review – Page 7 – MMO Fallout

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.

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

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

Score: A+ – No regrets

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

Review: Dead Island Definitive Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: C – Mediocre

Impressions: Homefront The Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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