review – Page 6 – MMO Fallout

2017’s Predictions Revisited: How Did We Do?

It’s that time of year, folks, where MMO Fallout looks back on our predictions for this year in order to hand ammunition to the very people who regularly remind me that I have no idea what I’m talking about. This year I did pretty well, out of 30 mostly serious predictions I would say that I only got about 6 wrong.

And when you’re done remembering the year, take a gander at this list of tips to keep your memory sharp into your 50s.

So let’s recap.

Nostalrius getting a cease and desist and Blizzard announcing Pristine Servers: Nailed it on both counts, minus the part about Nostalrius allowing the cease and desist to escalate to a full on lawsuit.
Laura K Dale would continue leaking Switch news: Also true, although we will never really know if Nintendo tracked down the person leaking the information.
Steam overloaded with trash games: Yep, in the form of Steam Direct, Valve has never allowed so many shysters and con artists on their platform as they did in 2017.
Firefall shut down: Called this one, although the folks at Red5 didn’t even bother to acknowledge the allegedly existing console version when announcing the PC sunsetting.
Pathfinder Online will shut down: 100% wrong on this one.
SAG strike ends: Called this one on all accounts, that there would be concessions on both sides and people would go back to not pretending to care about voice actors receiving residuals.
Trions Worlds would bungle a launch: This is like predicting that the sun will rise, so I’m not exactly looking for kudos.
Phantasy Star Online 2 still not coming to the west: And it still isn’t.
MMOs launching in the East and dying before coming to the west: Kritika Online has already shut down in Southeast Asia before coming to Europe/Americas.
Decent selling HD remakes with extras: Kingdom Hearts, Metroid, among other games.
HD Remakes with microtransactions: As sure-fire as it seemed, I’m pretty sure that not a single game released an HD remake with microtransactions shoved in.
Resident Evil 7 the first major VR game and streamers: Both happened, first being that Resident Evil 7 was a smashing success for VR and a streamer eventually did make a video that he crapped his pants.
South Park: South Park released and it could indeed be summed up as “pretty good,” and the game was criticized for its poop jokes.
Activision and Call of Duty: Well Activision didn’t hold development on Call of Duty, but WWII was a return to the series roots, and Activision has not explicitly addressed the falling sales from Infinite Warfare.
No Man’s Sky gets updates, no players: Half correct on this, did not anticipate that people would flock back to No Man’s Sky in the numbers that they did.
Bulletstorm Flops: It did, and odds are you’ll find Bulletstorm heavily discounted at your local game store. Currently Bulletstorm has less than 10 people playing, and peaked at launch at 1,200.
Video game movies: Only one video game movie released stateside this year, the Resident Evil film. It didn’t underperform in box offices, but I’m guessing most of you already forgot about it.
Daybreak becoming a home for wayward developers: Stay tuned.
Valve being sued: Did not happen.
Governments will pay attention to lockboxes: It’s starting to happen, although gamers are not seeing the inherent worthlessness of these boxes in many games.
Troll games and Ukranian money laundering: Troll games have become more prevalent on Steam, and the platform is definitely still being used for money laundering by Ukranian developers.
Yooka-Laylee Launch: Right on this one, the game launched and it was pretty well received.
Game from ex-STALKER developers: I’m going to fit Escape from Tarkov into this list.
Star Citizen misses its release dates: All of them.
Camelot Unchained: The game didn’t launch, therefore the rest of the prediction is meaningless.
Conan Exiles launches, Funcom realizes that developing MMOs is pointless: Yep, enough that they decided to reboot The Secret World as a non-MMO.
Darkfall Reboots: They launched but have not yet cannibalized each other.
H1Z1 will bring on new lead developers: 99% sure this happened.
I get a lawsuit threat from an indie developer: More than once.
John Smedley joins new startup: Of course he did.

Review: Secret World Legends

Secret World Legends is a reboot in the sense that the second verse to a song is a reboot to the first. Functionally it follows the same ebb and flow, but it feels like somewhere along the way the lead singer/manager died, only to be replaced by the studio label’s brand manager who doesn’t so much care about playing sick tunes at the next small gig as he does monetizing the band to death. The end result reminds me a lot of City of Steam, a fun game that didn’t do so well in revenue and as such was resurrected as a shambling money zombie to the detriment of the community and ultimately the game’s viability as people left for greener pastures.

After heavily considering whether I want to review a game that is now several months old and rebooted from a five year old title, I guess you can already tell my answer.

1. Let’s Talk Praise, Before I Tear It Apart

I’ll be the first to admit that my memories of The Secret World are as biased as they can get, owing to the 2012 launch and accompanying alternate reality games that were ridiculously cool. I can still remember sitting at my computer with a few thousand people watching CCTV camera footage of a park in Montreal where one of the chat members met up with secret agents (actors) and was given the next piece of the puzzle as we all tried to crowdsource this intricate puzzle.

Since the meat of Secret World Legends is pretty much on par with The Secret World, I think it’s safe to start with its two big draws; questing and the world. The secret world of the Secret World is one of myths, legends, and conspiracies. Imagine that everything you read on the internet is true, from living mummies in Egypt to vampires in Transylvania, swamp zombies in New England and filth in Tokyo. The Illuminati, the Dragon, and the Templars are very powerful entities unlike in the real world where contractual obligations require me to state that the Illuminati is certainly not controlling your everyday life via radio waves. You once again don the uniform of and join one of the three factions in their bid to stop the end of the world, mostly to forward their own purposes.

Missions vary greatly in length and complexity, from the simple “kill x creatures” jobs to 29 tier journeys that can take more than an hour to complete. Because a lot of the puzzles involve knowledge of Morse code, bible scripture, and 18th century musicians, the game has helpfully built in a web browser to assist you in looking up the answers. As well as aiding in learning about the world in which you inhabit, missions also go far into establishing the plot and actors that you’ll be encountering along the way. I’m not lying about that knowledge of bible scripture by the by, a fair amount of puzzles early on will require you to source from the Good Book.

One of my favorite parts of the story is in the scorched desert which features a series of quests that are basically stripped right out of an Indiana Jones movie. You even get to have a prolonged series of fights on a moving train. Many of the quests start and end with fully voiced cutscenes, and while the voice acting and animations aren’t always so great, it’s a nice change from the walls of quest text that still permeate most games in the medium.

Combat is, and I know this is something of an unpopular opinion, better than the average traditional MMO, and I can give me sound reasoning. While combat does devolve into the usual MMO repetition of the same five buttons in specific orders, each fight tends to last just long enough that you don’t feel like you’re grinding out, and short enough that each trash mob doesn’t feel like busywork. The game encourages you to keep moving by giving most enemies some form of powerful area-effecting attack, so Secret World Legends basically drip feeds you enough adrenaline to keep it from getting World of Warcraft quest-grind level boring.

But now that I’ve talked about my two favorite parts of Secret World Legends, let’s get the rest of this over with.

2. The Sheer Incompetence Of It

If you want to understand the criminal incompetence of handling in regards to The Secret World, all you have to do is look at the fact that people from Funcom went to actual, physical prison over fraud and corruption related to this game. Criminal incompetence is a term that I’ve used for a long time in regards to The Secret World, and it is still applicable to Secret World Legends, but worse. If The Secret World was held together with duct tape and chewing gum, Secret World Legends feels like the dry gum was hastily covered in a sign that says “nothing broken here.”

To further explain my point, I hit a spot while leveling where the story mode had become completely impossible to progress. I leveled up my character and managed to reach the Scorched Desert, the first desert area. At one point, the main story tells you to complete a quest called “A Time to Every Purpose” for your contact Said before he will let you continue. Funny story, though: This mission is bugged and has been so since long before the relaunch in July. At one point in the mission, you have to craft two items in succession in order to progress, and sometimes the second just won’t craft. At all, for no reason. It also doesn’t help that this quest highlights some of the user interface chunks that are no longer functioning but remain in the game anyway.

After reading through numerous conflicting theories on how to fix said glitch via Reddit and the official forums, I eventually found a method that worked for me. You craft the first item and then leave the area, log out, and come back which resets the quest but doesn’t remove the first item from your inventory. Get to the point where you craft the items and just craft the second item. Voila! Using a glitch to fix another glitch.

Like the pyramids that dot the Egyptian landscape, many of these bugs are old and decrepit. The fact that many of these bugs have been in the game for months and still haven’t been fixed is depressing, the idea that some have been around on and off since the original launch is downright pathetic. It’s indicative of a company that is either grossly incompetent or pitifully understaffed, but considering that Funcom’s history of MMOs seems to be one unmitigated disaster of a launch after another (Anarchy Online and Age of Conan, followed by The Secret World and Lego Minifigures), I’m inclined to believe that the answer lies in both theories.

The game just finished its Halloween event which is effectively just a reboot of an event from several years ago. The event had major, progression blocking bugs including one where a portal you had to step through to continue the quest just wouldn’t appear, for no reason.

3. R-E-C-Y-C-L-E Recycle! Make Gear Grinding Boring Again.

Let’s talk about loot and gear progression in Secret World Legends, more specifically how underwhelming both aspects of the game are. It’s important that we talk about both in the same section as they specifically go hand in hand.

Secret World Legends doesn’t much care about its loot, it knows that 9.9 times out of 10 you’re going to stick with what you have equipped and as such has no problem feeding you tons of junk with every completed mission. At the beginning of the game, you’ll pick your first primary and secondary weapons, a task that the game forces you to do before you even know what each weapon really does, and then locks the rest away behind some pretty aggressive currency grind. Rather than feed you a steady drip of increasingly fancy looking gear, Secret World Legends has you to level up your equipment by feeding it similar equipment, which are obtained via random bags given as rewards for completing missions. A mission might give you a weapon bag, a glyph bag, and a talisman bag, or some combination of the three.

While I like the idea of being able to upgrade your gear, the manner in which Secret World Legends seems to rely almost entirely on feeding garbage into your weapons in order to slowly level them seems to cut entire swaths of content out of the game. It isn’t like, well every single other MMO where part of the reason to play is the hopes that you’ll get some cool piece of gear. It makes completing quests feel less rewarding, not to mention raids/dungeons, as your best bet at sweet loot is some junk that you’ll recycle to incrementally boost your existing gear. Get used to staring at the same weapon for most of your time playing, because especially after the first few levels there isn’t much of a reason to start leveling up a new weapon.

So here you have an MMO with unsatisfying loot and virtually nonexistent gear progression. The more you level up and upgrade your gear to higher ranks, the longer it takes to get the pieces necessary to perform those upgrades. But hey, the cash shop is always there to speed that progression up, a sad reminder that certain elements of the game were functionally crippled in order for Funcom to try and make some extra moolah off of the free to play transition, at the expense of fun and, if it mimics The Secret World, long term financial stability and player loyalty.

4. Funcom’s Generosity With Loot boxes

One thing you may have noticed is that I’ve been talking about loot gained through mission rewards, and I haven’t said much about loot gained through monster drops. This is simple, monsters don’t drop loot. There are named boss creatures that roam around the map that will drop loot, usually just a random item bag, but monsters in Secret World Legends only drop one thing: Loot boxes. They drop a ton of loot boxes, and nothing else. According to the game, my character has 50 hours invested into it right now. In that time, I have managed to accumulate around 150 loot boxes.

Now that translates to one box on average every 20 minutes, which doesn’t sound so bad and also doesn’t take into account the amount of time spent not killing anything. In reality when you’re killing mobs, these things drop every few minutes. This still wouldn’t be a problem, after all I play Neverwinter and that game drops loot boxes like candy, but that’s coupled with the fact that mobs drop nothing else. Literally the only loot that drops from standard level mobs needs to be unlocked with real money.

It also doesn’t help that the loot box drops are nearly completely worthless. Barring the very rare cosmetic item, of which I have yet to obtain a single one from my daily patron keys, the loot boxes drop distillates and pretty much nothing else. Distillates are items that are used to further increase the experience on your gear, so one of the perks of a patron subscription is you get to boost your gear up every day by a certain amount.

This generosity also expands to the game’s varied dungeons, where your limited daily keys can be used in dungeon lootboxes to obtain even more distillates and junk gear to feed your inventory.

5. Yet I Keep Coming Back

I have very little reason to believe that my time in Secret World Legends will extend beyond completing the story, frankly I have neither the intent nor the willpower to continue the endless grind via repeating missions to continue leveling various weapons and equipment pieces. My character just hit level 50, and is about the venture into the relatively unknown lands of Transylvania. Even then, I’m feeling my interest waning in continuing on with the story after making the arduous journey essentially back to where I left off from the abandoned The Secret World.

Verdict: 2.5/5 – Secret World Legends feels bad all around, from the enhanced combat system that doesn’t actually change much to forcing the existing community to either forgo their characters and in some instances purchases to start over or be left behind on the abandoned-yet-still-operating-until-Funcom-arbitrarily-kills-it-for-lack-of-players The Secret World, while ignoring issues that have been present in the game for years. It strips content from the original game, some for the better, while crippling other parts for the sake of the cash shop and loot boxes. While the missions are still engaging, gear progression is a mind-numbing snore and another function crippled for the sake of selling you lootboxes.

Review: Guild Wars 2 Path of Fire

(Disclosure: MMO Fallout received a copy of Path of Fire for the purposes of review. As always, this does not change my opinion)

I’ve always regarded Guild Wars 2 as the Cadillac of MMORPGs, it’s a title that while not being the apocalyptic horseman for subscription games that some fans prophesied, has cut itself a fine section of the market thanks to its polish and the way that Arenanet went about building the world. Here you have a game with strong non-player characters, an engaging story, and a world that feels more living and breathing than your Eorzeas or Gielinors. It presents maps chock full of stuff to do, and your character at the forefront of ever increasingly dangerous foes.

Path of Fire is the second expansion to Guild Wars 2, continuing the story as it left of in season 3 of the living story. Balthazar, human god of war, has returned to Tyria and plans to kill the elder dragons in order to absorb their power and get revenge on his fellow gods for their betrayal of him. At the end of the season, Balthazar turns his sights toward the Crystal Desert and sets off to kill the elder dragon Kralkatorrik. This is where the story picks up.

The lands of the Crystal Desert aren’t just long stretches of brown and tan, either. The world presented forth is massive, much more open than previous zones (especially Heart of Thorns) and well varied between open deserts littered with the skeletons of massive dead beasts, and a lush oasis of trees and waterfalls.

#1: Mounting With Purpose

I’d like to use this opportunity to gush about the mount system in Guild Wars 2, in part because it was the main focal point of my previous commentary and mostly because it is a huge part of the expansion and a lot of mechanics revolve around the use and leveling of said mounts. You’ll gain several story related mounts, all of which are required to progress through the main story missions and to thoroughly complete each map. These mounts allow you to leap further, jump higher, ride the waves, and the griffon is halfway towards flying.

Now depending on who you ask, the mounts fall into one of two categories: Great handling or cumbersome and horrible. While not entirely like driving a tank, there is no doubt that the mounts in Guild Wars 2 have been built with some idea of realism in mind. Your mounts won’t turn on a dime, you can’t position the camera in front of your mount and perform a crazy backwards leap, it just won’t work. In the wide open maps of Guild Wars 2, these mounts feel great. They sway and roll into each maneuver, you can tell that Arenanet put a lot of love into making something more than just your avatar but with boosted speed/jump. Try to use them to maneuver through small spaces, and they respond exactly like you’d expect walking a giant dinosaur through a China shop would.

The mount system itself introduces a whole new form of progression into Guild Wars 2, with each mount becoming even better at their specialty as you use them and gain experience. Completing tasks, finding nodes, and going through the story missions unlocks mastery points which are needed to upgrade your mounts to be all they can be. The mounts also have a use in old Tyria as while the old zones have a lot more waypoints, you won’t have to spend the money to warp between areas.

#2: The Trivializing of Isaac

The good news is that if you have vast swaths of the game world unexplored, as my newly minted level 80 boosted ranger does, you’re going to have a much easier time doing so. The raptor and hopper mounts perform their jobs excellently, jumping long distances and leaping to extreme heights with ease. On the other hand, those of you who meticulously took the time to complete all those difficult jumping puzzles might not be happy to find out that they’ve all been made trivial and mostly useless thanks to a mount that can leap 50 feet in the air or a raptor that can just bypass a jumping puzzle.

Granted, these abilities already exists in one fashion or another, but Path of Fire basically takes all of that and wraps it up into four mounts and hands them to everyone, regardless of your ownership of Heart of Thorns.

#3: Telling A Story With A Punch

Five years later, I still can’t tell whether I like or hate story boss fights in Guild Wars 2. They remind me of the opening sequence of Game of Thrones, in that if I’m in the right mood, they are epic and just the right length. Other times they can seem cumbersome and overly dragged out.

One of the bosses you’ll fight against during the Path of Fire story is the Herald of Balthazar in Act 1. Personally I hated this character, not because of the character itself but for its game mechanics. There is no thought to most of the Herald’s fights, you just pummel her uselessly with attacks while she goes around murdering the people you’re trying to save. I get it, and although clumsy the presence of no-win situations is a nice addition. Who wants the protagonist to come out on top at all chapters of the story?

Otherwise the story boss fights are pretty grand, more than a simple “do more damage than the other guy until one of you is dead.” Fights against Balthazar become desperate, as he continues to make the field more dangerous. One boss I fought against had a mechanic where he would summon allies, and if you didn’t beat them fast enough he would siphon their energy and replenish some of his health. One thing Guild Wars 2 does great with its story boss fights is making that 10 minute fight seem like a real struggle, making you hate the giant bastard after you finally think you’re making progress only for Balthazar to show up and start wrecking your stuff while taunting you the whole time. After a while you realize that it’s not so much frustration at game mechanics that you’re feeling but actual immersion in the world and its inhabitants.

I eagerly await Season 4 and how the story will continue going forward.

#4: Closing Thoughts

In summary, Path of Fire is exactly what you would want out of an expansion. It adds a bunch of new content, reasons to log back in and keep playing, while keeping your existing toys more or less intact. The Crystal Desert is a beautiful place to roam around in with tons to do. There is more content coming with Path of Fire that simply hasn’t been unlocked yet, but we’ll be doing an updated look when it does.

Verdict: 4.5/5 – I loved the story of Path of Fire, and the mounts are a positive addition to the game. Arenanet avoided a major pitfall by not diluting the world with flying mounts. It’s impressive to see how far the story has come, via a series of flashbacks in Path of Fire’s main story.

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.

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.

Valve Updates Steam Reviews, Free Reviews Don’t Count

Valve has updated how Steam handles user reviews today in a way that will affect how paid/free reviews affect the game’s overall score. Starting today, the review score will no longer be affected by users that received the game for free, including free weekends and gifts.

With the changes we are making now, the review score (shown at the top of store pages and in various places throughout the store such as search results) will no longer include reviews by users that received the game for free, such as via a gift, or during a free weekend. Reviews can still be written by customers that obtained the game in any of these ways, but the review will not count toward the overall review score.

Free to play games will not be affected by this change.

(Source: Steam)

[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.

2016 In Review: The Year’s Most Unexpected Events

I can’t always predict the future. No, it’s true, and I am willing to admit what may just be the only flaw in an otherwise perfect being. I’m just that humble. So yea, 2016 brought with it some big surprises, and you won’t believe #6 (because this list only goes up to 5). What happened in 2016 that you didn’t expect? Let me know how you saw it coming in the comments below.

1. Wildstar’s Continued Existence

This one surprised me more than anything, and while the legion of doomsayers run around the net every year calling for the impending deaths of World of Warcraft, Eve Online, and every other game under the sun, this one had good reason behind it. NCSoft is not known for its kindness and understanding when it comes to under-performing titles, and I have made a few attempts to explain why Wildstar is in a bit of a different situation.

If you look back at the titles that NCSoft has shut down, they mostly all share one common bond: Money, not the individual game’s money but NCSoft’s money. These cuts came at a time when NCSoft was doing poorly overall as a company and needed to shed some of its liabilities, which meant losing their games/subsidiaries that were struggling or failing to make a profit. It happened to Lineage, Tabula Rasa, Exteel, City of Heroes, etc. In the case of City of Heroes, we learned that while the game itself was profitable, Paragon Studios was not.

So Wildstar survived 2016 against all odds and despite the fact that free to play and Steam just gave a momentary boost to their revenue. At this point, Wildstar is living on borrowed time. While I won’t outright claim its sunsetting in 2017, I will say that should NCSoft hit some financial trouble again this year, Wildstar will be the first thing scuttled to save the ship.

2. Daybreak Game Company and Turbine Entertainment

If Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online become part of Daybreak’s all access program, you can just hook that IV of nutrition right into my arm and funnel my checks straight to whoever is in John Smedley’s old office, right next to all the stuff that Columbus Nova has pawned off to save a buck, because I am never leaving the house. I’ve said a few times that my dream is that other multi-game publishers take a note from SOE and have an all access pass, and you know what? They don’t.

Turbine is moving away from gaming and going into the mobile app pseudo-games, a world where mediocrity isn’t just rewarded, it pays enough to afford Super Bowl advertising money. I think most of us expected that Turbine would spin off the two MMO teams into their own company, although it was likely more blind prayer that they wouldn’t just shut the whole division down and shutter everything, but who could have seen Daybreak Game Company coming? The company whose name is synonymous with slowly carving up the remains of Sony Online Entertainment like it was a delicious honey baked ham.

The plus side is that Daybreak doesn’t own Standing Stone Games, so this agreement likely won’t see much (if any) in the way of holiday layoffs. But seriously, Daybreak, that All Access. Get on it.

3. Korea Makes Cheat Development a Criminal Offense

This could only happen in a country where eSports is as big as it is in Korea, and I’m not talking about North Korea where Kim Jong Un most recently not only took all three top spots in the World Overwatch League, but also managed to pull in Most Handsome/Intelligent Gamer. This is South Korea, where pro gamers are treated like gods, where your account is associated with your social security number, and where there is a ton of money to be made in cheating.

Creating cheats in South Korea is now punishable by up to $43 thousand in fines or a maximum of five years in jail. You have to assume that the punishment will fit the crime, and that most cheat makers will be handed a hefty fine based on whatever profit they were bringing in. It seems highly unlikely that anyone will face an actual jail sentence of more than a week or so, unless the penal system is exceptionally harsh in Korea.

No, not that Korea. You don’t even want to know what happens if you’re caught aimbotting against Lil Kim.

4. Digital Homicide’s Existence

What can I say about Digital Homicide that hasn’t already been said about Milli Vanilli? It had fifteen seconds of fame and now nobody cares. The only time you hear them being brought up is when someone says “hey, remember Digital Homicide? I may be living in squalor but at least I’m not that guy,” and everyone goes back to eating their KFC (Nashville Hot now in stores, big thanks to KFC for being smart enough not to sponsor this article).

From the outset, Digital Homicide seemed to be like every other mediocre indie developer, a fragile ego hastily compiling the kind of shoddy work that you normally make before you start showing your work to the public, and not only showing it to the public but placing it for sale. Their existence had proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Steam’s Greenlight program was broken and not serving its function, a mountain of garbage built by the ultimate garbageman himself, James Romine (or Romaine if you read my earliest pieces).

But not content with merely saturating the store with heaps upon heaps of copy and pasted assets, Romine took the meta one step further by launching an active lawsuit against a Youtuber for criticizing his games. The lawsuit went nowhere and is currently in limbo waiting for dismissal by the judge, but not before pulling the ultimate bastard move: Serving Valve with a subpoena for the identity of 100 users in the hopes of finding out their identities. Finally deciding that they had had enough, Valve dropped the hammer and cut its ties completely with Digital Homicide, destroying the company financially and sending Digital Homicide back into the depths from which it had surfaced.

5. SAG Goes On Strike, People Stop Paying Attention

You could virtually count in seconds how long it took for the Screen Actors Guild to go on strike and for the public/press to stop taking notice. I find the whole ordeal laughable, not because I am anti-union or disagree with what the strike is demanding, but because the games industry overall is a pretty despicable place to work in and, if I had to offer advice to the folks currently on strike, it’d be to take a nice safe paycheck in the growing animated/CG film industry. This isn’t the part where I say “the industry is sleazy, deal with it or leave.”

If you take the time to actually read the demands of the SAG union, they’re pretty tame. A bonus for every 2 million copies sold or 2 million subscribers up to a maximum of 8 million, aka four payments. They want standard safety equipment/people on set to prevent unnecessary injuries, reduced hours, and an updated contract that was written in 1994 when video games were about as serious a product as Big Bird’s Speak and Spell, except less valuable as a market commodity.

The reason I say that the strike makes me laugh is because, at the end of the day, this industry can be pretty horrible. We’re talking about companies that, with little or no shame, pull tactics like $10 online passes to harass the second-hand market, where Microsoft was willing to risk shooting its platform in the head with the initial (revoked) decision to restrict used games, cut out entire parts of the world by launching an online-only console and simply refusing service to countries because they didn’t feel like it, where Capcom demands you pay more money to unlock content already installed on the disc, where companies shamelessly announce that selling you more DLC is a higher priority than actually fixing their product. And let’s not go into how poorly game developers can be treated, this isn’t a contest to see who is more abused.

So I can’t say I have too much confidence that the bean counters in the industry will take the strike seriously, you can tell them that even though they’ll save money by hiring scab actors that the quality will likely drop, all they’ll hear is that they’re saving money. While there are countless numbers of passionate people who love their work on all levels of gaming, from the lowly QA tester to the philanthropic president who really likes video games, I can’t help but feel that the people that SAG is targeting would gladly sacrifice quality for the sake of not putting a little extra in the collection plate. They’ve been doing it for years. How does that satisfy the shareholders? Pro-tip: It doesn’t. Worse comes to worst, they’ll sacrifice a beloved franchise with a predatory mobile port for some upfront cash, then kill off the studio and fire everyone involved before they can collect their bonus.

If this industry has to go back to having the developers themselves provide their untrained voices, I fear that’s exactly what they’ll do, and nobody should have to suffer through another fully voiced Ultima.

[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

lara

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.

croftgo

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.

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