonder what exactly Titan was, and why it sucked.

Functionally, Overwatch is what would happen if Team Fortress 2 and a MOBA made love and had a child. It is a 6v6 first person shooter with a massive cast of unique characters on numerous themed maps over several game modes. Rather than Team Fortress 2’s nine classes, Overwatch currently provides 21, split into four groups (offense, defense, tank, and support).

A Team Fortress 2 player would find themselves much at home in Overwatch. You have Pharah as the soldier with her rocket launcher and rocket jump ability, Torbjorn as the engineer capable of building and upgrading an automatic turret, Widowmaker as the sniper, Mercy as the medic with her medigun, D.Va as the heavy, Tracer as the scout, Junkrat as the demoman, and probably Winston as the pyro. There isn’t really an equivalent of the spy, the TF2 character that can disguise and go invisible.

Even Call of Duty fans have a dedicated character in Soldier 76, a hero who carries an automatic rifle that alt-fires rockets.

Even within each category, the characters vary pretty wildly and have a number of uses. In support, for instance, Mercy isn’t just a follow-and-heal character. While useless in combat, her staff can heal and it can also boost damage, while her ultimate ability can be used to resurrect characters on the spot. Lucio, on the other hand, is capable of using his offensive weapon to damage enemies or to knock them around. His Crossfade ability can regenerate health or amplify movement speed. Symmetry has a weapon that builds damage the longer it connects, while her sentry turret slows enemy movement.

But it still doesn’t reduce the versatility of characters. Even non-support characters have healing powers that vary from simply boosting oneself to providing area of effect healing and shield. They give every character the potential to just massacre the enemy team, regardless of their type. Roadhog, for instance, already being a tank with ridiculous defense and health, can bring enemies in close and then utilize an ability to heal himself. Widowmaker, with her sniper rifle and ability to scale to higher places, can be absolutely devastating in the hands of a sharpshooter.

The increase in characters allows for some devastating combinations. If you’ve looked up videos on Overwatch, you’ve probably seen the combo where Bastion (a giant robot) transforms into his stationary turret mode on the Payload objective and just mows down people while Reinhardt (a tank character) protects him with his shield.

There are three game modes planned for launch as well as a hybrid mode. Escort has one team escorting a payload while the other team runs down the clock. Assault has an attacking team trying to capture control points while the defending team tries to run down the clock. Control has both teams fight over control of capture points which control adds to a meter which, when full, ends the round. Hybrid starts out as assault and eventually becomes escort.

More updates are planned after launch, obviously, including new heroes and new maps, as well as new game modes. If there’s one thing you can expect from Blizzard, it is that the Overwatch that exists a couple of years from now will be massive in comparison to what we get at launch.

The only real downside of the beta so far is the prevalence of matchmaking throwing you into a guaranteed loss about twenty seconds before the match ends. It’s an inevitability in any game that has matchmaking, and Blizzard has alleviated the frustration by making it so you do not gain a loss if you backfill a match, however you can score a win if your team is victorious. It’s relatively simple functions like these that Blizzard is known to put in their games to make them a bit more fair.

It is a testament to these games when you can do poorly without going full tilt, even though the nature of the game demands a balanced team and I’ve had a few moments of shouting obscenities at my computer because my team was attacking on an escort map and my team just would not stop camping in their own spawn area or those public games when your team throws the game away because three members just wanted to be snipers. The game gives suggestions based on your team, but it doesn’t force you to pick a balanced list of characters so if you have a team of tanks and the enemy team is balanced, you’re screwed.

I see massive eSports potential from Overwatch, just from the litany of gifs showing up online. There are already tournaments planned, and hopefully Blizzard adds spectating tools in the same with Valve has with Counter Strike: GO, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2. I can’t wait for the full launch of Overwatch. If you haven’t gotten into the game yet, the beta was extended until May 10th mid-afternoon EST. Even if you can only get a few games in, I wholeheartedly recommend it. It’s been a long time since I’ve come out of a game this positive.

The game will also make a killing out of the loot system. Basically you have an overall level that is functionally meaningless, but every time you level up from experience gained in each round you get a loot box that is full of random skins, victory poses, sprays, etc. When the game goes live, you’ll be able to buy them with credits as well. Longer play sessions can lead to better experience gains, since you get a boost from staying in a match through successive rounds. You’ll also apparently be able to toss away the stuff you don’t want for credits to eventually earn the stuff you do want.

I never tell my audience outright to spend money on a game just because I told you I liked it, so I really recommend getting into the beta while it is still live.

MMOments: Blade & Soul

Blade & Soul is one of those games that we’ve been impatiently waiting to come westward for a few years now, and like any game that we are regularly told we can’t have, the hype train has gotten out of hand at one point or another. I think that the majority of gamers saw NCSoft’s “you can’t have this yet” attitude and recognized it as an issue of lengthy localization rather than an evil corporation withholding the greatest creation since sliced bread, but you know that there is someone out there that took the lengthy development delay as a sign that the game was being advertised as the second coming of Jesus.

If there is one thing you can expect from Korean MMOs it is that character features will be exaggerated and heavily sexualized, so naturally I created my character was created with the kind of booty you could rest a stereo on. I’m not entirely sure if the gliding and camera controls exist primarily to serve for gratuitous panty shots, but I’m not willing to rule it out at this time. Also, you should expect that all of the female characters have breasts that more closely resemble free hanging piles of Jello brand gelatin than actual human flesh, bouncing and bobbing with every small breeze.

That said, there are a lot of options for the character creator, honestly you could spend hours working on every little detail of your character’s physique.

The characters of Blade & Soul are rather charming, even though I can’t remember their names and they have a tendency to die ala Game of Thrones not long after you meet them. Still, the characters are drawn from the anime school of ridiculous features, like the grandpa dog, the obnoxious kid who takes credit for everything, and whatever this is. The world looks beautiful, even with the parade of very well oiled men and women running about, reminiscent of a higher quality TERA or a more polished looking ArcheAge.

Combat in Blade & Soul is well paced, relying equally on mouse clicks and key presses. Your left mouse button is tied to a resource building attack while the right mouse button uses said resources. As you level up, you start to be able to use combos like, in the case of my sword-wielding character, knocking your opponent to the ground and stomping them while they are down. The rate at which you learn new techniques is just slow enough that you’ve mastered the previous lesson by the time the game is ready to teach you something new. It’s spaced out enough so that the player doesn’t get overwhelmed but (at least in the opening acts) hopefully doesn’t feel like the combat is growing stagnant.

The game throws in little things that keep the game flowing, like enemies that randomly drop bombs that can be used to take out or stun another mob. Ultimately, however, this is your standard MMO fare: You go into a village, take a bunch of quests, complete those quests, then move on to the next village. In no sense does the game feel like an open world, with players being ushered down what is effectively a single hallway ala Final Fantasy XIII, with a few dungeons hanging off to the side.

What impressed me is how the game handles equipment. For starters, your beginner weapon is supposed to stay with you for most, if not all of the game. Imagine the upgradeable epic weapons you get during end-game raids in other MMOs, and then picture getting that weapon right from the start. The weapons that you pick up along the way are more useful as upgrade materials. In addition, there isn’t much of an equipment selection. Instead of grinding for your usual selection of gloves, boots, legs, chest, and head pieces, you’ll gather accessories and soul shards. Soul shards come in one shape and fit into a wheel, offering various stat bonuses. Complete a wheel with a single soul shard set and you’ll unlock even more powerful bonuses.

One small feature that I find myself appreciating is on logout, where the game tells you exactly what you’ve accomplished during that play session. It isn’t a major feature by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a handy tool nonetheless. You also have access to a “daily dash,” a board game of sorts where you spin a wheel and obtain items the further you get. It appears to reset every month, and falls into the Korean MMO trope of throwing shinies at the player to keep them going.

Now let’s get to some grievances. Blade & Soul is heavily instanced, with areas separated by portals that cause the game to hiccup whenever you pass through. While the drastic changes that some areas go through between and following quests are nice, it serves to highlight just how linear the game is, and how ultimately unimportant and forgettable each zone is, almost as if each one is an episode of a serialized anime.

The most obvious and present issue with Blade & Soul is the constant, endless, gold spam. The fact that it is insanely present on a Korean import title doesn’t surprise me, nor does NCSoft’s complete ineptitude at combating said spam despite operating MMOs for nearly twenty years. I would be less harsh were it not for the fact that Blade & Soul launched in 2012, yet still hasn’t figured out the most basic of bot protections. Let’s go over a few, shall we?

Severe limitations on chat for new/free accounts.
Level limitations on global chat channels.
A filter that can detect when the same message is being repeated across multiple accounts.
Safeguards at account creation that would prevent mass throwaway accounts.
A limitation on how often characters can be created/deleted.
A cooldown on sending messages to global chat channels.
Banning the use of proxies.
Banning Chinese IP addresses.
Making ignores account-wide instead of character-specific.
Having actual customer support.
The ability to easily report people in chat.

And finally, you need to squash the shit early, pardon my language, and start banning some Twitch streamers. Allowing popular streamers like Reckful to partner with illegal gold farming websites and make money off of a community form of cancer will do nothing but push away customers and make your company look feckless and corrupt. Generally I wouldn’t harp on gold spam in a game this close to launch, but Blade & Soul has had years to figure this stuff out and yet the spam is worse than pretty much any other MMO that I have ever played.

There is still a lot of ground to break in Blade & Soul, which I intend to do in the coming weeks. Despite the negative stuff I’ve said, the stuff that sets Blade & Soul apart, like how the game deals with loot and upgrading equipment, is keeping me playing.

MMOments: Deadman Is DarkScape Plus Punishment

Deadman Mode is DarkScape plus punishment, a statement that should be instantly endearing to anyone who tried out the RS3 mode and found it too accommodating to rushers and griefers. If you’re looking for Old School RuneScape with more rogue-like features, this is the place to be. If you’re not willing to lose a lot, and I do mean a lot, whenever you die, well there are other versions of RuneScape available to you.

It’s interesting to think of Deadman Mode as something that is hardcore in theory, not so much in practice. On paper, the game sounds devastating: Lose your inventory plus 28 of your most valuable stacks of items in the bank, plus 50% experience in all of your unprotected skills. And it is, death in Deadman is punishing in a way that only a masochist can love. But that, ultimately, is what seems to be preventing the game from becoming a grief-fest.

In DarkScape, a player with a decent stock of weapons can go around harassing players to no end and not end up risking anything. Griefing in Deadman means being willing to lose everything, and while I have seen a few players already throwing major tantrums and trying to harass other players, they quickly found themselves unequipped and powerless. Also unlike in DarkScape, it takes 30 minutes for a skull to disappear and players do not receive a skull when attacking a skull’d player. The entire world is open combat (3-126) and guards are level 1337. This makes attacking another player a massive risk, you basically become a target for EVERYONE who will kill you without a second thought.

To help you along, Deadman offers accelerated progression in the form of five times the usual amount of experience. What does this mean? At least in the early levels, the only thing getting in the way of your leveling will be the fact that you’re clicking through level up messages too often. Players are also able to store ten non-stackable, tradeable, items in a keepsake box that will remain safe if someone kills you and steals your stuff. You can’t store your cash, but you can store important items.

We’ll have to see how well Jagex can moderate the game, what with the company doubling down on its policy of not allowing mule accounts. There is also no grand exchange, making the accelerated progression all the more important because it will be easier to mass produce equipment or farm bosses sooner.

As with DarkScape, Deadman will change over time based on player feedback and (since this is Old School) anything approved by the community. Right now the community is voting in approval of changing non-skulled experience loss from 50% to 25%, as well as hitpoint insurance that will allow players to buy a minimum hitpoint level and the ability to separate left-click attacks on players and npcs. Currently up for vote but not approved (so far) are changes to team capes, the removal of the wilderness ditch, and reducing the skull timer.

So far, Deadman is turning out to be exactly what people wanted from DarkScape, not to mention being set in Old School. I hope to keep covering this game for a long time to come.

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