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.

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!

 

All Things End: Kingdom – Review

All things end.  This is the tagline for Kingdom, a simple, pixel art tower defense game with a whole lot of charm.  It’s a whimsical journey into a vast land laid before you to conquer or fall depending on the choices you make.

This is the tutorial, that’s it, now go!

Almost everything in Kingdom is simple, except for success.  As you drop into the simple, but detailed pixel art world, you’ll be given a short tutorial as to the basic functions in your procedurally generated world, with your also random king or queen.  A few lines of text are all the instruction you get as you ride into the world.  The concepts are simple too, collect gold coins throughout the world, and either give them to the denizens surrounding your camp, or use them to purchase and upgrade your camp itself.

You start with enough gold to start a basic camp, recruit a couple of peasants, upgrade them to archers or builders, and build basic defenses.  From that point you have to figure things out on your own.  Kingdom does nothing to let you know what to do next, except to explore, expand and survive.

As the sun arcs across the sky, and becomes night, the survival aspect becomes clear.  Each night you will be randomly attacked by strange creatures.  These creatures will throw themselves against your fortifications and steal gold coins and equipment from your peasants.  If they attack your liege you will lose any coins you may be carrying, and eventually they will knock the very crown from your head.  If you are unable to retrieve the crown before one of the demons does, it’s game over.  These attacks will randomly include a red moon, which brings more fiends and creepy flying beasts that will literally suck up your workers and carry them into the night.

Well this can’t be good…

If you haven’t prepared well enough during the day, these attacks can be devastating, even if survived.  It was common during my play-through’s to simply abandon hours of work after a severe attack as it would be nearly impossible to rebuild in time.

As you expand your kingdom outwards, and grow your encampment, you’ll find alters and monuments throughout the world that will assist you.  The game however makes you experiment with these the first time around to figure out what they do.  After a few runs however, you’ll discover that there are only a few of these and you’ll stop finding surprises.  The only thing that will change from run to run, will be the location of these monuments, but eventually with enough planning and patience you will be able to unlock everything regardless.  This felt like a missed opportunity from the developers to throw in new snags to each game of Kingdom by either limiting which monuments spawn, or by throwing in a few others with random properties that may or may not spawn with each game.  This would have added a nice layer of replay-ability beyond just the random spawn locations.

Check out this hilarious play-through from Weird Wizard Dave

Because of these limitations, once you get the idea of the game, only you, the player can create new challenges for yourself.  It’s fairly easy to create a bustling kingdom if you know how, and it’s easy to repeat the steps over and over in order to reach the game’s win condition of protecting the crown.  Once you figure this out, the only challenge remaining is to create your own obstacles by deciding where not to spend your coins and where to make the game harder.  The lack of a difficulty setting, or more random events or options puts a big limit on Kingdom’s longevity.

Other issues that reside in Kingdom is the balance of pace, and the usefulness of your liege.  As king, or queen, your only ability is to collect and spend coins to recruit and build.  As night falls, all you can do is watch to see if you did enough during the day to survive.  There is very little interaction or any real type of micromanagement available beyond deciding what to build, when and where.  These means a lot of long nights where you either watch your defenses mow through dozens of enemies, or see your kingdom fall as all you can do is run around and try to avoid being taken down yourself.  The rest of the time, you’ll find yourself running back and forth through your eventually massive kingdom to collect the necessary coins to expand to the next wall or point of interest.  Near the end, it can take you a whole day of game time to simply run from one end of your kingdom to another.

Progress!

Issues aside, Kingdom is still a very solid game.  Though it eventually lacks some re-play-ability and the pace isn’t always great, most of these issues can be easily solved through creating your own challenges, or potential updates down the road from the developer Noio.  The procedurally generated world, and learning curve will still give you hours of play time in order to secure your crown.

As always, thanks for reading, and be sure to share your experiences with Kingdom below in the comments.

Follow Noio on Twitter for more information on Kingdom and other projects

Another great Indie Game!

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.

Review: Cosmonautica

Space.  The final frontier.  What waits for us, out there?  Awesome trading opportunities for us to make tons of cash of course!  Welcome to Cosmonautica.  A cute, funny, fairly solid game with a few issues that help it become just not that good.  Release on July 31st this year, Cosmonautica does have a lot going for it, but struggles in a few areas that would make it a great, highly addictive game otherwise.

When you first load up Cosmonautica, your given the choice of following the story driven campaign, or the open world where you can do whatever you like with no linearity getting in the way.  In either game mode however, you will take control of a small ship and head out in a mostly 2D adventure into space.

I gots trades!

At the beginning of either game, you’re given a ship and a lump of cash to get started off.  Cash, or credits, are primarily used to buy upgrades to your ship, which come in the form of upgrade-able rooms that you can place throughout.  Rooms range from basic living quarters, to washrooms, to medical and science facilities, and of course weapon rooms.  You can place these rooms wherever there is adequate space in your ship, and get access to a side view cross section of your ship in order to due so. Beyond efficient space use however, there doesn’t’ seem to be any advantages or disadvantages to where you place these rooms.

Once your ship is prepped with the basic rooms, you need to hire crew to fill various roles on board.  Pilots quicken your pace, and add maneuverability in combat, scientists conduct research and operate your shields, gunners shoot, and so on.  Each of these classes generally have a room specified for their use, and though you can recruit them with the proper room, it’s pointless as they will be of little use and gain no experience.  Experience levels your crew up, and gives them special skills, along with upgrading them with skill points which you can either assign to their main skill, or a random new skill to help fill out your ship’s needs.

What you’ll spend most of your time looking at

Regardless of whether you choose story mode or open world, you will primarily spend your time roaming from planet to planet.  Each planet offers a randomized arrangement of trade able goods, missions and personnel to hire.  Most of your early missions will have you transporting goods or people from planet to planet in an effort to make enough credits to upgrade your rooms, or ship entirely.  All the missions are pretty straight forward, but do come with time limits, as each jump to another planet takes time and you need to balance your missions carefully with travel time.  Take on too many missions may face you with heavy fines if you are not able to complete them in the given time.

Later on you’ll be able to engage in more dangerous missions like smuggling and combat.  Smuggling missions are a simple act of making sure your tech, rooms and crew members are of high enough level to disguise whatever contraband you may have on board, and area really just deliver missions not unlike the other early quests.  Combat missions however turn the game on it’s nose.

The local solar system

Entering into combat in Cosmonautica is almost game breaking.  Battles are slow, long winded affairs.  Ships are equipped with only a few weapons at most, and limited ammunition.  There’s no phaser or laser fire here.  You have limited maneuvering control of your ship, and are basically restricted to four flight patterns, circle around, fly by, collision course, or flee.  None of these seem to work well however.  You are also very limited by how much ammo you can store.  These battle are long, really long and most will end with both ships running out of ammo, and you having to hail the other ship to settle terms.  These terms generally ending up being 0 credits, and are really just time wasters.  If I didn’t mention it before, battles are long, so long in fact during one occasion my crew actually went to sleep during battle, causing me to not be able to activate shields or fire my weapons, as both my scientist and gunner had gone to bed.  The reward for the battle I eventually won was minimal and felt like a huge waste of time compared to the really lucrative option to earning credits, trade.

Yes, my gunner is sleeping in the middle of the fight

Trade in Cosmonautica is by far the easiest way to earn funds.  Each planet has a list of exports and imports, and trade is as simple as taking advantage of low price exports, and trading them at planets that are in need of those same items as imports.  Most of your time in Cosomnautica will be spent looking for deals, and adding cargo space to your hull in order to carry more goods.  You will spend a lot of time trading, traveling and avoiding combat during your time with the game.  Luckily a fast forward option is available for travel.

Story mode has you following a loose chain of linear missions revolving around your captain’s memory loss, and a mysterious box he was found with.  Though the story is mostly well written and funny, once you get into the game, there’s never really a huge urge to continue on with the story, it’s usually more interesting to just try and build up your crew and ship as much as possible.  There’s also no time limit to story missions, so no sense of urgency is ever given to complete them.  There’s also no real choice as to how to proceed through the story outside of a few minor decisions, and it seems to waste the potential of the open galaxy environment.

Hi Lady!

Cosmonautica brings with it a lot of visual charm.  The colorful, cartoon-like graphics are a lot of fun and there are tons of details throughout both your ship and the world to look at.   As you travel from planet to planet, you get a side view of your ship to look at.  Zooming in opens up the cross section view, and you can watch your crew busy at work, at play, or showering as needs be.  It can be fun to watch this for a time, though generally you’ll find yourself fastforwarding and not paying them much attention.

Outside of this, there are several other mechanics at play.  You’ll of course do research as you fly around, researching new rooms, and upgrades to existing rooms.  You will also have to research the solar systems and galaxy to advance to new areas.  There is also a needs simulation a la Sims that you need to address as you level up your crew members.  Higher level crew members expect more, and you have to build the appropriate facilities or upgrades to keep them happy.  Crew members also have traits which affect how they get along with other people.  This can result in bonuses as happy crew members will catch fire and work more efficiently, or adversely go on strike and stop performing their duties.  You’ll have to carefully balance your crew’s levels with the appropriate need fillers as you proceed.

Two of the three basic weapons you can buy

All of these factors give you a bit to juggle, but I never felt overwhelmed at any point.  The game offers tons of helpful hints as you proceed, or you can choose to turn these off and figure it out for yourselves.

Terrible, terrible combat aside, there’s still a lot to enjoy about Cosmonautica.  The trade system is well built, and it can be addictive trying to build up your crew and ship.  The downside here however is there are limited choices as to what you can build, and how much you can upgrade them, meaning after awhile there isn’t much left to do except explore, or earn more credits.  Hopefully the developers can address these downfalls in later updates, and especially work on the combat to make it more fun and interactive.  Cosmonautica is available now on Steam, and is definitely worth a try if you are into space trading sims.

As always, thanks for reading, and be sure to comment and like below and let me know what you think of Cosmonautica.

For another solid indie release check out The Bug Butcher 

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.