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BATMAN: THE TELLTALE SERIES – Episode 1- REVIEW FOR PC

August 22, 2016 0 Comments

Batman: The Telltale Series was announced during the 2015 Game Awards with an intriguing teaser trailer. The first episode of Telltale’s next epic story was released on multiple platforms in August 2016. The story focuses more on Bruce Wayne and his backstory with Gotham, his family, and the caped vigilante.

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The game follows the ever-growing popular style of adventure games set by previous titles in Telltale’s history of releases. The gameplay consists of critical dialog choices in order to progress your own individual story with different branching paths determined by how you react to situations. The first episode doesn’t hold many puzzles for you to figure out leaving you with the opportunity to fully focuses on exploration and conversations between characters. It wouldn’t be a Batman game without some form of bad ass fighting scenes, though; we see the return of a QTE system found throughout Telltale’s games, but with an added twist of having to carry out combos during the scenes too, which really keeps you on your toes throughout the action. Much like in the Arkham series of games, the ‘detective mode’ also makes an appearance where you have to solve and figure out crime scenes. Obviously, the bread and butter of this game come from the plot and decisions you make and Telltale have really pulled off an interesting and captivating start for this series.

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The visual aspect of Batman is again mimicking the rest of the Telltale series with a gorgeous cell shaded comic book style. Facial expressions and character animations are all on point with the top of the range voice acting to be heard from the whole cast.

There is no difficulty in completing the first episode in this series; the QTEs can easily be repeated if you mess up, and the small amount of puzzles you encounter are easily solved with a little thought. I really like that a lot of the key choices you have to make come with a timer on, meaning you normally have to go with your gut instinct response rather than sitting on your hands for a few minutes whilst you mull over your decision.

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Throughout the first episode, there is a small chance to explore a number of scenes, but none of them really allow you too much space to find new areas. There are a number of objects that Batman/Bruce can interact with, but sadly these are few and far between, hopefully, the episodes to follow will allow a much greater chance to explore some iconic scenes such as Wayne Manor or The Bat Cave.  This first episode took me just over two hours to complete which is the usual length for a Telltale episode, so the full series will easily be a ten to twelve-hour experience if that is anything to go by.

Episode one is a great start for this new Telltale series, the story is gripping and interesting to any fans of the caped crusader. You’ll get to relive some of the iconic moments in the Batman story as well as create some new ones.

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Necropolis Review for PC

July 31, 2016 0 Comments

Necropolis is a third person roguelike game developed by Harebrained Schemes, and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment, releasing on PC, PS4 and Xbox One in July 2016. Harebrained schemes have a fairly well-known repository of games in their history with the le Shadowrun series of games being their most notable. Necropolis is set in a procedurally generated dungeon that changes shape each time you play.

First of all the art style on the show for this game really peaked my interest upon seeing it on the store page. It has a cartoony look to it that also has very dark and mysterious undertones. It completely grabbed me as one of the game’s stronger aspects after playing. Whilst the game’s world and environment are fairly low quality in terms of texturing and design, it still passes the mark due to the very stylized look and feels. Character and enemy models are again very basic, but due to the style, you can overlook the lack of serious detail. The game does have minimal sound effects; none that really stick in your mind, and the same can be said for the rather bland soundtrack too. We get a cheap-out way of avoiding voice acting by just having some monster mumbling over the top of any text you see on screen; this does come across as very boring and lackluster as it was quite clearly done to avoid having to include proper voice acting for the narrator.

Roguelikes and rogue-lite games are usually right up there with my favorite genre of video games. Thus I was super hyped to try out Necropolis, not only was I was drawn in by the game’s art style, but the thought of having a fleshed out roguelike that had a premium price tag also garnered my interest. Most roguelike games we see released nowadays are in the $10-$20 range so given that Necropolis is way above that I had extremely high expectations. Unfortunately with high expectations comes large amounts of disappointment. The game has a similar gameplay to that of Dark Souls in that it is slow paced and takes on the harder difficulty levels. Having hard game play is not the problem here; it’s the fact that the slow gameplay locks you into doing any sort of action until it has completely played out the animation which will more than likely leave you being smashed on by hoards of enemies in the meantime.

The game also lacks any proper progression system, roguelikes are meant to be played over and over again, each time you will get a little bit further than the last due to having a constant improvement in between runs. You do get some sort of bonus at the end of a run, but this only enables you to purchase very boring and unexciting passive abilities in the form of tomes, these passive benefits can be things such as reduced stamina usage when attacking, and a 5% health regeneration between fights. I would really like to see action abilities, or equipment improvements and definitely more interesting passive abilities that you exciting to be getting an upgrade.

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Crush Your Enemies Review for PC

July 29, 2016 0 Comments
This game was reviewed using a code sent by the developer/publisher but this did not effect my opinion on the game.

Crush Your Enemies is a real time strategy game, developed by Vile Monarch, and published by Gambitious Digital Entertainment, releasing on PC, Android and iOS in July 2016. The game has a humorous take on the real time strategy genre, the same developers who brought us This War of Mine invites you to a magical world of Generia.

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Whilst Crush Your Enemies is part of the RTS genre, it feels a little like a tower defense style game as well, I think this was because of the UI and some of the game mechanics which are on show though. The game is split across numerous levels which have three different objectives. The game has it’s own gating mechanism, meaning in order to progress further in the story you’ll need to complete a specific amount of objectives, which gives you good reason to replay previously completed levels, just to beat the extra objectives on offer. The objectives in each level will vary from straight up wiping your opponent off the map, to defending a building for an amount of time, or even something as simple as making sure you end the level with a certain number of units left.

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The actual gameplay from CYE is square unit based; you have a select amount of units to begin the mission with, and you can turn them into different styles of units, simply by entering buildings, units can be guards, armored warriors, archers, or builders. These units count as your resources for building more units. You’ll need to have a constant churn of units being built in order to combat your opponent’s forces. It takes a little bit of skill to finely tune the amount of units for each task but it is very satisfying once you figure out the perfect balance. The game has a very well done tutorial that doesn’t hand hold you throughout, but gives you plenty of helpful hints along the way when you encounter new mechanics. You learn as you play which is the best way of working these games.

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On top of resource management for your units, you’ll also get a number of consumables which can be used throughout a mission too, such as potions that ramp up units strengths, quick tents that allow you to build more units if you are in a little bit of a bind, and many more. These do become a little bit of a forgotten part of the gameplay for me though, as the UI has them hidden away in the top corner where you don’t really see them unless you are specifically looking. I thought they could have been displayed a little clearer in the regular UI to allow players to take full advantage of them, rather than realizing at the end of the mission they just struggled on, that it could’ve been much easier with the use of the extra powers.

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Better Late Than DEAD Review for PC

July 29, 2016 0 Comments
This game was reviewed using a code sent by the developer/publisher.

Better Late Than DEAD is a survival adventure game developed by Odin Game Studios, being published on Steam in July of 2015 on Early Access.

As we have come all too familiar with the survival genre of games; you start off as a single character, dropped in the middle of nowhere and you are expected to survive. Games of this genre are often a hit from the start or just flop straight away. Unfortunately Better Late Than DEAD does not have a very bright future in my eyes.

Gameplay is…well, almost none existent. I started out in the ocean and had to swim at least five minutes before I got to any sort of land. I spent almost an hour exploring the island, finding a couple of houses, and that is it. Whilst exploring the houses I found that each of them had their own loot, strangely enough, the houses were all an exact copy of each other and the loot was spawned in exactly the same place. The loot that I found were again, everything you would expect to find in this type of game, cans of food, bandages, knives, etc. As far as game play goes, that is it. There is absolutely nothing else to do in this game; I didn’t find any animals, enemies, nothing.

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The graphics are bad to say the least; the screenshots really shows the game in a different light to how it actually looks in real time. Awfully low quality textures on almost everything, the water certainly doesn’t look like how it does in the screenshots, and neither does the skybox. On top of the poor graphics, the animation side of the game is horrible; your character has just an awful run cycle that looks like some sort of jelly man was used to rig it – also this game features possibly one of the highest jumping ability I have ever seen in a game, I swear I was jumping up entire flights of stairs in one go… It should also be known, that from jumping, I managed to break my leg in the game twice and die from it once – lord knows how.

At the beginning of the game, I was presented with a cut scene that sets up for a quite interesting story; but that is it. After that intro, I found no other plot elements, or anything. I was particularly disappointed as I would have really liked to have seen more of it. Hopefully the developers will be adding something in via patches in the future on this aspect.

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Better Late Than DEAD also has some audio problems. Whilst playing the game, you will have the same repetitive soundtrack playing in the background, and when it loops, boy do you notice it. There is an obvious cut in the track, and it just starts playing again; this for me seemed like a really basic issue which should not be seen in the game, it really ruined the game’s immersion (the little it actually had).

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Firewatch Review for PC

July 29, 2016 0 Comments

Firewatch is an adventure game, developed and published by Campo Santo that was released in February 2016 on PC. The core team behind this game have got a plethora of experience, with some coming from big titles such as Mark of the Ninja, Brutal Legend and Bioshock 2 so I went into this game with high expectations.

You play as a middle aged man named Henry, whose wife has sadly got dementia, a crippling illness which tears people’s lives apart. Doing what a lot of people do in this world, Henry runs away from his problems to become a woodland ranger in a national forest. Your job is to mainly look out for signs of a fire in the dry woodlands and help prevent them spreading across the rest of the forest. This should be a calm and relaxing job for most, but you soon become the centre of a massive conspiracy plot as the story unravels.

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Gameplay consists of hiking across rough terrain in order to reach objective points, loot supply crates which contain key game play tools such as ropes or walkie-talkies as well as notes left by past rangers which form part of the history of the park and give you some back plot to the story. Another core element to this game is the interaction you have with the only other human you have contact with throughout, Delilah – you maintain contact with her through your radio and talk to her every day. The two develop a relationship depending on how you respond to her in dialog and actions throughout the story. The dialog was probably the most compelling part of this game; the hiking between objectives did actually grow a little tiresome at times and grew very repetitive towards the end of the game.

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The story is what carries this game hands down, I’ve been on a bit of an adventure game binge lately and this is by far the most interesting and gripping story I’ve played in recent memory. The relationship and bond between the main character Henry and Deliaha develops throughout the game and you really find yourself becoming completely immersed in this story. The game will leave you asking yourself moral questions too, and of course the ending will allow you to decide yourself on how everything works out in the end. You’ll probably finish the game with more questions than answers, and normally that would point to a case of bad storytelling, but in this case it is simply amazing that a story such as this can bring out so many emotions and questions regarding certain subjects.

Whilst the game isn’t the most graphically enhanced, it does have a nice art style that is pleasing to the eye. The game is ran using the Unity engine so we do get OK looking graphics but some of the texture quality and graphical effects are lacking which let Firewatch down sadly. The voice acting and sound effects are all really good though, again the dialog between characters is spot on and I cannot fault it even for one second in that department.

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