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[Not Massive] Radical Heights’ Unique Concept: Persistent Money

Following the commercial failure of its take on the Overwatch-style hero shooter, Boss Key Productions is coming back swinging by taking on the Battle Royale genre with Radical Heights. In production for the past five months, Radical Heights is set to go live on Steam Early Access very soon. Tomorrow even, as in April 10. And why not take a look at the game when it does release? It’s free, after all. Radical deadlines.

Radical Heights is aping on 80’s aesthetic and radical, tubular dialogue to cosmetically set itself apart from the competition, but one aspect that is rather new to the genre is the idea that player-held cash is persistent between matches, allowing players to hoard cash to hopefully make the next match easier.

Can Boss Key pull out a hit? We’ll find out when the game goes live tomorrow.

(Source: Steam)

Beta Perspective: Wild West Online Is Hot Trash A La Mode (Hold the Ice Cream)

An empty wilderness, terrible sound quality, cheap animations, and unfinished assets everywhere with nothing to do but die and see your character irreversibly bricked. It may be in alpha, but Wild West Online is easily a fast contender for worst game of 2017, what is looking to be a shoddy title with questionable connections to one of the most incompetent developers in the gaming industry. Read this preview and stay far, far away.

One thing I’d like to ask about developer 612 Games: Who are they? Do they have a website? No. Does WWO Partners have a website? No. According to the Wild West Online website, the name is trademarked under the US Trademark system by WWO Partners and others. So I decided to do some digging and found exactly what I was looking for:

DJ2 Entertainment Inc. DBA WWO Partners

DJ2 Entertainment doing business as WWO Partners, or in layman’s terms WWO Partners isn’t a real company. Imagine DJ2 Entertainment is Adam Sandler in the Jack & Jill movie and WWO Partners is when he puts on a wig and pretends to be his own sister.

The announcement that Wild West Online is following the model of The War Z, another low effort shovelware title pushed out in connection with Sergey Titov, immediately red flagged this game in my book. Impressively, War Z also had such a refund. It wasn’t until after the refund period that OP Productions (or Hammerhead or whatever they’ve changed their name to these days) stopped pretending that it would live up to certain promises and started coming down hard on the invasive microtransactions. Let me also remind you that War Z was one of the first games to be involuntarily pulled from Steam over fraudulent advertising.

But this game has nothing to do with The War Z or Free Reign Entertainment, the company just by coincidence uses the same engine, had similar website/forum structure, utilizes the same payment processor, and creative director Stephan Bugaj happens to be friends with Sergey Titov on Facebook. DJ2 Entertainment just happened to have worked on Romero’s Aftermath, the equally low quality War Z clone pushed out after the original was abandoned, and was similarly abandoned in short time. Wild West Online’s PR is being handled by Vim Global who, you guessed it, also worked on Shattered Skies. And finally Wild West Online’s trademark was filed by Steven A. Bercu of Lime LLC, also responsible for filing trademarks for all of Titov’s other shell corporations under a slightly different forming of his name.

In case all of the companies I’m listing is confusing you, don’t worry. Sergey Titov and his Free Reign Entertainment crew go through LLCs like they’re candy, each new reboot of War Z was created by a completely new developer with absolutely no online corporate presence, that seems to exist in name only just like WWO Partners.

This weekend’s alpha test is supposed to sell you on Wild West Online, this much is obvious to everyone but the community manager and its tiny cabal of fans. It’s one of two alpha tests before the refund policy ends and you’re up poop creek without a paddle (unless you know how to dispute a transaction via Paypal or issue a chargeback), so rather than treat this like a stress test with minimal features, I’m going to preview Wild West Online like it’s already trying to show off for my money. Which it is.

Everything I need to know about Wild West Online, I learned in the first half hour. A wild west shooter, the game starts you out with a six shooter and no money in a safe zone town somewhere on the open world map. I went to the shop to find that I couldn’t buy anything, watched players run around town, and ran off toward adventure. About three minutes out of town, another player ran up and started a shootout. I lost. Upon respawning, I found that my gun, my medicine, and my ammunition were gone. My character was effectively dead and couldn’t even be deleted it seemed.

And that’s pretty much it. The graphics are nowhere near what we saw in earlier videos, the towns are barren of bystanders, and the world doesn’t have any NPCs roaming around. Your character doesn’t make any footstep sounds when running around, there are hundreds and hundreds of unfinished assets lying around, and the developers don’t seem to understand how skin tone works.

This is what black people looked like in the wild west.

I am hoping that Wild West Online isn’t being developed by the guys who made The War Z, and I say this only because it would mean that the team has become even less competent. While War Z’s alpha may have been a two-bit hack job, it at least masqueraded as what could potentially become a competent product. Wild West Online shows up to work with yesterday’s clothes and a half-empty bottle of whiskey, still drunk because it never stopped from the night before.

Wild West Online is an embarrassment, both in the idea that it is a paid alpha and that WWO Partners expects players to use this to judge whether or not they want to refund their purchase. And they can complain to unhappy customers all they want that this weekend was clearly a “technical test” and was deliberately gutted of content, it doesn’t change the fact that players have two weekends to decide whether or not the game is worth keeping their money in, and WWO has clearly squandered its first of two impressions.

H1Z1: King of the Kill Releases Producer’s Letter

Daybreak Game Company has released its latest producer’s letter for H1Z1: King of the Kill, detailing upcoming updates to the arena shooter. The combat update, set to hit the test server soon, will improve how weapons handle with a reticle offering an accurate idea of where your bullets will go. In addition, each weapon will be tuned to provide a more specific use at different ranges.

In addition to the weapon changes, new points of interest are being added to the map along with an updated bleed mechanic, a deathmatch mode, as well as a battle royale mode that gives each player the same random weapon with infinite ammo, with no weapons spawning in the map.

Check out the full letter at the link below.

(Source: H1Z1)

NM Impressions: Crash Force

(Editor’s Note: Copy provided by publisher)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Video] Does the World Need Another Shooter? Raiders of the Broken Planet Says Yes

Raiders of the Broken Planet is an upcoming 4v1 shooter that may bring to mind Evolve due to its premise of four heroes taking on one big baddie. Looking over the developer diary from Mercury Steam, the game seems to be doing what Left 4 Dead did with the genre, introduce more of an ongoing story element to the mindless shooting. A third person shooter with cover mechanics, Raiders will have you dodging, ducking, dipping, shooting, and punching your way through waves of enemies.

An incredible discovery on one of Saturn’s moons leads a force of humans to a broken planet on the far reaches of the universe. A source of energy called Aleph exists there that grants ultimate power to who ever controls it…

You can watch 22 minutes of Raiders of the Broken Planet from Eurogamer below. The closed beta can be signed up for here, with the game set to launch on PC and consoles. MercurySteam is best known for their work on Castlevania: Lord of Shadow and their upcoming Metroid: Samus Returns.

Hi-Rez Studios Announces $150,000 Paladins Tournament

paladins-2016-09-20-19-27-58-81

Paladins has had a massive response, and Hi-Rez Studios has wasted no time in announcing the first major tournament with a grand prize that could only be described as…grand. Teams from Brazil, North America, Europe, Latin America, Australia/New Zealand, and China will all compete over $150 grand from January 5th through the 8th, with 8 teams battling it out to see who makes it to the finals and walks off with that sweet cheddar.

“The Paladins Open Beta had an explosive first weekend with well over 100,000 new accounts created in the first 24 hours”, said Todd Harris, Hi-Rez Studios co-founder and COO. “We’ve also seen a very strong interest in Paladins from competitive players and esports organizations worldwide and are therefore extending the Paladins Invitational to include more regions and more teams”

More information on the tournament can be found at http://www.hirezexpo.com/

[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.

Rumored Division Open Beta Is True, Coming February 18th

Last week’s rumors of an open beta coming for The Division have proven true, as Ubisoft has announced that gamers on Xbox, PC, and PS3 will be able to get in and play in just about a week and a half. Xbox One players will have a one day bonus, gaining access on February 18th with PC and Playstation receiving access the next day. The beta for all three systems runs until February 21st, barring the moderate possibility that technical issues delay the beta past a reasonable point, as seems to happen every now and then.

In addition to the beta news, Ubisoft notes that most of the cheating issues that plagued the PC closed beta have been fixed and will be ready to roll out for launch. Anyone who plays the open beta will also receive a unique item that will carry over to launch on March 8th.

(Source: The Division)

DUST 514 Will Shut Down In May

CCP Games has announced that their console shooter DUST 514 will be shutting down later this year. Initially launched on the Playstation 3 in 2013, DUST never really caught on with either the Eve Online community or the console community. The idea was pretty unique, players in DUST would form corporations that would fight over territory control on planets in the Eve universe, contracted by players in the MMO. Unfortunately the game failed to catch on with shooter fans, who had numerous other well-established console shooters, and Eve players who heavily criticized the game only being available on consoles.

We are very proud of what we’ve learned and accomplished with DUST 514 on PlayStation 3 over the past three years and it is an honor to be a part of such a dedicated community. We consider DUST 514 one of the best free-to-play offerings on the platform, but the years have caught up with us. It is with a heavy heart that we inform you that DUST 514 will be shutting down on May 30th, 2016.

The forum post announcing the sunsetting also mentions a new PC shooter set in the Eve universe, to be given more detail at Eve Fanfest in April. The most loyal DUST players can expect some sort of recognition when this game comes around.

(Source: DUST 514)

Firefall Going Under For 26 Hour Maintenance

Trove isn’t the only game to take an extended vacation this week. Firefall will be launching update 1.6 on January 20th, but in order to do so will be taking down the servers for more than a day to perform maintenance. The servers will go down in the morning on Tuesday and come back online (hopefully) around the same time the following day.

Because of the nature of the changes coming in this update, we need to bring the servers offline for maintenance and migration. On Tuesday, January 19th at 8:00 AM PST we will be bringing all of our production game servers offline to perform this required maintenance. Because of the nature of the work that needs to be performed, we expect to be down for approximately 26 hours.

Update 1.6 introduces the Jetball PvP arena, a new instanced game mode, new missions, new events, changes to battleframes and progression, as well as numerous other tweaks and content additions. You can find all of it at the update preview at the link below.

(Source: Firefall)

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