Legends of Callasia – Review

Take a game of Risk, add some fantastical settings and creatures, throw in some powerful cards to use against your enemies, and you get Legends of Callasia.  The latest full platform release from Boomzap Entertainment is a detailed, colorful strategy game with a smooth learning curve.

Combat Begins!

Set in a fairly traditional fantasy world, Legends of Callasia takes its roots in the form of long standing games, like Risk, and Magic: the Gathering, and blends them in to something new, yet familiar.  You can take control of a single faction in either a skirmish versus AI opponents, 3 sizable campaigns, or go online against up to 7 other players.

Whichever game type you choose, you go on to find yourself at a starting point with a hero or two and a few starting units on one of Legends of Callasia’s colorful maps.  Game play is turn based, but surprisingly fast paced.  Legends doesn’t ask you to do too much resource management.  There’s no taxes, or upkeep, or menu upon menu, upon sub menu to go through each turn.  On the surface this may seem like there is not much depth to tenured strategy players, but it does make the game move quickly, and things can change on the map just as quick.

The only things you really manage are your income, keeping your land, and upgrading your towns and keeps enough to order up higher level troops, and increase your unit cap.  Every territory you get can hold either a forts or a town.  You need to balance what you build on each territory as although towns provide more income, you can only recruit troops at forts.  Each of these can be upgraded to increase your income, population cap, and at forts your ability to hire better troops.  Building all your forts too far away from your front-line can mean long trips back and forth to restock troops, as they can only move while accompanied by a general.

You can aid in this movement by building portals that will transfer your Hero and his troops across the map to any other owned portal at the cost of that units turn.  The downside of course is that each territory can only support one building type, so you need to plan ahead, especially in larger campaigns if you don’t want to leave yourself exposed.

One map at a time

Skirmish mode lets you take on up to 7 AI players in a rush to either destroy each other and take over the land, or accumulate enough points before the final turn.  Skirmishes are quick and sweet.  You can easily get through a game in under an hour.   Multiplayer works similarily and it’s nice that you don’t have to commit too much time to any one game.

The campaign of Legends of combines skirmish style play, with various objectives that can change throughout the course of a single map.  You’ll also be thrown various choices of aligning with other factions during each battle, though I did find these choices more or less redundant as I was not often given much context to them, and I usually wasn’t allowed to look around the map and access before making a decision.  This left me with usually just clicking the first option and seeing how it turned out.

Campaign

In campaign mode, you choose one of three factions, the Hundred Kingdoms, the Faeborne, or The Revenant.  You’ll also encounter various Orchish clans during your fight for supremacy. Each faction has it’s own set of heroes at it’s disposal, and you’ll unlock more as you play.  These heroes are your generals in battle, and the only way to move troops around the map.  Each has a unique class and traits that come with it, as well as unique cards that can be used either for offence, defense or to better your kingdom.  You gain cards randomly throughout each game mode, and they can be used contextually for a small amount of money, or can be sold back at face value if you can’t use them.

A campaigning we will go!

Cards add a significant amount of strategy to the game, as higher value cards can instantly swing the momentum.  An oncoming superior army can be slowed by dropping a card that summons a horrifying beast, or neutral army to fight them.  You can perhaps supplement your own troops by instantly recruiting reinforcements.  Certain cards will also build improvements on your territories, or give you boosts in income, offence or defense.  The right card, played at the right time can make a big difference.

As you play through the campaign you can skip back and forth between any factions’ available maps.  Each faction also comes with it’s own set of troop types, for which you can 4 of any kind at a time in any army.  Balancing melee fighters, with ranged troops, and hard hitting elite troops is necessary in each army.  Though there is a lot of variety in the troops, I did find that there wasn’t a very tangible difference from one faction to another besides for the look of the troop cards, and for a few of the playable cards you receive.

The campaign should last you a good 30-40 hours.  The story is relatively light, and easy to follow.  It doesn’t distract much from the gameplay, but it also wasn’t intriguing enough that I wanted to hurry to the next map to find out what happens next.

There are some upgrades to decide on, but most won’t get used.

Combat

Combat is simplified in Legends of Callasia.  Your troop cards attack based off of attack type and any specific bonuses they have.  You’ve really fought each battle ahead of time by checking your foe’s cards, and making sure your compliment of troops matches up well.  This makes battles go by fast, and keeps up the quick pace of the game.  You can bring multiple heroes into play in each battle, and they can go for several turns in the case of larger troop battles.  Every movement choice into battle gives you a quick preview as to your odds.  These can change suddenly however with the right cards played during the same turn.  Combat begins whenever you enter into a territory with non-allied units, though your enemies may still get a chance to move their troops away if there turn falls after yours.

The map size, and limited unit resources mean you need to take precautions whenever you make a move, as enemy units can pass freely through undefended territories, potential sacking your towns behind your borders.

Visually Legends of Callasia is a ton of fun to look at.  The stylized map and characters are well drawn, detailed and very colorful.  Small touches on the game map like interactive clouds and birds that swoop across your screen, and can be clicked on for a quick, fun animation show the attention to detail.  The UI and everything on screen is easy to read, and accessible.

There are many heroes to unlock and choose from each game

The Verdict

Overall Legends of Callasia is a fun, fast paced strategy game.  It doesn’t overwhelm with it’s depth, but in some cases this is a boon as you can complete a quick match with friends in a realistic time, not spending days back and forth taking turns.  The game is easy to learn, and very accessible, but it’s turn based style adds just enough dimension that during certain points of a battle you’ll need to make careful decisions with your unit selection and movement.  Multiplayer is definitely the best part of Legends gameplay, as although the campaign and AI do offer some challenge, the story and factions are fairly irrelevant and there’s no comparison to playing a real, live player, or players across a sprawling map.  Legends of Callasia is a good offering for someone looking for a light, quick gaming session against friends.  There is just enough content to explain Legends’ price point, but luckily you can also download a fully playable demo that offers several hours of play for free.

As always, thanks for reading, and be sure to check back often for more great game reviews, and previews.

Checkout Legends of Callasia on Twitter, and be sure to follow me too, and leave some comments down below to let me know what you think about the game.

Fallout 4: Review – Where does it end?

Depth and imagination bring the world of Fallout 4 to life.  It’s large and well planned environment, and amazing amounts of customization out weigh the many minor issues you may find in your journey across the wasteland of Boston.

Time for a shave!

The Good:

Fallout 4 feels enormous.  Not just in the generous map size, but in the sheer amount of things you can do throughout the wasteland.  It would be quite easy for you to simply go out and explore, and never do any quests at all and still feel quite accomplished in your chosen path.

After customizing either your male, or female character, you get a short prelude into the world that was.  It’s high tech, high tension cold war atmosphere filled with advanced tech, but still locked in a 50’s style environment is a ton  of fun.  Every character in the game is also fully voiced, regardless of their importance.  They will even try to say your chosen name so long as it’s recognized by the game.

It’s not long before everything goes downhill and you are thrust into a nuclear destroyed future, alone, confused and missing your young son who is stolen away from you by raiders.  From here it’s up to you to decide what you want to do.  Whether you follow the story, do some random quests, or simply ignore all story and just start shooting things, there is always something to do in Fallout 4.

The main story will push you to go and find your lost son, finding clues and new friends along the way.  These friends will join you on your adventures if you choose, and have a few benefits.  Alongside the extra fire power, each companion you find will also add unique skills, and a perk once your relationship is solid enough.  For instance if you’ve chosen to ignore increasing your lock-picking skill, Cait is a great companion to have around as she can open up locked chests and doors for you.  Your loyal dog Dogmeat is able to hold down enemies to give you time to use your V.A.T.S. targeting system to target individual limbs on your enemies.

Shoot it in it’s face!!

If you’ve played Fallout 3, then combat will be familiar to you, but the combat is based around similar FPS games, so new comers should fit right in easily.  Combat can be approached in several ways, either through stealth, melee, or taking advantage of your V.A.T.S. to target enemies.  V.A.T.S. allows you to slow down time and individually target enemies and limbs to cripple them, or engage in gruesome slow motion kills as body parts explode off of your enemies.  It’s a huge amount of fun and the fact that time sill continues as you target takes away the feel of invincibility you got in Fallout 3 when time fully paused using this system.

The stealth systems are workable, but I never quite found it that much fun, as compared to just running in guns hot and firing away, or using V.A.T.S. to slow time.  Either way fights are challenging, and you will die often if you take on enemies who are too high in level or too numerous.

As you embark in battles and exploration, you will scour the corpses and environments for scrap and salvage, along with weapons and armor.  Scavenging in the wasteland is of dire importance in Fallout 4.  Early in the game it’s an absolute necessity.  Salvaged items can be either consumed if edible, or broken down to their components and can then be used in crafting.

So many things to tinker with.

You will spend a huge amount of time crafting and building in Fallout 4.  Every piece of weaponry and armor you collect can be customized.  This adds a great deal of depth to combat as you can build equipment to suit your every need, or your play-style.

To be very successful in Fallout 4 you will also have to build up various settlements throughout the world.  These settlements are unlocked early in the game and you can acquire more by completing quests in the areas surrounding farms, or other central locations to align yourself with the settlers there.  Once allied with them, you’ll have to take time to build them up and protect them so that they grow larger, and help you with your resource collection.  This is a great added feature to the game, and allows you to add your mark to the desolate wasteland.

Every action in Fallout 4 gains you experience.  Whether you’d like to do all the quests, kill all the enemies, or simply spend your time building up settlements, you’ll continue to earn experience and level up.

 

The Bad:

Though there is a ton of things to do in Fallout 4, outside of quests, there is very little information about what you need to do.  As you explore, your quest log will load up quickly, and though each quest is searchable on the map, it’s sometimes hard to distinguish which ones are side quests, or part of the main story line.  If you are someone who want’s to power through the main story line, you’ll have to keep track of which quests you need to do next to do so.

There’s also very little explanation of some of the concepts of the game.  For insatance as you build up your colonies, there is no mention about how to link the resources for each of these sites together.  I personally only found out how to do it by watching a friend play the game, and had been missing out on having all of my resources connected to make building up settlements faster.

As you find new companions throughout the game, it becomes increasingly hard to keep them organised.  There doesn’t seem to be any utility to tell you where your people are unless you keep a list of where you’ve sent them.  I for instance have no idea where I left my dog and have to search through more than a dozen settlements to find if I want him to accompany me on a quest.  Also, beyond the first few times with a new companion, you may not know what their particular perks will help you with.

Finally a reason to go get my armor!

Power armor is available in the game, and gives you extra strength and endurance, but it became rare late in the game where I felt I needed to use it.  I seldom felt like taking the time to go all the way back through a couple of loading screens to collect my armor to come back and fight a tough enemy or boss.

When it comes to the main story, there is little urgency in completing it, and considering it’s your son you’re looking for, my character never really seemed that concerned about finding  him.  Although I understand that Bethesda wants you to play the game however you like, it seems strange that my character doesn’t really care if I spend weeks building up a settlement while unknown fiends have run off with my only child.

 

The Ugly:

Unfortunately, like with most Bethesda product, Fallout 4 comes with a variety of graphical and gameplay glitches.  For the most part these glitches are minor and don’t effect the gameplay, and are often good for a laugh, but every once in awhile this is not the case.

In one case at my largest settlement, I decided to store my extra weapons inside a cupboard in a house.  When I returned one day to the settlement a cow had somehow found it’s way into the house, and was unable to fit through the door, essentially blocking me from accessing my inventory.  Even after exiting the game and coming back, the cow was still there, mocking me.

Man, I hope he’s house trained…

Other occasions found me getting stuck in the environment during massive fire fights, resulting in my untimely death.  Other combat issues like feral ghouls launching at you, and passing through your body to the other side, resulting in you having to quickly twitch around in order to hit them, or aiming straight down to make impact with them.

These along with various other clipping issues, and weird graphical issues throughout my experience made me occasionally want to rage quit the game when things didn’t go my way.

In the end:

Fallout 4 has a lot going for it.  There are countless things to do and see.  The environment is large and beautiful and whoever designed the map should earn an award. The open world, and customization choices mean you can play Fallout 4 however you like.  There are no rules or obligations for you to play any particular way, or even complete quests to have fun.  Adversely, with such a rich story and history, it’s unfortunate the game doesn’t really push you to want to complete the main quests and discover the mysteries of the wasteland.  This, along with a variety of glitches and exploits mean that Fallout 4 is far from perfect, but it’s rare that these issues will interfere with you having a blast blowing limbs off of super mutants or raiders the like.  The sheer amount of funny, awesome and interesting things to find and do have stopped me just before rage quitting from some silly glitch more than once.  Fallout 4 is definitely a great addition to the franchise and I am sure to spend many more hours in the wastelands of Boston.

As always, thanks for reading and make sure to like and comment below, and let me know what you thought of Fallout 4.  Follow me on Twitter @micbemac88.

Get the game here!

Game of Thrones Episode 6: Was That a Thud I Heard?

Game of Thrones Episode 6: The Ice Dragon is the climatic ending to season one of TellTale’s episodic adventure.  With it comes a lot of loose ends, a whole lot of blood, but not particularly that much storytelling to go along with all the choices you’ve made in the previous 5 episodes.

Reader beware, after this point there will be some spoilers for the lead up to episode 6

Conclusions for our characters are what we would expect fora  season finale, but it’s not necessarily what we get here.  Only one character through my play-through actually had a real ending to their story, and that was for Mira Forester who’s story I never really connected with until episode 5.

Hmm, I choose you!

Her political dealings in the capital only really become interesting so late in the story, that the abrupt possible conclusions for her story didn’t hold much impact for me in the end, and I really could have gone either way on my final choices.  There didn’t seem to be any good way to end her story, though the last second portrayal of her true nemesis in the story was well done, and unexpected.

To the north, Garred finally discovers the North Grove.  After so much time spent talking about it, and what it is, I was really looking forward to finding out more about it’s secrets.  Unfortunately episode 6 failed to deliver in that regard, and although we do get one small secret revealed, we really learn nothing about why the North Grove is so important that we would risk so much to find it and keep it safe.  We are left here with a pretty gruesome life or death choice, but the impact feels empty without the secret of the grove’s importance being revealed.

When have I been wrong?

Meanwhile in Ironrath we get to experience the more dynamic of all the endings.  Your choice of who to save at the end of episode 5 creates great contrast in what you can do to try and save the Forester family.  Though most of our choices end up in vile bloodshed and much life lost, we still don’t really get a full conclusion here.  There are many loose strings left hanging with the hopes that TellTale is working on an yet unconfirmed season 2 to help answer some of these questions.

This place has seen better days.

In the end Game of Thrones from TellTale is left wanting.  It feels like there is still another episode of content that didn’t get that would help answer our questions and give us more of a conclusion.  Season 2 is yet to be confirmed, so it seems kind of unfair to the player to leave so many loose ends to chase.  With all that does happen in this episode, and with the overall dark sense of the story, it’s also somewhat disappointing that it doesn’t feel like you really have any way to feel like you got a win in any of the possible endings.  Each choice ends up either terribly, or terribly gray and it would be nice to at least have one character come out of 6 episodes of game-play in a better position than where you started.  Though I still enjoyed my play-through I feel somewhat empty with it’s results.

As always, thank for reading and be sure to share and comment below.  Let me know what choices you made in your game and how it ended.

You can find my reviews for all of Game of Thrones episodes here or use the links below.

• Episode 1
• Episode 2
• Episode 3
• Episode 4
• Episode 5

Called it! : Life is Strange Episode 5 – Review

Though still a very emotional and gripping story, Life is Strange Episode 5 falls for familiar tropes of time traveling Sci-Fi stories.  The end episode of the series brings Max Caulfield’s story full circle with an emotionally gripping, if predictable finale.  

Beware spoilers to follow!

When we left Max in episode 4, Chloe was dead, again, and Mr. Jefferson had been revealed as the big bad.  Both of these were predictable outcomes from the foreshadowing of earlier episodes.  I was disappointed with this “surprise” in episode 4, and I was disappointed even more by Jefferson’s total switch to psychopath here.  The man basically becomes an evil cartoon villain with his heightened expressions and full 180 degree switch in behaviors.  I was hoping to see a more layered villain, and not somebody off of the show Gotham.

What follows this opening scene is a series of time hops, and trial and error as Max tries to figure out how fix everything and make sure everyone survives as well.  The usual rewind, try again approach that we’ve seen in previous episodes is here.  We again lack anything new to try out early in the game  or get any complexity added to our powers.

Look into my eyes!

After this initial escape scene, Max goes about her day of messing around with time, after seemingly learning nothing about messing with time before.  What follows is a series of faux-endings as you jump back through time over and over to try and piece together the puzzle of how to stop Jefferson and save everyone else.  The episode does it’s best to talk about fate and destiny without ever mentioning the words themselves.

Here Life is Strange does a good job of first pulling the strings on all your hard thought of choices, then giving you the happy ending you thought you wanted, only to pull that away too.  The lead in into a trippy, paradoxical world of endless hallways, and Walt Disney like light up animatronic displays of all your choices once certainly and interesting way to go.  It did a good job of literally highlighting your experience through the story, as well as feeding both the guild Max feels for her choices, as well as adding emotion to the game’s final choice.

An everyday hero.

Unfortunately, I found that this final choice was where Life Is Strange faltered the most.  Though both choices available to you at the end play well emotionally after all the time spent with the two main characters, it feels like there was missed opportunity to go somewhere new here.  And yes, as the title of the review says, I wasn’t surprised with the choices at the end.  Either learn to live and die with your choices, or let fate and destiny do their thing and sort life out for you.

Overall, Life is Strange Episode 5 presented an emotionally gripping finale to Max Caulfield’s, and Chloe’s story.  This emotional connection was well built up and established throughout the story and the episode, and mostly makes up for the fairly obvious plot taking place in the background.  Choices made through the earlier episodes unfortunately make little difference here and weigh little into your final choice.  In the end it would have been nice to see something slightly more original done with this story and it’s characters, but it is still very rewarding to play through Life is Strange and experience the powerful emotional connection of two friends, destined to make an impact on you regardless of your choices.

No caption required

As always, thanks for reading, and be sure to share your experience with Life is Strange Episode 5 in the comments below, and make sure to share!

 

Review: Zombie Vikings

What do you get when you mix zombies, classic beat-em-up game-play, gorgeous hand drawn visuals and Norse mythology?  Zombie Vikings!  From the clever folks at Zoink Games bring their humor and creativity to life in Zombie Vikings.

Zombie Vikings is an homage to classic 90’s side scrolling, button mashing, couch co-op.  Choosing random maps in arcade mode, or jumping into story mode gives you access to one of the 4 initial playable characters.  Each character is a viking, brought back to life by Odin to help retrieve his stolen eye from Loki.  Every character comes with a basic attack and combo from multiple hits of the attack button, the ability to grab and throw both objects and small enemies, and a unique magical attack.  You can charge your attacks by holding down the appropriate button.

Each mission plays out in 2.5D as your 2D animated characters do battle with various monsters, vikings and cats, lots of cats. You’ll encounter a variety of these enemies, and though many of them share similar attack patterns, Zombie Vikings does a good job of mixing each one up slightly, and also adding a diverse grouping of them in each encounter.  Mixing it up in between even more, there are a ton of bosses, mini-bosses and chases scenes to break up the button mashing and you think a little more strategically, or just race across the beautiful hand drawn backgrounds in order to out run a giant slug.

Avast! Ax wielding slug things!

Throughout each zone you’ll also find side quests to embark on.  These are usually pretty straight forward find-and-return quests, but the quirky characters and their specific and amusing needs keep these fresh and interesting throughout.

Sprinkled further into this mix, are a huge variety of bizarre weapons that you can find throughout the game, or purchase for gold at shops you’ll find along the way.  You’ll also be able to equip magical runes to your characters that will give a variety of different buffs to your health, magic or attack.

The artistic style of Zombie Vikings is where it’s at.  The 2D characters and backgrounds are all hand drawn with extreme detail.  Each zone you encounter if full of the ridiculous, the surreal and the downright weird to catch your eye as you battle along.  Though these landscapes are great, it would be nice on occasion to see more animation amongst them to help them really feel alive.  Characters in the background stand motionless, and there is no interactivity for you to play around with.  This feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to add even more fun and hilarity to the game.

It’s a witch! On a stick!

Hilarity is in the heart of this game.  Zombie Vikings is full of humor.  As you play through the story missions you’ll be exposed to the tongue in cheek laughs throughout each short cut scene.   They are wonderfully silly and full of puns.  These cut scenes along with each character are fully voiced as well.  The voice overs are solid and energetic, and each character really feels like their own individual.

Umm penguins, help?

When you combine all these aspects with a few friends online or locally, Zombie Vikings is a load of fun.  It does an excellent job of reaching it’s goal of bringing back to feel of old school gaming, sitting on a couch with a group of your friends vying to power through the game in one sitting.  Though the game is not hard, it offers enough challenge and variation to keep you amused throughout.  Currently available on PlayStation 4, Zombie Vikings will also be released in the near future on Steam, and a stream of content and new characters already seems to be in the plan for future updates.  I suggest you check it out!

As always, thanks for reading, and be sure to comment below and let me know about your experience with Zombie Vikings if you’ve played it!

 

Review: Mad Max

Welcome to the wasteland, time for some good old fashioned revenge.  Enter Mad Max, the grizzled, apocalypse surviving ex-cop with a bad temper, and even worse demeanor.  Brought to us by the folks at Avalanche Games, Mad Max is a terrific open world action game with various RPG elements thrown in to boot.

Dropped in the middle of the wasteland, you take over Max after he’s been beaten, abused and robbed of his beloved V8 after one of the most epic opening scenes experienced in recent memory.  The gist from here is simple.  Get a new ride, and take out the guy who stole it from you.

One of many, many, many, many, many explosions

If you are familiar with games like Assassin’s Creed, Shadow of Mordor or Batman: Arkham Asylum you’ll fall right in line with the basic game-play for Mad Max.  You roam around in third person in a massive, fully explorable map.  At any time you can view this map for insights as to special locations throughout the world.  These locales can be discovered similarly to Assassin’s Creed, by finding view points and explore the world, only this time they come in the form of hot air balloons.

There is a wide variety of missions you can take on, from simple scavenging quests, to races, to taking down powerful convoys, or even invading fortified bases and taking them over.  There is always something to do, and even these similar tasks are made less repetitive by changing up the layouts or objectives in each area.

Each of these will involve combat of some type.  Ammunition is extremely limited early on, so most of this combat will take place either on foot, or in your vehicle.  Ground combat is theatrical thrill, and takes more than a nod from Batman and Shadow of Mordor, with it’s button clicking, counter timing style.  The speed, variety of enemies and attacks, and pure adrenaline it inspires from it’s theatrical approach however makes you completely forget any of the before mentioned similarities to other games.  Combat here is simple to learn, but just a ton of fun to take part in, as Mad Max takes on dozens of enemies at a time with his bare fists, or weapons found laying about.   Later combos also let you perform magnificent kill shots, and use the environment around you to assist in a multitude of ways.

If you aren’t fighting on your feet, you’ll be fighting on your wheels, in your own customizable death machine, better known as the Magnum Opus.  You’ll spend most of your time in your vehicle, building it up from a scrap pile of a dune buggy, to a monstrous machine of death, spikes included!  You can customize and upgrade your vehicle with an assortment of armor and weapons, or configure it into special Archangels which will give you various bonuses to driving or combat.

Early carnage (pun intended) starts with simply ramming objects and other vehicles, but you quickly gain useful accessories, like a harpoon able to rip pieces, or even people off of opposing vehicles, and even taking down towers and snipers and other stationary targets.  Later additions like a rear mounted sniper rifle, and explosive harpoons add to the mayhem.

Meet the Magnum Opus

Throughout the game you will upgrade your vehicle and Mad Max himself by collecting scrap strewn throughout the world.  You can also gain scrap by taking over opposing camps, and building relationships with the leaders of the mighty strongholds.  Managing your scrap intake is a big key, especially early on, to upgrading Max’s abilities and customizing your ride.  For the most part though, besides a few visual choices, most players’ Mad Max will more or less play like everyone else’s, there is simply just not as much uniqueness available in the skill sets, and you can eventually just buy everything, or gain it through either in-game quests, or your notoriety which will raise as you complete quests and accomplishments.

These small misses are generally completely wiped out by the pure scale, scope and feel to the giant, and quite literal, sandbox laid out for you to explore.  The Wasteland is vast, beautiful and treacherous.   You can explore nearly every mountain, valley or distant point with no fear of any invisible walls, or dead ends.  The lack of any loading screen only makes this world seem more massive.

And the Wasteland isn’t just a pretty place to look at.  There are various dangers out there just waiting to kill Mad Max.  Massive dust storms throw debris everywhere, tornadoes appear out of nowhere to knock you off of cliffs, and massive scary as hell thunderstorms destroy nearly everything in their path.  The surroundings are beautiful and deadly, and you’ll never know when to expect attack from roaming patrols, or snipers.

The only major downfall to Mad Max is the story.  After the initial awesomness, the story falls to the background and there is little motivation to proceed with it, except to unlock new upgrades for yourself, or your Magnum Opus.  Though the story does pick up again in the final chapter, you’ll have more fun just exploring the world, blowing up things, and knocking out bad guys.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Sorry, what was your name again?

Regardless of any of it’s shortcomings, Mad Max is a huge amount of fun to play.  There are a couple of different ways to go about the combat, and there is always something else to do.  Completionists will find a ton of items to collect, scrap to find, and historical relics abound in the massive and beautiful environment.  Fans of the movies will also see a variety of call-outs to the series as you explore, though there is an obvious disconnect from direct references to any of the movies.  By far if you are looking for a fun time-killer, and love over the top action and beautiful explosions, Mad Max is a fit for you.

As always, thanks for reading and be sure to comment and like below.  Also, check out my YouTube channel for Let’s Plays and stream  highlights for Mad Max.

Another awesome game!

Review: Reassembly

Reassembly, a 2 dimensional space sim from developer Anisoptera Games with a load of charm.  An exploration sim with building mechanics that lets you explore a procedurally generated galaxy.  As you explore you collect resources and build bigger and better ships to better handle your expanding influence.

The basic premise is pretty simple.  Choosing a basic starting ship and colors to stand out, you’re dropped into the galaxy near some friendly units to start your exploration.  The tutorial guides you through basic game-play to get you started.  From it’s top down perspective, Reassembly has you gathering resources from local meteors and strange space plants that can be returned to owned bases to be converted into more useful resources.

Damaged bases can be captured to help spawn more friendly NPC’s to assist you against the many enemy ships scattered around space.  Unless a ship shares yoru colors they are enemies, and will attack on sight.  More resources can be gained from combat as you destroy these enemies.

Combat in Reassembly is fast and fun.  Ships fly around irradically across the screen depending on their design, firing all sorts of different weapons, from lasers to torpedoes, to chain guns and more. This fast pace is fun and frantic, and though there is little strategy here, you still have to make sure to maneuver smartly around to best take advantage of gun placements and armor.  Armor is mounted all around your ship and can take a certain amount of damage.  As the armor is damaged, it flies off exposing more critical components of your ship.  If you can avoid getting hit long enough, your ship will slowly pull it’s pieces back together again and recover, otherwise expect to be blown up and re-spawning at a nearby friendly base.

Custom grill maybe?

Customization in Reassembly is not only just a visual change, it’s a necessity if you are going to survive exploring the galaxy.  As you gain resources, you will also earn “C” which are used to buy new components for your ship.  These can include weapons, new armor or useful components.  When you enter the customization screen, you’ll find your ship layed out in closeup.  Each component you can utilize has various stick points you can use to connect it to any other component.  It’s very easy to add or subtract parts or weapons you want to and build pretty much whatever you like within the 2 dimensional interface.

The amount and type of parts you can use, is limited by your ship’s “P” which you can upgrade with “C” along the way.  This allows you to add more weapons, armor or utilities  and make larger and larger ships.  It also allows you to add more ships to your fleet.  These are NPC’s that will follow you around and help you in battles.

Lots of parts to choose from and upgrade

The customization screen is where the strategy really exists in Reassembly.  You must carefully build your ship to take advantage of weapon range, direction, and firing means, while balancing armor around your vessel to ensure you can take some damage as you go.  You can also specialize ships for resource gathering or other beneficial specs if you like, or build a jack-of-all-trades ship otherwise.  Each component has multiple sticking points so you can be fairly creative within the 2D limitation.   All throughout you will also need to balance your ship’s energy generation ability to power your weapons and make sure your fighting ability is not hindered by a lack of power.  There are also various pre-built ships you can use as is, or as a starting point for something else.

The colorful visuals for Reassembly keep you engaged at all times.  Explosions fill the screen.  Thrusters burn through space, and the various weapon effects are all unique and make it easy to see what’s coming at you.  The quiet, ambient music helps fill the void of space without adding more to the frantic experience.  The HUD is informative without spoiling the view.  In the top right hand corner you can see  a live closeup of your ship, including any damage that may be accruing so that you can move to avoid death if you’re quick enough.

I can’t hold her together! I’m an engineer not a miracle worker!

Reassembly does a solid job of being fairly easy to learn, but also giving enough customization that those who want to spend hours building the perfect ship can do so equally easily.  It’s simple but fun graphics mean you have a smooth experience throughout with little slow down or hiccups regardless of how much is going on on the screen.  The unlimited replay-ability will have you coming back often to try out new tactics or ship designs.  This is definitely worth checking out if you are into space exploration sims.

As always, thanks for reading, and be sure to comment and like in the space below!

For more fun indie games with a space twist check out Cosmonautica

Review: The Flock

The Flock, an asymmetrical first person game of tag with a twist, when every dies at least once, the game comes to an end.  Unfortunately it’s hard to see the current population of 215 million plus actually wanting to play long enough to die that many times.

The basic premise of The Flock has all players starting off as strange gargoyle like creatures.  Your creature can run, jump and scamper, and when you stand still you become stone, and impervious to your prey.  There are no other attacks or actions, or special moves you can do as the gargoyle.  Your first objective from here is to lactate the light.  The light is basically a big flashlight with a terrible battery.

Once the first player finds the light, the game play changes slightly as you the carrier of the light are now the prey of everyone else and becomes a simpering weak human.  Taking away all the movement advantages of the gargoyle creature, you are left with only the light to protect you.  As the human you can only walk or sprint, you can’t jump or crouch or crawl or anything else.  You’re only protection is your flashlight which can burn up the other players who remain gargoyles.

Here the objectives change slightly, as now you as the human must run and hide from other players, while waiting for objectives to light up that you can activate for extra points.  You also gain points the longer you carry the light.  The other players adversely are trying to find you and attack you to take over the light.  The light however hurts them and their only protection is to stay still to avoid damage.

Well it’s kinda bright

This seems like a interesting concept, but it’s lacking in various areas.  For one, as compared to other asymmetrical games like Evolve, there is absolutely no teamwork involved here.  Everyone is out for there own score and objectives.  There is no in-game chat or any other form of communication to use, nor is there any benefit from working together as each individual is simply trying to get the highest score each match.

The other big issue, is after a match there is literally nothing else left to do.  Each match is the same, regardless of what map you choose to play on.  There is no variation to the game, nor is there any development to your skills or abilities.  There is literally  no replay value here.

The beautiful color pallet astounds

There’s not really much to look at here either.  Visually The Flock is drab and repetitive.  Every map though unique is dark and grey, with very little variety.  Though I will say there are generally some interesting areas to set up ambushes if you’re patient.  Character animations are also very limited, as you can see the gargoyle characters warping across the land and generally looking silly and un-detailed.

Sold as a horror game, there’s little to be afraid of with The Flock aside from wasting too much money on it.  With zero story progression, no replay ability and no other modes to try out, there’s little chance I will see the end game when 215 million other players die.

Thanks for reading, and as always, make sure to comment and like below, and let me know what you thought of The Flock.

Check out my review for Evolve for something much better to play.

Rewind Review: Grandia II

This week we’re headed back to one of my favourite consoles, the Sega Dreamcast to explore Grandia II.  A fantasy RPG set in yet another world of fantasy and magic Grandia II brings with it it’s own charm and unique battle system.  Released in 2000 for the Dreamcast, Grandia II was also later ported to the Playstation 2 and Windows.

Sarcasm much?

Taking the part of Ryudo, a Geohound mercenary, you begin the story by being hired by the Church of Granas to escort a young songstress to an upcoming cermony.  This of course goes horribly wrong, and you are left with saving the songstress, Elena and escorting her to presumed safety with the Pope of the Church of Granas.  Trekking out across the large map, you eventually find yourself with the inevitable task of saving the world.  Seeking the location of the great sword Gransaber, you set off to defeat the evil go Valmar.

Let’s be honest, the overall plot here isn’t that unique, but Grandia II does do a solid job of presenting it.   There are a bunch of twists along the way, and every new character has some interesting background to learn about.  The story does an excellent job of connecting us with each one and making them all feel equally important.

The game is presented in a beautiful, 2.5D graphics.  The colorful and detailed sprites jump off the screen.  The varied environments are even more full of details.  Though this detail goes down somewhat on the battle screens, the characters are still lively and fully animated.  Each character has their own hand drawn head shot that appears during each of their actions.

So much going on.

The instrumental soundtrack that comes along for the ride is sharp and to the point.  It’s not the greatest soundtrack of it’s time, but it’s not bad, and does do a decent job of setting the mood at each phase of the game.  Grandia II does come with a pretty solid voice cast however that does really add a lot to the game.  Having fully voiced characters was also still fairly rare for the turn of the century console game.  This gave the overall game a solid presentation.

General gameplay is fairly traditional when it comes to RPG’s.  Explore the world map, talk to NPC’s in the various cities, and complete a relatively linear line of quests.  All of this any RPG player will be quite used to.  There were no surprises here.  The battle system however was quite unique in it’s design.

Headed to the map!

Taking inspiration from Final Fantasy’s active time battles, Grandia II adds  more layers to the equation.  Characters can move freely around the battle zone depending on their movement points, to either attack or avoid damage and attacks.  They can also perform combos that will lay multiple hits down on the selected enemies.  The really unique feature though, is the initiative bar.  Each character has their own initiative, which creates a sequence actions for all characters involved in the battle.  You’ll have to carefully plan around this initiative to both avoid enemy attacks as well as recover from them appropriately.  Well timed hits can also cancel out actions of various enemies on the screen.

Balancing all of these features makes combat fun and exciting.  You also have to balance each characters health points, magic points and skill points throughout.  Battles are pretty intense and short, with loads of colorful animations to keep you into the action.

The solid story and action of Grandia II allowed it to be one of the best RPG’s on the short lived Dreamcast.  With the various ports and soon to be released Steam version there is still much to enjoy with this game if you happened to miss it.  I suggest you do.

As always thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this week’ Rewind Review.  Keep checking back for more, and don’t forget to like and comment below!

Check out last week’s Rewind Review.

Life is strange Episode 4: Review

The story of Life is Strange is nearly at an end, and with episode 4 comes the biggest emotional roller coaster so far.  There’s a good deal of feels here, and some foreshadowed plot twists finally coming to pass.

Episode 4 drops us right into the alternate present created in the previous episode.  One major change in history has unraveled the complex structure of time and created a new world.  In this new world, tragedy and happiness are mixed in equally and you are left to decide the fates of the character’s closest to you.  Despite what you choose to do, this first scene ranges from heartwarming to completely heartbreaking and is filled with tough choices.  The realization for main character Max Caulfield by the end of this chapter is that these powers of rewind may be more dangerous than helpful as previously thought.  We also lose some of the sting of the scene, as we immediately traverse back to set it right.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.

After this early heartfelt scene, you’re lead directly back into the mystery aspect of what is going on in Blackwell Academy.  Though a slow paced episode, clues as to the reality of the situation are regularly found as you progress.  There is also a lack of the redundant quests here.  Almost every action directly supports the main story line, rather than feel like filler to keep you in the game longer.  Though the pacing is quite slow, this fact alone makes the episode feel more full and important than some of the previous episodes.

Meanwhile, outside of this mystery of missing persons, and drugs, outlying factors continue to change around you.  The vision Max had of destruction at the very beginning of the series, seems ever prevalent, as signs of it are emerging more frequently.  Beached whales, dying birds and strange weather patterns are constantly focused on by the characters.  This with clues of other bigger events going on around the town are regularly mentioned in the same sentence with the game’s primary nemesis the Prescott family.  Whether these strange occurrences have something to do with them, or are entirely related to Max’s powers of rewind have yet to be revealed.

When it comes to Max’s powers themselves, expect to be a little disappointed, as this episode of Life is Strange reverts greatly in their use.  Only one puzzle in the episode requires their use, and only really one scene in particular about mid way through the episode urges to use them otherwise.  Though this step back in the frequency of their use does tie together somewhat with the overall story, it seems a bit of a waste that we aren’t give more choice as whether or not to use these powers now knowing that there may be some consequence from them.  I feel leaving more choices like this in the hands of the player would have better reflected the game’s intent that these powers are as dangerous as they are helpful.  We also don’t get anything new from the powers when we do get to use them.  The same basic puzzle mechanic exists, and the same, go-back-and-change-your-last-choice mechanism is also unchanged.  It is just a shame that these powers are not being developed with each episode as well as the story is, and seems like a major missed opportunity.

One new game play mechanic that is added to this episode, is a short scene where you must puzzle together all the clues you’ve found so far.  Though it only takes a few minutes to figure out the fairly simple puzzles, it does at least give you something different to do and adds another small opportunity to use your powers when you screw up.

Detective Max hard at work.

As the story unfolds we get our first really major plot twist near the end.  Those of you were paying close attention during early episodes however, would have likely seen the foreshadowing of this particular plot point already.  That aside, the twist still works well, and is otherwise executed well.   The end scene still has enough shock value, even if you saw some of it coming already to be a very good cliffhanger entry into the final episode.

Though most of the grounded portion of the mysteries of Blackwell Academy have been revealed at this point, there’s still a significant amount going on that hasn’t been made clear.  Whether the strange going on’s around the city of Arcadia are due to Max’s powers, or something else that may have inadvertently caused Max’s powers in the first place is still in play.  There is still a major mystery to be solved here, and potentially some major reworking of history as well to resolve it all.

What do you suppose that is?

I do hope however that the writers are able to find a unique way to end the story, and not go the fairly overdone route that most time travel stories such as this tend to go with the heroes going back in time to stop themselves from ever existing, or affecting the time stream.  We’ve seen this a great deal already and unfortunately it does feel as though this game my end on a similar note which in my mind would be quite disappointing.  The characters in this story are well written enough that they deserve a better end than this.

In the end, episode 4 gives us a ton to think about, and makes you feel a variety of emotions throughout.  This range of emotions throughout Life Is Strange Episode 4 creates one of the better episodes yet in the series, and we can only hope the conclusion takes on a similar ride.

As always, thank for reading, and be sure to like and comment below.  What decisions did you make in this episode?  What was your experience like?  

You can catch up on the previous episode here.