Tag: Preview

Beta Perspective: Realm Royale On Playstation 4


I’ve been spending most of my PS4 time over the past couple of months playing H1Z1 and now Realm Royale, and I have to say I find the Battle Royale genre far more enjoyable on the consoles than on PC. Maybe it’s because of the rampant cheating on PC, maybe it’s because I’m 30 and my reflexes just don’t hold up on a platform where the base can shoot a hair off of a fly from two miles away. Regardless, I’m enjoying myself.

Realm Royale is Hi-Rez Studios loading the style and gameplay elements of Paladins into a cannon and firing it at PUBG. While the base gameplay elements will be familiar to those who have played other games in the genre, Realm Royale is carving a niche all of its own. On the familiar side, you have up to 100 players jumping from a flying bus on to a giant island where they must battle either alone or part of teams in order to be the last person/team standing. Each player starts with a melee weapon and must scrounge around for better quality items so that they may rain down death upon whoever happens to get in their crosshair.

I haven’t played Realm Royale on PC in about a year, so my knowledge of that version is too far out of date to make comparisons. While the base concept is the same, Realm Royale has quite a bit that sets it apart from the competition in terms of meta gaming and quality of life features.

Before the round begins, the first thing you’ll do is choose a class. There are four classes, each with their own perks and weaknesses, such as the assassin gaining 300 health on each kill and the warrior having a higher maximum health and dealing more damage with melee weapons. Each round in Realm Royale starts with you jumping out of the bus and careening down to a spot of your choosing. The goal from here on out is a prolonged arms race in which you travel about the countryside, opening chests, grabbing weapons, and murdering anyone who happens to cross paths. As time progresses, a circle of fog gradually encircles the map, restricting the play field until one person is left standing.

One quality of life feature I like about Realm Royale is that everyone has a mount, accessible with a simple d-pad click. In games like H1Z1 where your starting location is predetermined, it’s possible to get screwed because the game stuck you in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the map with little access to weapons or transportation, leaving you to spend the round just barely keeping ahead of the fog if at all. In Realm Royale, you always have the ability to get where you need to go and fast, and the map is populated enough that you’ll have no problem amassing an arsenal. The balance to this convenience is that you can be knocked off the mount with a single hit.

In addition to your pistols, rifles, shotguns, and magic staffs, player power is also strengthened by picking up various runes and powers scattered around the world. Powers can vary in usefulness, such as one that turns you invisible for a short period of time, one that grants temporary flight, concussion grenades, incendiary grenades, shields, health, etc. Runes, meanwhile, are passive powers that can give you a hell of an advantage on the field, offering perks like regenerating shields, making survival as a chicken easier, and resisting knockback.

Even death in Realm Royale is handled differently. Most battle royale games have a knock-down mechanic in squad modes, where you aren’t instantly killed but instead are knocked out and can be revived by a teammate. In Realm Royale, losing your HP (even in solo) means turning into a chicken that can run and jump around. If you manage to survive until the timer hits zero, you’ll get back into the fight with a certain amount of health. If you are killed as a chicken, or you get turned three times, you’re out of the match. Certain runes found during gameplay can increase your speed, your health, and decrease the timer while in chicken mode, giving survival a strategy all on its own.

The benefit of this is that you rarely get that sudden game over that accompanies other similar titles just because someone with an epic sniper rifle managed to blow your head off through an open window. It also makes encounters with multiple people all the more dangerous, as you can be easily popped while chasing after the player you’ve just chickened, or similarly being the first to go down may present an opportunity to escape and recuperate while everyone turns the guns on each other.

Another thing Realm Royale has going for it is the ability to break down weapons you come across and use shards at forges to craft new items. The catch is that each forge can craft one of each category: health, armor, weapon, runes, ability, and revival (squad mode) so you can’t amass shards and use them to bulk up on potions. The crafting forge takes time and makes sound, which can mast incoming players. It also displays a timer that can be seen by other people, so you can tell when someone is waiting inside. You don’t need to be physically near the forge in order for the time to count down, so you can easily start the queue and hop off to a vantage point to stay safe.

There are also nuggets that you’ll find by looting chests, killing players, and making rank. Nuggets are the in-game currency for Realm Royale, usable to buy cosmetics from the in-game shop. Gaining generally less than a dozen per game, and considering that most rewards are in the realm of thousands of nuggets, it’s a feature that isn’t even worth paying attention to.

I do like that Realm Royale’s battle pass seems to be very easy to level up, I have personally managed one level about every 1-2 matches, but that the game also rewards you with crowns. The first battle pass costs 750 crowns and can reward about 1,100 crowns if you manage to level it up all the way. By this logic, it should be possible to heavily discount or get the next pass completely free, depending on how many crowns you obtain during the course of the season.

The season does not indicate when it ends, however, or if crowns can be used for the next season. I contact Hi-Rez about these details and have not received an answer.

One aspect of Realm Royale I find odd is the inclusion of bot players, mostly because they aren’t indicated as such and Hi-Rez to my understanding and research doesn’t acknowledge their presence in the game. I’ve been playing shooters for more than twenty years, I can generally recognize when a game is using bots by their very obvious behavior. Realm Royale is clearly using bots, as I was able to repeatedly confuse bots causing them to go into animation loops or completely break, being unable to properly walk through a door or constantly moving back and forth on the same spot of land making movements that a normal player shouldn’t be capable of.

Let me be clear on this: I’m not against bots being in a battle royale game, I just find Hi-Rez’s actions surrounding their implementation to be strange. I reached out to Hi-Rez for an official comment and despite stating that I would receive an answer over a week ago, I have not. I will update this piece if I do receive a comment on the season pass questions or regarding bots.

My only real gripe with Realm Royale right now is in relation to a certain unbalanced pistol that can be found/crafted in-game. The poison/fire pistol is severely unbalanced, extremely powerful, and can basically win you a match. The weapon is trash and going up against anyone with one is guaranteed to ruin your mood.

Early Access: Battle Royale Survivors Is Lazy Dreck


I had to give Battle Royale: Survivors a look, it just had to be done.

Battle Royale: Survivors is the latest in the long line of developers jumping on the PUBG bandwagon and if you’re thinking that this game looks like a twinstick shovelware title built off of the Unity engine, well you’re right on two of the three points. Survivors isn’t a twinstick game, although it would be a much higher quality product if it were. What it is is a shovelware title built on Unity that hopes to piggyback on an existing trend.

Survivors launched into early access on June 18, by which I of course mean that the game launched riddled with bugs and unfinished features, but a functioning cash shop where you can purchase money packs up to the best offer at $24.99. Cash can be swapped for TK, the in-game currency, at a base rate of 2,000TK per $1 USD, meaning the loot boxes run for between $2.50-$3.50 apiece, plus an extra dollar for keys for the higher two options. Additional characters will run you nearly 10k TK, or $5 give or take. Alternately you can grind TK through the games at such a snail’s pace that the game will become unbearable long before you even get close to unlocking your first crate.

Unfortunately the cash shop won’t be able to save a game that is currently sitting at barely enough players to fill up a quarter of a standard battle royale match, and I sit here waiting for my latest match to hit the bare minimum ten players needed to get started.

I’ve already noted that Survivors is not a twin stick shooter, but this is important because the isometric camera might have suggested otherwise. In this game you move with the WASD keys and your character attacks where your are pointed. This leads to shooting mechanics that are so poorly handled and controlled that I found myself constantly coming in the top 3 simply running around in the open with some sort of melee weapon and zerging out my enemies.

Shooting mechanics in Survivors are worthless, to the point where holding a weapon is a detriment in many situations. You can hold the right mouse button to aim, but you move so slow and the aiming itself is so wonky that anyone can run up behind you and start whacking away with a baseball bat, the janky controls and laggy nature of the game allowing them to just jolt left and right while you fumble and try to hit them. In addition, weapons are stupidly underpowered to the point of being useless in their own right.

Which isn’t to say that this title has zero good ideas. The idea to implement fog of war makes it possible to sneak up on people, and the wonky controls actually make it a viable strategy because you can’t really easily keep a 360 degree view on your surroundings. Unfortunately, that’s it. It’s the spicy dijon mustard in the dog food sandwich.

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But I call this game lazy because that is exactly what it is. Hastily cobbled together on Unity to throw into early access and hope that people pay far more than the game is worth for the simple act of changing your default character. Nowhere else is this idea of laziness more blatant than the massive buildings that will block your view and make huge swaths of the map impossible to interact with.

If Survivors became a twin-stick shooter, where your character faced the mouse and you had a reticle, the game would be 25% better. Otherwise, right now this game feels like yet another cheap, lazy, unity-based shovelware title. One where the game conveniently tells you to shove off after you complete a match and doesn’t let you continue playing. Really, it’s for your own good.

Beta Perspective: H1Z1 On PS4


I’ve been trying to put my finger on why I am enjoying H1Z1 on the Playstation 4. Is it the graphics? No, those are relatively standard for a game of this style and mostly subpar in the greater scheme of the Playstation. Is it the streamlined controls and faster paced action than its PC counterpart? We’re probably getting closer. Is it the fact that I can get through a match, kill seven people, and actually have a fleeting shot of winning? Absolutely.

Competence goes a long way toward enjoyment.

H1Z1 is a battle royale game from Daybreak Game Company, originally released on PC and now ported over to PS4 sans its survival mode counterpart. The PS4 version down to its fundamentals is a port of the PC copy but with a lot of the intricacies stripped out. Gone is crafting, your inventory, weapon attachments, and more. What’s left is a survival mode shooter that will likely make you happy that the game isn’t pulling such complicated systems in a rather fast paced game and handing you a controller to fumble your way through it.

For those of you who have managed to avoid this genre, I’ll go over the details: H1Z1 throws up to 100 players on to an island littered with weapons, armor, and vehicles and has them battle it out to the last remaining survivor. You and 99 players are essentially thrown into an arms race where you try to build up your offensive and defensive power by raiding the numerous towns, houses, and camps that litter the landscape. As the match progresses the playable area gets smaller as a toxic gas slowly encroaches upon players. This ultimately leads to each map starting of slow, watching players get picked off, and ending with just a massacre of the remaining players as they all get grouped up into the last remaining safe spaces.

As a genre, the battle royale game mode is all about your experiences and how you experience the game is directly related to whether or not you enjoy it, and how much. Combat is fleeting so there tends to be more memorable moments of survival or failure, like the time I hunkered down in a gas station and wound up taking out six players before being forced out by the toxic gas, or the time I parachuted into the world only to immediately have my brains blown out by some guy who found a pistol seconds before I did. Victory, while likely more common in group games, always seems to have a memorable story behind it of you and the other last remaining dude or dudette battling it out in the toxic fog.

Controls and handling in H1Z1 is pretty unique compared to other shooters on the platform. Guns are tight and control pretty much how you would expect for a third person shooter, but vehicle handling is all over the place thanks to a rather wonky physics system. You’ll be spending a fair amount of time driving in a vehicle, so getting used to the loose turning is going to be necessary for survival.

What makes the gunplay so special in H1Z1 is that the game is very straight forward in how it plays. There is a large enough variety that you’ll inevitably find your favorite close and long range weapons, but basic enough that you’ll figure out what each weapon does within the first few games. Weapons are familiar enough that you’ll know how they work: Pistols can shoot faster but do less damage, or slower and be more powerful. Shotguns are killer at close range while SMGs shoot fast to make up for their lack of punch. The only wacky weapon that H1Z1 really has to offer is the crossbow that shoots explosive arrows, great for area of effect damage or destroying a moving vehicle.

Equipment you pick up is also huge for your survival. You will find basic helmets and makeshift armor everywhere, with higher end military gear available only from caches that dot the landscape. You can also find backpacks that let you carry more weapons and combat boots that let you run faster.

Microtransactions come down to cosmetics which in turn act sort of weird. You can buy gold and then spend said gold on loot crates or earn them through gameplay, and those crates in turn unlock cosmetics for various weapons/equipment that effectively override your current default. How does this work in a game where your items are all found throughout the world? I’m glad you asked. When you equip said item, the look gets overridden to your default. Simple as.

End of the day, I feel like H1Z1 is a game that people will either hate or they will love, until they hit three bad games in a row of dying within three minutes of landing, and log off to stop themselves from angrily throwing their controller through the television, and come online to finish the beta review that they should have done two days ago.

Unless that’s just me.

[Not Massive] Preview: Ion Maiden Plugs Old School Into New School


Ion Storm is the perfect level of ridiculous to be almost believable. Imagine for a moment that in 2018 I’m trying to tell you that 3D Realms is not only releasing a new game, but it is a first person shooter on the Build Engine starring a character who is essentially Duke Nukem’s lady alternate.

In a world where crispy M&M’s, French Toast Crunch, and Jumanji are all making a comeback, it only stands to reason that a shooter actually built out of a twenty year old engine would be eaten up like, well, crispy M&M’s. Ion Maiden is currently in early access on Steam with an anticipated release date of later this year, and people are loving it. It currently holds a 97% approval rating and clocks in at a hard drive busting thirty two megabytes.

Without a doubt, Ion Maiden is the Duke Nukem game we all wished had released instead of the depressing episode that was Duke Nukem Forever, and likely evidence that 3D Realms might still have the Duke rights if George Broussard hadn’t catapulted his company into the sun in the pursuit of fancier game engines. Everything you’d want from a Duke Nukem iteration is in Ion Maiden from the fast paced gun action to the cheesy one liners, pop culture references, and maze-like maps with tons of hidden areas.

The Build Engine has been modified and upgraded throughout the years to include a 3D renderer and be capable of showing off really good looking sprites. Those of you who don’t wax poetic about the virtues of 90’s shooters might not find the aesthetics as appealing, considering anything and everything in the world is a two dimensional sprite that moves its orientation to face you no matter how quickly you circle around it. Still, 3D Realms has created nothing short of magic with this engine since it debuted in 1997, and while it may not impress anyone with its graphical fidelity, it is by no means simple.

It’s especially impressive when you consider that the Build Engine isn’t technically 3D, it just tricks you into thinking it is.

Right now there is only a sample campaign available that should take you about an hour to finish and a hell of a lot more time if you decide to try and track down every one of the campaign’s dozens of secret areas. There are only a handful of enemies and the preview is rather short, so I can’t fault anyone for simply waiting until the full game comes out later this year especially since it’ll still be a cheap $20.

Early Access: Tower Of Time Hands On Impressions


Tower of Time is hoping to continue the legacy of games like Baldur’s Gate and so far my time with the early access version has proven it a worthy successor. It strikes me as exactly the kind of title that hardcore RPG enthusiasts would be happy to get their hands on, the combination of strategic gameplay, stat building, and a so far compelling story that’ll have you up until two in the morning trying to figure out the best builds for your characters.

In short, this game is pretty fun, and it’s also tough as hell.

Rather than trying to go over every aspect of the game in this preview, I want to discuss the meat and potatoes of Tower of Time, that being its combat encounters. I find myself rather impressed by the fact that a game where you’re not directly controlling your characters requires as much attention to be paid as this game does. While you don’t control your character’s standard attacks, you do direct them around the field of combat and activate their special abilities when necessary.

Combat in Tower of Time is very heavily reliant on line of sight mechanics, with battles easily won and lost based on how you position your characters and keep them working with each other. Kane is the party tank, able to raise walls and absorb damage while your other party members pepper the enemy with attacks. Maeve is a marksman, high on damage but low on defense abilities. Aeric is a druid, able to summon an ent and more adept at party healing than Kane.

There are also plenty of ways to customize your characters, and you’ll need to be paying attention to the deficits in your team in order to properly build in response to them. For instance, I upgraded Maeve’s arrows with the ability to inflict blindness, making Tower of Time one of the few games in which casting blindness on NPCs is useful. Blind is great in this game because combat encounters at least early on have a habit of throwing wraiths at you which cast an ongoing life drain as long as they have line of sight. Now Kane’s wall can break this line of sight, but it can easily just push some enemies into attacking the more vulnerable characters. By giving Maeve the ability to blind them, I could very quickly put a stop to multiple life drains.

In a sense, you can think of each match like its own tower defense mini-game, like a puzzle of sorts where you need to carefully move your pieces around the board to handle each threat as it appears. For me this has basically come down to getting my ass handed to me on a silver platter in some matches a couple of times before I figure out the best way to maneuver my characters around. Arrow Time, Tower of Time’s branded bullet time effect, is both helpful and necessary to keep the action from getting overwhelming, not to mention handy in keeping track of who is targeting who (seen above).

You’ll have the opportunity to bring on more companions, up to seven from the looks of the roster, but the few hours I’ve spent in the game so far have only given me access to three. Presumably if I play the game as intended and put more time into crafting/enchanting gear using the available facilities in town.

I look forward to diving further into Tower of Time.

Exclusive: Middle Earth Shadow of War Preview


Middle Earth: Shadow of War is the long awaited sequel to Shadow of Mordor, a highly rated open world fighter that takes place in everyone’s favorite land of Mordor. Players once again control of Talion as he forges a new ring of power and attempts to keep control of it for use in the war against Sauron and his forces of darkness. The game doesn’t officially launch until October 10, but it just so happens that I was in the store and they miraculously had a copy on the shelf already. I couldn’t pass up this opportunity for an exclusive review, so I took it.

The more I play this, the more I’m pretty sure that this is an unreleased prototype spinoff, possibly taking place in between the first two games. My local store had a copy called the Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition, and frankly within ten minutes I could tell that this would revolutionize gaming as a medium. To start, the special edition was clearly mislabeled and thus rang up for about $4 at the counter. The cashier didn’t seem to care that I was getting this product more than a month early.

And I know what you nerds are going to say: Why focus on Pepperoni as a character when she was such a minuscule factor in the books and never made it into the movies? Look, I love Lord of the Rings just as much as any of you do, likely a lot more. I’ve read the books literally three thousand times each, and I’ve been waiting what feels like decades for the Tolkein Estate to finally release the rights to Pepperoni for her own game. In fact, just the idea that pervasive sexists are fighting so hard against her appearance as a lead character should be all the evidence the Warner Bros needs to put her front and center.

The most surprising thing of Shadow of War’s Pepperoni spinoff is that it not only isn’t compatible with any of the current gen systems. Instead, Pepperoni Edition is compatible with most microwaves and convection ovens. It does contain a code for 100 coins in the main game, however. The cashier told me that this game doesn’t play as well on the microwave, so for the ultimate experience I went with my trusty convection oven. After a quick 10 minute installation process at 400 degrees, I was ready to go.

Let’s get into Pepperoni as a character in Shadow of War. It’s nice to see Warner Bros. finally giving us a gritty female character, one with a tough, crispy outer shell that actually hides a rather saucy personality underneath. We see a character that is both sweet and a bit tart, always ready to help when called. The dialogue can get a little cheesy in parts and it lacked a really meaty ending, but overall the presentation is one that you can really sink your teeth into.

While her motivations aren’t as in your face as, say, Talion wanting to survive and destroy Sauron in the main game, it’s pretty clear from the get go that Pepperoni is all about sustaining the survivors still hiding within Mordor. She wants to enrich life back into the lands via copious amounts of iron and protein. The game really goes far to show the gritty, greasy reality of life in Mordor and while I wouldn’t exactly call this game “profane,” it is dirty enough that you will literally need some napkins in order to walk out with your hands clean. Perhaps some wet naps.

The delivery method of Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition is going to irk some customers. The idea of games slowly becoming more of a service than a product has become more popular over time, but this is the first game made entirely out of consumables. The box came with 40 consumables that must be individually installed, of which I used a baker’s dozen for this review. Now I can see why this cost $4 at the store, most will beat it in less than a week while hardcore games can probably get through it in a day. I did severely burn my mouth on the first three consumables, but that’s the cost of games journalism.

There is little doubt in my mind that this review is going to get slammed on social media because “oh it’s not a real game,” and “oh Connor you don’t know what a real game is, you’re not a real games journalist.” Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition doesn’t cater to the ‘hardcore gamer,’ the unemployed basement dweller who has all the time in the world to memorize button combinations. You don’t need quick reflexes to play this game well, nor do you need to memorize insane codes or find secret areas. Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition can be played both solo or co-op/competitive, but there is no online option.

MMO Fallout Verdict: 4.5/5 – Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition is a welcome spinoff of presumably a great game. It’s simple to install, engaging to play, and features a filled out protagonist with clear cut motivations. Will it win the hearts and minds of hardcore gamers? No, but the general public will find something to love in Pepperoni’s cheesiness. 

Guild Wars 2 Expansion Weekend Is Live


Arenanet has officially launched the second preview weekend for Guild Wars 2’s next expansion, Path of Fire. You don’t need to have pre-ordered to get in on the action either, as any active account can join in on the festivities. Players will be able to take part in the demo until Sunday, August 20.

To participate, go to the Character Select screen and choose the option to create a demo character. If you don’t have a Guild Wars 2 account, register now to play for free.

MMOments: RuneScape Menaphos Details


Menaphos is the first expansion to RuneScape, a series of massive updates that are set to release every three months. While the content drops on the live servers today, MMO Fallout was invited to preview some of the changes last week, and the new content looks pretty exciting. As I have mentioned in previous update teasers, it’s been a while since Menaphos was first revealed to the public: Twelve years in fact, it’s like Boyhood but with a lot less growing up and a lot more angry desert deities. The city of Menaphos was first added to the map on April 26, 2005.

But players couldn’t get in. While its sister city Sophanem became available, Menaphos immediately closed its doors to outsiders amid rumors of corrupt leadership and stayed that way, for twelve years. In that time, players have come in contact with numerous desert deities, learned new magics, and assisted in god-tier sibling rivalries. Now, the cruel Pharaoh has reopened the doors and adventurers are flooding in to see what secrets the city holds.

You may be asking at this point: How is RuneScape sixteen years old and is only releasing its first expansion now? For the better part of that time, Jagex has been releasing content updates on a weekly basis with various major updates every year to add in new skills, update the game engine, and more. Last year Jagex polled players on whether they would like to continue the current system of trickling updates out on a weekly basis or release major content packs every three months. Players chose the latter, and here we are.

Content in Menaphos is targeted towards mid to high level players, although most players will find something to do after completing the three pre-requisite quests. The city itself is divided into four areas, with access to everything from a Grand Exchange, new skilling areas, a merchant area to steal from, and more. Each of the four areas has its own reputation system, and while it is possible for the more dedicated gamer to maximize his rank in all four areas, Jagex told me during the preview that it will take some time and most players will just focus on one or two factions.

The centerpiece to Menaphos is the giant pyramid around which the city goes about its daily life. Inside that tomb you can find the Grand Library which will be comprised of stories submitted to Jagex by the player base. As massive as the library is, we were told that so many players had submitted quality stories that Jagex is having a hard time fitting them into the game!

Shifting Tombs is a randomized dungeon crawler with procedurally generated tombs and monsters. Players have a set amount of time to plunder the dungeon, gathering as much loot as possible while still making it to the end and escaping within the time limit. Personally, I’m looking forward to meeting Krondis, the alligator goddess of life and pleasure. Krondis, as with much of the rest of the city, has been corrupted and is currently hoarding the treasures for herself, but we’ll see if that can be changed.

The city is full of lush trees and vibrant colors, a rather stark contrast to the other desert areas. Every area has its own stylistic theme, from the extravagance of the imperial sector to the downtrodden workers district. A big piece of the Menaphos update is that the Slayer skill is having its level cap increased to 120 along with new content to fill in that level gap. You can check out the update details on the launch page here.

Players can also get in on a free weekend beginning on June 9th, allowing free players to enjoy all member content throughout the weekend until the 12th.

[NM] Demo Impressions: Prey


(Editor’s Note: All screenshots from Playstation 4)

The date, March 15 2032. The place, my apartment. I am Morgan, waking up to start my first day at a new job at the TranStar Testing Facility. After fiddling around with a few things in the apartment, I grab my suit and head to the roof where a helicopter awaits. As the pilot takes off, the game transitions into a vehicle for smooth synth music. Just for giggles, I decide to see if I can jump into the helicopter’s blades. I can, they kill me instantly.

You start off Prey as Morgan Yu, gender-neutrally named protagonist going through a series of confusing and likely annoying personality questions at the TranStar Testing Facility. As you might expect being that this is a science fiction game, you’re walled off from the other characters initially, something goes wrong and all hell breaks loose in the facility. You’ll see this “twist” coming the moment you step into the first room, so I don’t feel like I’m spoiling anything of importance. To go further with the story after this point would be a major spoiler, so play the demo at your own risk.

First impressions with Prey make me feel like I’m playing a game developed by the Deus Ex folks at Eidos Montreal for the Mirror’s Edge universe with some System Shock thrown in for good measure. Rather than throw you into a sandbox and have you play with the encounters placed around the map, Prey follows the vein of Deus Ex, throwing around enough toys to play to most preferences. Want to be an awesome hacker? There are turrets, locked doors, etc aplenty. Want to go in guns blazing? You have that option. Sneak around using stealth? Absolutely. You very quickly come upon items like the wrench, GLOO gun (freezes enemies in place) and oddities like a foam crossbow that fires bolts that don’t do damage but are probably helpful for distractions.

Mimics are the primary antagonist of the game so far. The more populous group you’ll come across are capable of scurrying off and changing into objects in the scenery. Larger enemies roam around the map, and at this early stage it is clearly best to leave them alone. Your GLOO Gun doesn’t do a whole lot to help and they are capable of taking your out from afar.

Skill upgrades are handled by neuro mods both in plain sight and hidden around the map, giving the game more of an emphasis on exploration and less so on killing everything in sight to maximize your experience gain. Neuro mods can be used to customize Morgan to your play style, emphasizing stealth, weapon proficiency, or healing, among other things. Players of Deus Ex will be familiar with using the system for minor upgrades like lifting heavy objects or allowing Morgan to extract more resources from downed foes. Weapons are similarly upgraded through weapon upgrade mods (go figure) that are found separate from the neuro mods and again encourages deep exploration.

Prey is best played at a slow, methodical pace. Explore the map too fast and you’ll likely miss the crafting materials and notes scattered around, sticky notes with pass codes and important information. I also enjoy that mimics will show up in rooms that you’ve already cleared, rather than guiding the player through an all-too-predictable shuffle of entering a room, triggering the traps, and then having it be safe forever.

I walked out of the Prey demo with a few issues, most pressing being that controlling Morgan feels like pushing a wheelchair up a hill made of pudding. Slow and sluggish, both in movement and in turning, with some serious input delays on the Playstation 4. It’s like someone put Morgan into one of those padded training suits that you see the police use with training dogs, and you’re expected to keep up with said dogs who are now on rocket powered skates. None of these problems appear to be present on the Xbox One version, so if you have both systems, you’re probably better off on Xbox. There is no knowing how the PC version will run, Bethesda hasn’t released a demo.

MMOments: The Exiled, No Land For The Sheep


(Editor’s Note: MMO Fallout received a key from the developer for the purposes of reviewing. The opinions of this website cannot by swayed by anything short of a case of Orbitz drink)

I started playing The Exiled a few days before the actual launch, and my first thought was basically the same that I had with titles like Darkfall. “Yea, it’s fun, but I have a feeling it’s going to push a lot of people away very early.” It’ll be hard to move forward with an impressions piece without talking about the ten ton elephant in the room, so I’m going to get it out of the way now: The whole labeling as free to play is going to annoy people, and already has. The game has a seven day trial, after which you have to chalk down at least twenty bucks to keep playing. Overall it isn’t a huge deal, but I feel like not mentioning this would bring up issues later on.

The Exiled is a PvP sandbox MMO with nearly full loot and a considerable number of you just crossed this game off of your wishlists. You control your character with the WASD keys, attacking through a combination of mouse buttons and keyboard commands. Your character can make, equip, and use any weapon or armor in the game without having to deal with a class system.

The rules in The Exiled are that while you keep your gear on death from other players, your inventory is open for looting. There is some solace in the fact that you drop to the ground and start regaining health, after which you get back up and can continue whatever you were doing without having to trudge back from a spawn point, since most gankers are willing to loot your bag and leave you be. The game, as you might expect, instantly turned into a numbers game with gangs of clans roving the countryside and wiping out random solo’ers.

I’m not making any big discovery by saying that this is a niche game in a niche market, if you could take the perception that games like The Exiled has and give it a physical manifestation, it’d be somewhere in the realm of opening a store, locking the door, hiding the key under the doormat and standing at the window giving the middle finger to whichever carebear customer has the gall to ask “are you open?” And if the store owner himself isn’t enough to drive away customers, you can bet that the tiny vocal minority of obnoxious, mostly toxic cult followers of the genre will do their part to make the game as intolerable as possible, be it running train through the starting zone to harass new players, shouting “gg kill yourself” in chat, and generally operating “for the lulz” because the game lets them do whatever they want and they’re too busy telling people to go back to World of Warcraft to notice the population decaying around them.

And this is where The Exiled falls shortest, in that I don’t think that the developers at Fairytale Distillery looked at similar games when they were creating this, or if they did then they didn’t learn anything. There are zero repercussions to acting like a jackass in The Exiled because there are no safe zones and no reputation system. Like I said, you can just run train through the starting zone and nothing’s going to stop you, outside of there being nobody to kill. While it’d be nice to imagine clans going up against one another, we all know that isn’t happening. Instead you have the hardcore gank squads, some of the most risk averse gamers in existence, only going into fights where the odds aren’t even close to even.

The bulk of the game is pretty shallow at the moment, comprising mostly of activating nodes and fighting off waves of mobs that try to destroy said node, hoping that at no point during the five minute wait that a clan will come along and steal the node out from underneath you. The AI is incredibly basic at the moment, as mobs mindlessly make their way toward the node with no ability to navigate the terrain aside from a straight path, not bothering to move around whatever is blocking their way.

The farming technique perfectly encapsulates how The Exiled exists now: A long, arduous grind that can and likely will be stripped from you at any given moment. Some people love this, and I won’t vilify them for their tastes. But when it comes to the genre, there are other games that have long established themselves and managed to throw in some semblance of fairness, even though you are never 100% safe.

In a way I like and can appreciate how The Exiled handles its inventory management. You gain experience through killing mobs, however there is a wholly separate material called Flux that can be used in crafting new gear or it can be converted to straight experience, which also means that if you get attacked you can at least scuttle the flux, level up in the process, and not come out of the encounter completely empty handed. Even abilities are subject to looting, since you obtain abilities as scrolls and must bring them to a dojo in order to learn the associated skill. Each class relies on a specific reagent in order to level up said skills, so killing and looting players isn’t just about stealing their stuff, you can also gain some heavy leveling materials in the process.

I suppose what makes me reel in agony even more than the long grind splattered with setbacks due to ganking is that the game wants me to do this all over again every month when the servers reset. No thank you, if you’re going to give me a job then it can either be fun or you can pay me for it. At the very least, while the MMO genre is all about a continuous carrot on a stick, gearing up to where you can run dungeons with the best until the better dungeons requiring the better gear comes out, you’re always making progress. Stripping that away on a regular basis only ensures that The Exiled will appeal to a limited portion of an already limited audience.

Right now The Exiled suffers from long time to kill on basic creatures, a lack of diversity within weapon subsets, and motivation outside of grinding resources, among other problems. That being said, the game is still in early access and early on at that. I’d recommend holding off on your seven day free trial for the moment, but keep the game on your radar. It might become something one day.