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The Yawhg – PC Review

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By the end of one of my playthroughs of The Yawhg the hospital had fallen, I had become a werewolf, a giant demon baby had crashed the arena, and there was a leech pandemic. My character, clad in red, spent her six weeks mainly in the forest and slums whilst the other three heroes spent their weeks instead by brewing potions, drinking in the tavern, and helping the ill in the hospital – until it was destroyed by a vampire, unfortunately.

The Yawhg is a local co-op choose your own adventure game, there is no online multiplayer and it allows 1 – 4 players, although two characters must be picked regardless of how many players. The player is informed in-between weeks of the impending Yawhg attack (which is essentially a massive storm and tempest, thought apart from this description it’s unclear what exactly The Yawhg is) and within the six weeks available the player (or players) build up stats from visiting areas, for example landscaping in the gardens adds 1 finesse, 1 physique and earns the player one wealth. Throughout The Yawhg there are eight areas to choose: the arena, the gardens, the hospital, the palace, the slums, the alchemy tower, the tavern, and the forest. All areas can only be chosen once per week which means that multiple characters embark on different adventures in other areas and can continue storylines that previous characters had started, such as one character growing a beanstalk in the gardens and the next week another character would nurture it and help it grow…. Or eat it, if they preferred.

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Clearly, The Yawhg is a different experience from most games and it’s a refreshing experience at that. The gameplay is simplistic; you choose your hero, choose an area to build up stats or explore and from there the hero is placed in a situation, an example would be a hero that frequently visited the tavern would have to deal with bar brawls, terrible musicians, and the difficult choice of deciding whether or not to spectate or enter the drinking contest. The game is driven by an excellent narrative, written by Damian Sommer, backed up with beautifully drawn visuals by Emily Carroll, and completed with a hauntingly beautiful soundtrack by Ryan Roth with the vocal talent of Halina Heron. It doesn’t surprise me that The Yawhg has nominated for an Independent Games Festival Award for narrative and audio, and received an honourable mention for both the visual category and overall grand prize.

If one were to play The Yawhg by themselves I would estimate the completion time to be around seven to ten minutes long. However, with one friend (as I have tested) the run lasts around twenty minutes to half an hour but if you are able to invite four friends to play then the run is significantly longer, lasting around an hour. There are dozens of variations of in-game situations and even epilogues at the end of the story but these situations will be repeated playthrough after playthrough, however I believe there is enough variability in each new playthrough to ignore the repeated situations.

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The Yawhg can be purchased on Steam after a successful greenlight campaign for, but if a DRM copy is preferred then it can be directly purchased from The Yawhg’s official website.

Overall Conclusion: A story rich local co-op game with stunning graphics and music, however, it’s very short but offers plenty replay value.

Recommended?: Yes

Price: £6.99 (Steam)/ $10 (official site)

Games similar: Any choose your own adventure games, Dungeons of Fayte

Where can you buy it?: http://www.theyawhg.com/ or http://store.steampowered.com/app/269030/ and the soundtrack can be found here: http://dualryan.bandcamp.com/album/the-yawhg-ep


The Last Tinker: City of Colors – PC Review

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“A Colorful Game That Exceeds Expectations”

Last month I penned a brief preview of The Last Tinker: City of Colors, a platform game slated for a summer 2014 release by Mimimi Productions. I wrote that the game was a fun, colorful experience that hinted at things we love from other games while bringing some fresh new energy to the table. Recently I was lucky enough to be given the chance to do a full game review for The Last Tinker, and I was so pleased to find that the game continued upward and only got better as I played on. The game gives you a simple story outline to start out with: Your name is Koru and you live in Tinkerworld, a beautiful place where anything is possible if your creative mind is up for the challenge, but where segregation has separated the people into four districts based on their color. You are a charismatic young fellow living amongst people clearly different from you, and you have gifts that even you don’t know about yet. A great evil is threatening to wipe out all the colors of Tinkerworld, and it’s up to Koru to stop it by finding out just what makes him so special.

The gameplay of The Last Tinker is nothing particularly new; it seems to run as a blend of a speed comparable to the Sonic the Hedgehog series, but breaks for fun and entertaining puzzles. The combat is not especially worth mentioning, as it feels more like an afterthought that wasn’t truly a necessary part of gameplay. As the game progresses, and more moves and abilities are added (and there are a LOT of them), the combat steadily improves albeit remaining very repetitive. However that hiccup is easily overlooked in a game that clearly relies much more on aesthetic and energy than combat.

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One of the most delightful aspects of The Last Tinker is your squeaky, sheep-like companion, Tap, who gives the game so much personality from its adorable little sounds to its loving attachment to Koru. Seeing as Koru has chosen to be a silent hero, Tap does most of your speaking for you and often with just a hint of sass and humor. Tap also works as a navigation system and a guide, and this one of the rare times when that type of character isn’t universally found to be rather annoying to deal with.

I have few real complaints about The Last Tinker, but they should be noted. The movement mechanics feel awkward and the use of forced jumping is difficult to adjust to. Despite what I assume was an effort to try a new and different model of movement, this ends up being very frustrating to deal with due to a rather touchy system. This is a minor complaint really, but something that if it were improved would have made for a much more pleasant game experience.

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Another small issue I take with this game is in the sheer amount of dialogue that takes place. A game that is so visually stimulating starts to feel slightly bogged down by excessive amounts of explanation and information. While I enjoyed learning about the history and inhabitants of Tinkerworld, after a while I found myself trying to simply get through the unnecessary speaking parts. It makes me wonder if some of these sequences could have been left out, or perhaps conveyed in a more entertaining way.

As I noted in my preview article, it was the music of this game that stuck with me long after I finished playing. The lovely soundtrack makes subtle changes as you enter new parts of the world, but always stays simple and pleasing to the ear. Each level had a distinct musical track that really set the right mood for the challenges ahead. The score of a game really has the potential to keep you sucked in and with the music of The Last Tinker, I felt completely captivated the entire time.

I predicted in my initial preview of The Last Tinker that it would be a game that would appeal to many and leave no one wanting and I stand by that thought. Mimimi Productions makes smart choices in stating The Last Tinker will be released on many different platforms, and that those playing on PC will be able to enjoy controller support if they so choose. And as it happens, this sort of game may benefit from being played that way. I recommend The Last Tinker for those looking for a joyful and unique gaming experience that will have them whistling the soundtrack long after the credits roll.

Always Sometimes Monsters – PC Review

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I stumbled upon Always Sometimes Monsters several months ago and since then I’ve been intrigued to how they their choice system would work. Choice has been a rather big selling point nowadays, nothing more proves that than the extraordinary success of Telltale’s The Walking Dead and Bioware’s popularity, given that both companies’ games promise that their story will tailor to the player and their choices. Always Sometimes Monsters advertises that it will focus on relationships and consequence and having played The Walking Dead, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect I’d say Always Sometimes Monsters handled it best.

The plot of Always Sometimes Monsters follows your player character, a struggling writer, dealing a recent split with their significant other and deciding to travel across the country to win them back, of which you only have 30 days to do so. It’s simplistic but it does pave the way to introducing interesting characters and creating moral dilemmas. Always Sometimes Monsters is a game where you should go in unspoiled and be prepared for everything it throws at you, and seeing as it deals with such issues as racism, homophobia, sexual assault, and suicide it is going to throw everything at you and it won’t hold back.

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Most of the issues dealing with racism and homophobia in Always Sometimes Monsters is due to the player’s ability to make their protagonist any gender, race, and sexual orientation. The homophobic and racist characters will treat the protagonist differently based on their appearance and preference. An example of this would be the landlord of the protagonist’s apartment, when I had played an Asian protagonist he had called me a “Little China Girl” and later when dealing with a rude doctor he states something about how he had fought in the Vietnam War. While most of the bigoted characters are just jerks, there are some noticeable bigots who just aren’t bad people when you get to know their character, which can make situations difficult as although you know their infuriating prejudices you can sympathise with them, or completely call them out and refuse to help.

Earlier I had praised the choice system of Always Sometimes Monsters, and while it does offer consequences of doing certain actions I believe it is much better at making the player actually feel accountable for their actions. I would advise people go into Sometimes Always Monsters with as little spoilers as possible (as even things like the character selection can be considered a spoiler!), however for the purposes of giving an example of how the choices work, I will go over the first set of choices.

Your protagonist awakes with two notes slid under their door, one note telling them they’re a deadbeat and set to be evicted if they don’t pay up and the other offering work for the day from the protagonist’s good friend but after leaving your room you can stumble upon your friendly elderly neighbour who offers to pay you for helping her with her chores. If the protagonist chooses to help their friend they’ll be paid significantly more but if the neighbour is helped then you can learn about her, her life… or possibly steal all of her money to pay off your $500 rent.

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Sometimes Always Monsters is extremely well written, but I’m aware many people will be put off with its simplistic graphics, which are very reminiscent of RPG Maker and the Harvest Moon series. When having dealt with the major event of the day you are free to spend the rest of the day to sleep or interact with characters, but you will mainly spend this free time working whether it is just to speed the day along or because you need money – and you will need money. There are a multitude of jobs that are available to the protagonist from working as a bartender, at a daycare, in a slaughterhouse to helping out at a weedfarm, and these feel mundane but they’re supposed to, and while I’m aware of that and know their completely optional it did drag on a tad. Another slight problem I found is for those that tend to bash enter too fast, in a dialogue tree if enter is pushed it will automatically choose the first choice, which can lead to problems and reloading so I would advise waiting until the character stops speaking.

With that being said, I can think of no overly major problems with Always Sometimes Monsters as long as you know what you’re in for. There’s no major gameplay and the controls consist of mainly enter, the arrows keys and Esc, and these keys can be changed. Always Sometimes Monsters also enables gamepad support, if that is the preferred method. It is utterly story driven and I have found myself in love with some of the quirkier characters, and feeling real sympathy for the characters who feel totally down and out, I care for the characters and the plot and I wanted to root on my hero, even if they were to blame for most of their own misfortune. If you can ignore the occasional grinding for money there’s a very intriguing story, and with the amount of choices I can see why Always Sometimes Monsters was being hyped as a future indie gem, and in my opinion, it exceeded my expectations.

Publisher: Devolver Digital

Developer: Vagabond Dog

Price: £6.29 (Steam)/$9.99 (Humble)

Store Page:

Summary: Surprisingly dark and gritty, some choices will haunt you. Many will be put off by the graphical style and mundane jobs but a well written game that is very much worth your money if you value story.

Recommended?: Yes

Divinity: Original Sin – PC Review

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“What’s a corpse doing here alone?”

“What, did you expect it to have an entourage?!”

A band of heroes is trapped in the entrance porch of a prison, the ceiling is slowly descending, in a minute there will be nothing left of them but a pile of bone dust with sand stained red underneath. A dwarf and a gnome managed to avoid the portcullis dropping behind the party. To help aid their friends they climb to the roof to disable the trap’s mechanism. They pry off roof tiles and find cogs, their first thought is to urinate on the whirling metal. The party below feel drips of warm liquid dropping on their heads. Finally the dwarf releases an almighty blow with his hammer and destroys the trap from above. Dungeons and Dragons, as I have said previously, is the ultimate in ‘do what you want’ gaming. Logic isn’t dictated by a programmer, using a door as a shield or starting a city-wide fire are completely sensible options in a world where you make the choices. For years I’ve craved this kind of logic in a game and finally I have found the best example yet in the form of Divinity Original Sin.

The Divinity games have been around for a while now and have stretched across many genres. Recently though, Larian, the studio behind Original Sin, took to Kickstarter to get funding for their latest release, then after a long period of Steam Early Access we now have the final release of the game to play on PC.

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Divinity Original Sin is not for the faint of heart, this is a truly deep and complex RPG. At first the character creator looks quite simple, you’re picking the looks of your adventurers and scrolling through the multitude of classes. Then you realise that is just the surface, you then have the feats and abilities and points to share out. You can make some quick choices and let the computer auto choose for you or you can potentially create a broken character from the get go with mismatched abilities and points.

You control 2 characters at first, which means your initial choice should ideally balance the two, I chose a ranger with high dexterity and strength with an intelligent mage for backup. The pair went off for adventure starting on a beach with the hope of solving a murder. Very quickly I lost track of the plot and started falling deeper and deeper into the trap of not knowing where I was going and falling into random adventures miles away from my goal.

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And that’s where we hit my only real gripe with this game, I had little clue what I was doing or where I was going the vast majority of the time. The game is a fairly standard affair for anyone who has played a game like Baulder’s Gate or Neverwinter Nights, click to move and when in combat its turn based action point spending fun. I found my way to the main city near by and started hunting for a contact, much time had passed and I realised that the game had done away with classic ‘Big Exclamation Mark’ on the map style gameplay, you needed to read signs, you need to ask questions and most of all; you need to pay attention.

Divinity Original Sin takes no prisoners when it comes to its difficulty, this isn’t a pick up and play game, this is a game that requires you to read everything on-screen; whether it’s a tip, a conversation or an item description. On one hand this is good for immersion, but after playing for a number of hours I found myself only skim reading and missing great reams of text about a potential adventure I could go off on.

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The reason I brought up D&D at the start is because this game takes everything from it. If you have a fire you need to put out then just use a rain spell near by. If you have an ice familiar with you, let an enemy kill it and then they will slip on the pieces of ice, if you then melt that ice with a fire spell you can then use lightning to shock nearby enemies thus doing more damage. The game, on occasions, allows you to think outside of the traditional gaming box and try something different, sure it doesn’t always work but when it does it really feels good.

The turn based combat is amazingly strong and rather than with most turn based games it manages to maintain flow and momentum keeping you looking for that next scrap. Each character has a set number of Action Points and movement and your different attacks all take up a set amount, if you want to do one of your strongest attacks you may have to save up your Action Points for a couple of turns. This kind of freedom means that you can really get tension but also enjoyment out of most brawls. Having the party with you gives extra tactical challenge as you try to encourage flanking, attack mixes and just staying alive.

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The soundtrack to this game is a thing of beauty, it hits all of your traditional RPG musical needs but also brings some new epic sounds to the party. The graphics in this game have the potential to look amazing but, be warned, this game is brutal on your machine. For a game that looks perspectively simple it has the potential to ask a lot of your gaming rig and leave it wanting. On the lowest settings, which I chose so I could enjoy silky smooth frame rate, the game still looks great but don’t be surprised if the frame rate drops during big effects sections of the game.

With a real open feel to the game and a depth that very few RPG’s are willing to strive for you can easily get your money’s worth from this game. There is multiplayer available but for the sake of not having a chaotic evil weirdo in the party I just stuck with single player. For £30 you can’t go wrong with Divinity Original Sin, this game is everything a pen and paper role player could want from their PC games, depth, fun, logic and faithfulness to its source, Divinity Original Sin has the potential to rekindle many true RPG fans feelings to the genre.

Pure Pool – PC Review

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In 1991 on my brother’s Amiga I played Jimmy White’s Whirlwind Snooker. It set me up for something that would bug me for the rest of my real and virtual life. With every real and virtual game of pool I’ve played I can see the angles perfectly, like an eccentric TV detective with words flying around my head I can see where I need to hit a ball and when each respective bounce will go. Unfortunately me being me I have the only two ways to do a shot on a pool table; move the ball half an inch or smack it as hard as the Hulk taking on a Whack a Mole game. Obviously these speed settings aren’t ideal.

Pool Pure from VooFoo Studios is something on an anomaly, a pool game with scope and vision that has stretched further than just being top down, a free web game, or an iOS game. Rather than being a first experiment by a developer into physics this is a true pool game that should impress most fans of the sport. The game is based around the various American games as opposed to British red and yellow rules. A lot of the game is being sold on its DNA Profiles, despite the creepy name this is a feature that’s appearing in a number of games these days and it’s fascinating. After a few games of Pure Pool a profile is made for you where it assesses and works out your play style, tactics and general attitude. With this your friends can play against a version of you when you’re not online. Despite the worrying ability of the game to read your mind it actually adds something a bit different to a game that could have easily been a bit stale in its nature.

Unfortunately this game is not built for track pads and lap top keyboards, for the best results use a gamepad. My game wouldn’t recognise when I was using the track pad and the keys at the same time, this is kind of essential if you’re looking to put spin on a ball. Thankfully with a regular mouse or a gamepad all of the little abilities you can use to perfect your shot can be harnessed to their full potential.

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The screenshots that litter this review should make it clear what one of Pure Pool’s biggest selling points is, hot damn this game is beautiful. Don’t get me wrong, your computer wont be grateful, but if you’re able to then you need to have every setting cranked up to full and just love the shininess of it all. When going to pot the black you will get a slow-mo bullet time effect as the cue hits the ball sending blue chalk everywhere, sure this is all pre-done animation etc, but that doesn’t stop it being great to see, again; if your computer can handle it.

This game isn’t insanely labour intensive on your machine but to get the full effect you could do without the slight frame rate issues a smaller machine might suffer from. What I find odd about this however is that the game screams “casual business man in a hotel or on a commute”, and not “COD player needing a break”. Obviously there is some stereotyping there as I can fully admit I loved the game and I don’t wear a suit to work. My point is that it’s hard for a game that ostensibly is a table and some balls to destroy a processor.

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The pool table you play on in the game is located in some trendy bar, one so trendy I wouldn’t have got in in real life. In the back ground faceless ethereal ghosts wander around trying to find their partner for the afterlife, or they’re just sprites in the darker background. Either way the entire game is sound tracked with lounge jazz, a type of music I should hate by all rights as with any objective view it’s awful, however in a setting like this it’s perfect. The game gives the tracks cheesy names like you’re playing Outrun on the Mega-Drive. The sound track is there, like everything else in the game, to aide you and to support you in not being distracted from the main point, getting the ball in the pocket.

I often talk in my reviews about fun, something we often forget about with games, something we seemed to have lost in our haste for graphics and hard hitting stories. Pure Pool brings fun back, it may not be the laugh out loud or action packed game you may be used to, but on those late Friday nights or Sunday mornings when you don’t want anything too heavy, you want to start winding down, Pure Pool is the ultimate in chill out games. Much like Proteus, Flower and, for me, Mirrors Edge; Pure Pool is a game that will take away hours of your life without you even realising.

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To put it simply, if you enjoy pool at take it even remotely seriously when you play in a bar then you should play this game. Sure it’s not a one to one simulation, but it captures enough of the skill required and strategy of pool to give more hardcore fans something to come in for. The casual market may struggle with the sheer power needed to get the great graphics and the nigh-on requirement of using a game pad. Overally Pure Pool is a clear sign that when down right this sports genre is something that can be more than just a flash game and have some quality and thought behind it.

CounterSpy – PS4 / PS3 / Vita Review

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Being aged 28 and British I have little to no knowledge of the Cold War. It’s something I know is referenced a lot in films and something I know is brought up by lazy journalists every time Russia is naughty, but other than that my experience is limited. To me the whole thing was international dick swinging contest held between Russia and the US, though as opposed to using their real sausages they went abstract and showed off their nuclear war heads. In CounterSpy you get to live those heady times and enjoy all the propaganda and scare mongering that comes with it through action/stealth platforming.

In CounterSpy you play as an agent who works for “C.O.U.N.T.E.R.” the most obviously named counter intelligence agency in the world, that being said at no point did I see the game tell me what C.O.U.N.T.E.R stood for, my guess is “Cool Outfit Uncle Nigel Top Elegant Ruff”. As an agent of C.O.U.N.T.E.R. you aren’t attached to either political party within America or Russia, or as this tactful game calls them “The Imperialists” and “The Socialists”. The two super powers are in a race to the moon, unfortunately it’s not with dogs in space suits or earth worms, instead they’re playing a game of chicken and the first to blink will be sending a nuke up to the cheese ball in the sky. C.O.U.N.T.E.R. doesn’t want this, and sees the best way to deal with this imminent threat is to break into numerous Imperialist and Socialist bases and sabotage equipment and steal plans for the launch. Once you have reached a certain number of launch plans you have won the game.

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Your character, the agent, who is oddly reminiscent of Frankenstein from 1975’s Death Race 2000, must break into these bases and grab plans, intel, memos, new weapon designs and formulas. Formulas and Weapon blueprints come in the same way, when you find a safe on the level you gain a piece of a plan, once you’ve completed the plan you can then purchase it from the shop you access at the start of each level. The game is based around Defcon ratings, if you die in a level, get caught or just generally screw up the Defcon level lowers, get it down to 1 and that’s game over, the world is destroyed with nukes.

There are 3 ways to get your Defcon back to a reasonable level, for sake of ease just think of Defcon ratings as lives. The first way to get them down is to complete a level, you could also use a formula that costs a fair amount of money to lower it by one. Finally some levels contain high-ranking officers, generally wearing white uniforms, if there are any on your level you can kill everyone except them in a room and point your gun at them, once they surrender your level lowers.

At the start of each in-game ‘day’ you have a choice of going and doing a mission in the US or Russia, each will display perks, one may have $2000 of intel but the other has 2 weapon plans within it, strategy is a must at this point, some may have 1 plan and other missions have 4. Once you have collected all the plans the game sends you to whichever country has the highest Defcon rating, at which point you must complete a long and tough level without rockets being fired and sabotage a nuke.

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This game is made to be replayed, it’s like Dead Rising or Spelunky or any other numerous games that are perspectively short but long if you allow them to be. I completed the game in an evening, I only died twice in the whole game and didn’t lose a continue, however there were many moments where I sat for a few minutes waiting for a pattern of guards to go in my favour to allow a silenced bullet to take someone out. Once you’ve finished normal difficulty the next one unlocks, all weapons are removed from your possession, however you keep the blueprints so you just need to save up to re-buy them again. Weapons range from pistols to shotguns to machine guns, my personal favourite is the shotgun with a silencer on it, one shot with that deals with most in a wonderfully quiet way.

Counterspy keeps controls to the most simple, I played through the entire campaign on Vita and all the different controls felt perfectly mapped. Often when playing cross-buy games you will notice the  lack of L2 and R2 as the developer shoe horns in some touch screen element. CounterSpy thankfully doesn’t suffer from this. The whole experience felt fluid and despite some issues with the enemy detecting you when coming up for a stealth take down, I didn’t put this down to the system, just the programming. When you’re behind cover the camera moves from a 2D platformer angle to a 3rd person shooter, from here you can line up your headshots and pick people out from cover. If you aim your gun outside of cover a laser guides you as to where your bullet will hit. Technically the 2D would be easier to kill enemies with as you have less variables, unfortunately your body can only take so many new holes before you drop.

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The game uses a mixture of styles to get its image across; namely propaganda, Pixar and Jazz. The whole game screams cartoon and eccentricity but it also has a number of little details that really make it. Like with a number of games these days you could easily miss a lot of the fun if you’re not paying attention, but if you care to look at things like the posters in the background they really have an awesome style and humour about them. All the characters are exaggerated and tall, the areas are all pastel colours, the player runs like a cartoon character, the whole experience is there to entertain.

The game jumps between styles of music, more often than not it’s playing the soundtrack you would want; 1960’s jazz. If you imagine a 1960’s American spy movie you’ll no doubt have a certain type of music instinctively appear in your mind, yeah, it’s that music in this game. When starting the Socialist levels and during certain scenes you are treated to some traditional Russian music, unfortunately this does occasionally remind you that this was a real-time and there were real threats. It’s easy to let this game pull the wool over your eyes and make you forget about its inspirations, and when you do snap out of the Imperialist and Socialist namings you’re reminded even more. The game isn’t in bad taste by any stretch, but for something that tries not to offend or remind players of the history you can’t help but be more aware of it when the game slips up.

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The game uses procedurally generated maps meaning you, in theory, shouldn’t get the same base twice, though you may see awfully familiar locations across your play through. The main problem with procedural games is that it is more than telling the game what to do, the developer needs to give it lots of things not to do. One area this failed numerous times for me was when I would walk through a door into a soldier, completely blowing my cover. Being spotted before an entrance animation has finished is annoying as you haven’t even had time to assess where the nearest cover is before your health is three-quarters gone.

When you start a level you are shown how many plans there are to collect. To my amazement I couldn’t find anywhere whilst playing to tell you how many you have left to collect. This is most annoying when you’re trying to decide whether to bother looking for all the hidden air vents or rooms littered around each military base. In most games pressing pause would bring up at least a hint of how you’ve done on the current level, unfortunately in CounterSpy you’re left mostly in the dark as to your in game progress.

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CounterSpy is a game that has nailed the presentation, but needs just a bit of polish to be a classic game. Please don’t read that as me not enjoying the game, I completed it one and a half times in one sitting as I was so into it, I just wish there was a little bit more. The levels design is great and the different enemies work well as fodder, but I sometimes wished I had objects to throw to distract or maybe simple gadgets to use. At first I thought Dynamighty may have avoided this to keep realism, then I remembered the nuking the moon thing and that I used a formula that made me 40% more healthy. This is a pick up and play game, it works perfectly on the Vita and if you buy it close to launch then PS Plus members get 20% off. It’s a fun game with good progression and an interesting difficulty level increase as you play through. It may not be a game to take over the world but if you’ve enjoyed Shadow Complex, Metroid or any rogue like game then there’s a good chance this game could give you a fun ride, just a shame that ride could be on a nuke to the moon.

Guilty Gear X2 #Reload – PC Review

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One on One competition in a computer game is a brutal affair, a mixture of fun, stress and potentially trash talking. There’s no outside interference, and ignoring any inherent skill you may have, the playing field is level. This is why fighting games especially are great. With every fighting game there are three options of play style:

1. The Expert: someone who knows every button combo and the motions to perform the best of the best attacks.

2. The Safety Player: Someone who can comprehend what jump, punch and kick are and use their limited move-set to win.

3. The Button Masher: Someone who hits every button and hopes for the best, occasionally they jump at the right time to avoid an attack, this is counted as a calculated and successful move.

More often than not fighting games rarely just stop at one game, they often span years and span multiple entry in the series. This is why fighting games have plots so crazy and insane that they make Metal Gear Solid’s plot arcs look like a simple telling of a nursery rhyme. Guilty Gear X2 #Reload comes in to the mix with a fine heritage and a back story for its characters that beggars belief.

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Arc System Works and Kiss, not the band, has recently re-released Guilty Gear X2 #Reload on Steam. Although released on PC many, many years ago only now has Guilty Gear X2 #Reload come to Steam to join it’s GG brethren Guilty Gear Isuka. Guilty Gear Isuka was only released 9 months ago on Steam (January 2014) and with the hints from the community lead for Guilty Gear at Steam hinting more is on the way that news can only keep fans happy.

My knowledge of Guilty Gear is minimal at best, I’ve played BlazBlue which was the spiritual successor to the series, namely because of apparently awkward ownership issues, but until now I’ve never gotten my hands dirty with the series, my initial impressions were those of someone who stepped into a performance art piece when thinking they were going to a boxing match.

To say this game is crazy would be an understatement of epic proportions. There’s numerous characters that will make you query what is up with this game world, a witch called I-No who seems to own the sorting hat from Harry Potter and rock out with a possessed guitar. A character called Faust who was once a great doctor, then went insane, and then went sane with a crazy edge, mainly that edge being him wearing a paper bag on his head. Amazingly that’s all relatively normal when you compare their stories with Bridgette, a child from a village in England where having two twins of the same gender is bad luck, as such despite being born a twin boy, his parents raised him as a girl. He then wants to prove his masculinity in his teenage years and sets about becoming a bounty hunter. Somewhere along the line he finds a teddy bear possessed by a demon that turns into a yo-yo his weapon of choice.

 

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Everything about this game screams style, whether it’s the beautiful art in the sprites or the backgrounds, or it’s the heavy metal references like the characters Slayer and Venom or when you win ‘SLASH’ appearing across the screen in big letters, everything is just simply cool. Animation is smooth and the music is a pleasure to hear, also with each purchase you can find the official soundtrack buried in the Steam folders.

Every time my friend and I try a new fighting game out we have a series of things to experiment with before we get to the fighting. The first thing is to see if the game uses the Capcom move set. By that I mean, whether with most characters you try to do a quarter circle forward and then follow it with a punch you get a decent move. Thankfully, and majorly to its credit, Guilty Gear X2 #Reload’s moves list is wonderfully simple, and those moves are well enough animated so that even if you aren’t doing big damage attacks you still feel like you’re doing something, you feel part of the action and you feel like a badass. The roster is big enough to keep you going with random characters selecting and the single player provides enough of a challenge so that people like me could try again and again and never complete it before giving up and returning to fights with a friend, locally.

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There’s a lot of contention at the lack of online play, there is a user made patch that could be implemented but a number of people question why this wasn’t automatically implemented, rather than expecting Steam users to lay into the config files. I can see why this wasn’t practical, it would be a case of ensuring it was safe, but also getting in touch with the original creator who may have asked for recompense. All that being said, for a fighting game to be released in 2014, whether a new or re-release, without netplay enabled from the get-go does seems like a misstep from an otherwise sound release. There is also some issues with certain graphics cards, I was unable to get this game running on my PC tower unless it was in windowed mode, and it took quite a bit of tinkering to get it full screen on my laptop. Hopefully a patch down the line may open up some of this teething trouble.

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The whole point of these reviews is for me, the almighty and powerful writer, to let you know whether you should spend your hard-earned sheckles on this game. In short, yes. I know this came out well before, but it does remind me a lot of Skull Girls but somehow more accessible. Skull Girls is a great game but, despite mostly using the Capcom move-set, it still seems a struggle to get anything going in terms of skills or combos. Guilty Gear X2 #Reload however is forgiving to players new and old. At the start of this review I listed the three main types of fighting game players in my eyes, Guilty Gear ticks all boxes and allows for fun and craziness from the get go. The art is a joy to behold, a ten-year old fighting game should not be as beautiful as elements of this game are. The Guilty Gear series is definitely an underdog in the world of fighting games, never reaching quite the peak of Capcom’s or Netherealm’s releases in the west, but I now truly consider myself a backer of this series, the story, the world, the combat, simply put it all just works, and it works damn well.

Frozen Synapse Prime – PSVita Review

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The Vita has had a hard time of it recently. Sony seemed to be struggling to find the hand-held console’s selling point, on top of that the big developers and publishers have let the little black bundle of joy fall by the wayside. This left a power vacuum. For a short while no games were really being released and everyone lost hope for this super powerful machine. Thankfully a sect of the game developer community came in and took ownership, the indies. With titles like Hotline Miami, Spelunky and Stealth Inc doing big numbers on the handheld others have looked to taking their PC properties and moving them across to the Sony handheld. Last week another joined the cause in the form of Frozen Synapse Prime.

Originally released as Frozen Synapse on the PC, the game has come a long way with its current iteration on Vita. The original Frozen Synapse and Prime clearly share the same basic core but there’s something about Prime that has made it wonderfully more impressive and accessible than its PC counterpart.

You control a team of avatars, each with their own weapon of choice. The core game boils down to ‘Kill the other team’, but to say this is just a team shooter would be a great disservice to the depth of tactics and combat held within. Turn based combat is usually something held for RPGs, but in this combat rather than waiting a few minutes between attacks you and your opponents spend a few minutes setting up intricate waypoints and attack plans in preparation for both move sets to play out at the same time.

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What this leads to is you looking at the placement of your opponents squad members and spending a long time saying which direction you will send people, which corridors they will look down as they pass, which areas they will crouch past or aim at. Finally you’re set, you’re ready to watch your team precisely take down your opponent with cold accuracy and skill. You hit the Prime button, locking in your tactics. The screen loads before showing you both team’s actions play out at the same time, quickly you realise that your opponent is smarter than you and half your team drop. The matches play out over a set number of turns, usually between 5 and 10. If you fail to complete your objective or kill your adversary, then it’s game over.

The game has various modes to take away a number of hours of your life. Skirmishes was my main go to when playing this game, you’re dumped in a randomly created area and just told to kill your opponent in X turns. As well as the Skirmishes you can also tackle the online world in Multiplayer, or alternatively take on corrupt corporations in the single player campaign. The single player campaign is a solid alternative to the other modes, giving you different objectives to your standard kill all affair. Whether it’s ‘protect this hacker’ or ‘escort this person from A-B’ you’ll see something different. You are still controlling guys with guns and just trying to take out the red guys, but at least these objectives give you a different play style to experiment with, for example rather than chasing down the enemies and going for the kills you learn through the single player that often finding a spot and holding it actually makes more tactical sense in this game.

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To aid you in taking down the enemy AI you have numerous available skills to take advantage of. Aiming, looking, glancing are all essential skills to implement when you’ve reached the end of your waypoint run, perching in the corner of a room and looking out through as many doors as possible is a key skill to use, especially with machine gunners and snipers on the team. Whilst playing you have the choice of using the buttons on the Vita or taking advantage of the touch screen controls, both work wonderfully and in my case using both in conjunction with each other made for a great immersive experience. Using the buttons for general unit selecting and menu operating worked great, but for the waypoint setting and the command wheel touch screen was responsive and accurate enough to make all the difference.

It’s hard for me to admit my biggest problem with the PC original Frozen Synapse because it makes me look petty, but if I’m completely honest I couldn’t get over the neon graphical style the game had. It all just looked a bit nasty to me and I couldn’t get past it. Frozen Synapse Prime has made me realise that if I had given it a real chance I would have seen an amazing game underneath it all. Thankfully Double11, the developer of this pseudo-port, has made some changes to the game that the original really needed, namely a graphical overhaul. Now you’re playing your games on top of a virtual reality sky scraper and the husks on each team are neon mannequins who spew brightly colour gloop instead of blood. One element that deserves huge praise is the soundtrack. Cyber-punk enthused electronica tunes just work perfectly with the world that has been built, prominent but not over powering this music fits the game play like a glove. The rounds can take many minutes each time when you end up trying to lay down huge tactics, having music that seamlessly mixes and doesn’t have annoying catches means you are never reminded of how long you’ve been playing and how long this turn is taking you.

Frozen Synapse Prime is not an easy game, whether in multiplayer or single player you’ll struggle at first. The tutorials do a good job of making you think you’ll own this game and show every husk you’re up against you’re boss, but in reality you’ll probably spend the first handful of matches screwing up turn 1 and then spending the next few turns on the back heel and working against odds. Difficulty isn’t really an issue with this game, the enemy is always follows rules and if anything the amount of squad members I’ve lost is a testament to the AI. A number of people may claim this game is too difficult as a negative, but what I think a number of people will actually be saying is that the game is too deep, and this is a view I could see. When you first start playing, you’ll be shown various play styles, different tactics and different abilities, when it comes down to it you could use the basic moves but later on that won’t get you far.

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The Vita is great for a certain type of game, games where you’ll play for an hour or so and then think “ok, just one more round/level/attempt, and then I’ll stop”, it’s at this point you realise it’s half 1 in the morning and you had gone to bed 3 hours earlier. Frozen Synapse Prime is deep, rewarding and enjoyably challenging. It’s difficulty is there to make you realise you suck, and then to help you improve. Prime doesn’t hold your hand, it beats it to a pulp and then offers you a splint. You’ll struggle with this but when it finally clicks in your head, you’ll be taking out a whole team in 2 turns and making it look damn good.

Frozen Synapse Prime is Out Now on PS Vita


Devil’s Dare – PC Review

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The 90’s were an awful decade. Everything was so grim in England, grim in the cinema and grim in the charts. It wasn’t all bad though, as well as the pleasure of home consoles starting on 8 bit and finishing with CDs it also was the decade where I first went to an arcade. Arcade gaming ever since has been a true passion of mine, so much so a couple of years ago I bought an arcade machine and have re-built the control panel from scratch. One aspect of arcade games that cut me as a child was the fact I rarely had money. This meant I’d have to spread around the change I had, one life here, one life there, basically I would have to see how far I could get through The Simpsons, Final Fight, Alien Vs Predator or Dungeons and Dragons on a single credit. That mind-set is what brings us to Devil’s Dare in 2014, a side scrolling brawler with clear arcade game inspiration. The pop-culture references are plentiful and the permadeath is brutal.

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That’s right, permadeath, I need to start with this so no one goes into this game under any illusion. When you start the game you pick a save slot, you choose your character and then you play. If you happen to die during your run through the world, well, the game literally comes up with the message “Deleting Save Game”. I don’t want anyone to be confused after my review, this game is hard and this game is cruel, though in its defence it does have the Devil in the title.

In a world over run by zombies and monsters a group of ‘average Joes’ are enchanted by a little red fairy called Ivan. Each character gains untold strength and weapons. There’s Axel a guy with a bin lid and a stick who gets transformed into a shielded sword wielding guy (Zelda). There’s Kingston a guy with a beard, who gets transformed into a guy with a beard, and an axe (Golden Axe). There’s Jackson a kid who gets transformed into a kid with penchant for stabbing (TMNT, Streets of Rage). And then finally we get Queenie a lady who actually gets a transformation, she gains the ability to perform MECHMAGIC or Tech Magic or something (Final Fantasy VI). Though it isn’t fully explained it does appear that either she is sat in a mech suit, or the alternative explanation is a Full Metal Alchemist style accident and she actually lost her legs and is now forced to use this mechanical monstrosity to get around.

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What makes Devil’s Dare so interesting is actually it’s control scheme. Recently we’ve seen a slight resurgence of side scrolling brawlers, games like Castle Crashers, Sacred Citadel and Foul Play, but none of these have really kept the original game’s main selling point like Devil’s Dare has; a simple control scheme. Back in the arcades 3 buttons was always more than enough to do what you need when pummeling gang members in classic Capcom or other’s games. Devil’s Dare only requires a control method and two buttons, what I mean is that if you were so inclined you could play this game using an NES controller. Many will be confused as to how that is a selling point, but when you’re playing a game like Devil’s Dare that allows up to 4 players and is a rogue like with permadeath, having buddies there for some pick up and play is essential. Being able to say to someone this button is attack and this is a special attack button means that in no time someone has your back.

The game is littered with pop culture references, as you wander your way through the pixel world and fight monsters in sewers, castles, trains and streets you will come across various big bosses. Each of which will destroy you in minutes. In the early levels you’ll meet a Jason-alike, a The Fly-alike and Queen Alien-alike.

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 This game is one Saved By The Bell Reference away from being the most 90’s thing to emerge since the 90’s finished. All of this looking back though does come at a cost, the game is, as I’ve mentioned numerous times, is hard to the extent where it’s off-putting. I had fun through the levels, I enjoyed the killing of zombies, knocking out pregnant monsters and dodging deranged dogs. But then I’d get to a boss, and I’d be taken out instantly. It’s hard to say whether this is because I’m playing it solo, perhaps in the games local 4 player co-op it’s a cake walk, but on my own? I struggled, a lot. I like the permadeath idea, I like the fact the game is trying to be like an old arcade machine, but that doesn’t help with the fact you end up seeing the opening levels over and over. I’m reticent to say the developer should have had a non-permadeath option, but maybe a difficulty setting? For some a difficult game is a selling point, something for them to master, I suspect in the case of Devil’s Dare this may be countered by the number of people giving up. All that aside, I had a blast with this game, it’s one I can’t wait to get hooked up in my arcade machine. If you can overlook the few issues it has with pacing and difficulty then you’re in for a good time. This is definitely a case of simple to learn but hard to master. Each character has different special abilities based on which direction is pressed, this is your key to survival. Axel’s hookshot especially is a must if you want to beat a boss, pull Mama’s Boy over and then cut cut before running like a little girl.

With the crazy number of references to games, films and culture this is a game made for nerds by nerds. With some friends around and everyone willing to put in some time you could get far and have a blast. If you’re playing on your own then be prepared to die, a lot. This game isn’t for people who get stressed or angry when they die, you need to just accept it as fact and roll straight back in. The art and music of the game are clearly beautiful and the slightly sepia tones over the pixel art lead to a great retro feel. If you want a challenge, if you want to feel like it’s the 90’s again, if you want to crack open heads with characters referencing Golden Axe and Zelda; then you need to play Devil’s Dare.

You can pick up Devil’s Dare on Steam right now!

(at time of writing 20% off)

Price: £7.99

Developer: Secret Base

Publisher: Secret Base

http://store.steampowered.com/app/279580/

Shadowrun: Dragonfall – iPad Review

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Shadowrun was a pen and paper RPG from the 80’s, quite popular at the time it spawned a spin-off in the form of Earthdawn. Shadowrun wasn’t the first Cyberpunk set RPG, but it was one of the most interesting. The game played with the concept of a dystopian future where corporations run the world and corruption is as common as the rain. Magic has been rediscovered and in the process, the year 2050, is now filled with not only jaded gangers that live in the slums but also elves, orcs, trolls and dwarfs. Shadowrun was turned into a game for the SNES and Megadrive in the early 90’s and it has become a cult hit. If you try to buy a SNES copy in the UK with box and instructions you’re looking at around £50, just the cartridge costs around £30.

Shadowrun Returns, Dragonfall’s predecessor, was a modern take on the original SNES/Megadrive games as well as the pen and paper original. There was clearly a lot of love for the source material. It starts with you creating a character, you can choose any of the races I listed above and then you work on a class. In this game you can be the all rounder Street Samurai, a Decker, who is essentially a hacker who’s vision goes all ‘Matrix’ or a magic user like a Shaman or Mage. There are other classes that show potential to be exciting like the Rigger, but for the starter like me, who maybe hasn’t played an RPG in a long time, the more recognisable classes are tempting.

Shadowrun Dragonfall iOS Review PC Steam Android 2Shadowrun Returns launched with a campaign creator on the PC which produced some wonderful stories from clearly talented GM’s and writers. Using their own, improved, engine Harebrained Scheme’s have come out with their first stand alone DLC in their Shadowrun catalogue, Shadowrun: Dragonfall. Set in Berlin you start the game with your character, Denvir a street samurai in my case, joining a new crew of Shadowrunners about to break into a mansion. Things go south pretty quickly and as a team member get’s her brain fried in a pretty horrific way you’re lead into the a world of chaos, grime and a dragon in neo-Berlin’s underbelly. The world of Shadowrun is run by corporations, organisations that do evil acts, but sometimes they need things doing that even they can’t be caught involved in, that’s when they turn to the mercs of the streets, Shadowrunners.Shadowrun Dragonfall iOS Review PC Steam Android 3When creating a character it’s worth bearing in mind that the class you choose isn’t a chain around your ankle, it’s more of a guideline. When completing objectives and gaining points to spend on your character you can put them into any area, the initial Class selection just helps with an initial set up and idea of where to take the character. A minor annoyance has returned from the first Shadowrun Returns game, the character model. You are given the option of many different pieces of art that can be your character portrait, and they all look great and the variants of each standard picture means you can get the look you want for your avatar, but then when you come to customise the 3D model that will be in field and on the screen most of the time the choices of hair and facial hair don’t quite match. It has been improved vastly since the first game but I still find this little niggle that creates a disconnect between the great avatar art and the model.

The game falls into three basic areas, the first is team management, familiar for anyone who has played a role play game before, you must keep an eye on who you’re knocking around with and make sure people are tooled up and healthy for the job at hand. Secondly there’s the combat; if you’ve played the Shadowrun Returns then you’ve familiar with this, each character has action points and each action costs a set number. Battlefield information is as essential and well presented as before with you being shown how much cover something is going to provide in a fire fight and what your percentage chance of hitting a foe is. Finally the third aspect of the game is my personal favourite and what will hopefully keep most people playing, the talking.

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There’s no two ways about it, this game is text heavy, but that is not a negative, this game thrives because of its writing. Something that got me so into the first game was the humour, it may not seem like a game where everyone is poor and steps away from death should involve chuckles but when Shadowrunners get together the quips seem to fly around like a Joss Whedon dream. Through dialogue trees with your fellow runners and other NPC’s in the world you’re drip fed a whole new lexicon to get behind and without realising it you’re fully versed in deckers, cred, the matrix (not the film) and cyberjacks. It all becomes second nature, at no point does the game hold your hand, instead it points you in a direction and says ‘go have fun over there Shadowrunner’ and instead of making you read a book first or sit through training it assumes you’re smart enough to work stuff out yourself, and if you’ve ever played a game before, then you are. You may not realise but you’ve consumed a lot of Cyberpunk over the years be it in film, comic, TV or games, you just always had it distilled, Shadowrun is here to put it straight on the rocks for you.

Graphically things have had a bit of a polish between the Returns and Dragonfall, the game has also had some much-needed UI tweeks and the game now has a working and useful save system. Although at a base level the graphics haven’t changed that much the world is different, because this is set in Berlin, as opposed to Seattle, the team at Harebrained Schemes have added a joyous amount of assets to the game transforming the location from dirty neo-city to a well presented Germanic city with history behind it. Although there is no voice over for any of the characters the sound design is one of the strongest elements of this game, namely the soundtrack. Jon Everist has produced an awesome soundtrack that does just what it needs to, create tension, atmosphere and emotion without hogging the limelight from the player and the world at large. The soundtrack manages to be on loop for potentially a long time, thankfully with the tracks all feeling so ambient and an essential part of the scenery it just works wonderfully.

The game does have its couple of issues, namely problems I had with the previous installment of the series. For me the lack of pinch zoom is a nuisance in battle. Numerous times I would end a turn not realising that off-screen, but within range, an enemy was stood ready to mow me down with whatever multi-barreled and multi-bulleted device they were dragging around with them. Another problem with the inability to control zoom is trying to select an enemy. If someone is stood behind cover, shielding themselves from bullets, it actually also shields them from your tap meaning that someone with, how to put this, sausage fingers like mine, may struggle to get the game to recognise that they’d like to hurt the bad man now please. These qualms with the game are minor and only effect a small amount of the combat, overlooking the issues is easy when the rest of the experience is so good.

If you’re on the fence about this game and came looking for a review to tell you one way or another whether to buy it, the simple response I have is, yes, buy this game. For a low price you’re set for a very long and consistently well written experience. The chat between the crew of runners is funny and provocative, you feel for some characters and others you want to smack hard, with bullets, but the fact you have a feeling towards them at all is a testament to the writing. With a load of missions and locations you rarely get bored with a scenario, just be prepared for some fights to last at least 20 minutes, this isn’t a pick up and play game, this is more of a pick up before bed and realise it’s 4 in the morning game. Trust me, this game is worth being tired for.

Satellite Reign – PC Preview

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Leather trench coats have meant a lot of things to a lot of people, for years they were associated with some quite questionable secret police exploits, thankfully they broke free of that in the 1970’s and 80’s when things like Blade Runner, Neuromancer and Shadowrun came out. When those different media formats introduced the world to the concept of Cyberpunk geeks and nerds took it and ran. In gaming this peaked in the early 90’s when Syndicate came out on everything that could manage a cursor. A Cyber-noir future where corporations run the world, private security is just a fact of life, technology has become the opiate of the masses and that has led to widespread corruption.

Playing Syndicate was an awakening to games that gave you the option to do things your way, even if that way was ‘guns, lots of guns’. It’s sequel a few years later, Syndicate Wars, took this concept and ran with it to produce a dark and gritty game full of corporate espionage and rain. 19 years later, here we are, looking at Satellite Reign, the ‘spiritual successor’ to Syndicate.

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Bullfrog, the studio behind Syndicate and Syndicate Wars, tried numerous times to get a new Syndicate. Unfortunately most people’s experience recently has only been the distinctly average FPS that tried to reboot the world. The lead designer of Syndicate Wars obviously spent the past couple of decades unable to shake that cyberpunk monkey on his back and thankfully he did, because like a nice sorbet to cleanse the pallet, 5 Lives’ have recently released Satellite Reign on Early Access via Kickstarter.

Satellite Reign follows the same basic concept of Syndicate. You are introduced to a city, perpetually trapped in the middle of a storm at night. You’re given four agents, after a little bit of rescuing, and given a choice of missions to tackle. In this current build those missions all follow a theme of ‘here’s a building, get in it’. Using your four agents in an isometric view you must navigate past security, the public and your own ineptitude to complete tasks for your employer, a corporation with enough power and money to hire four mercenaries with trench coats and guns.

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Often ‘spiritual successors’ are no more than copy and pastes with better graphics, this is one of many places Satellite Reign manages to break all expectations. Rather than rely too heavily on the source material Satellite Reign manages to carve its own path, no more are your agents just cookie cut avatars, now they each have their own abilities and specialisms. More than that, you now have options and the potential for some true tactics to deal with scenarios. Do you knock on the front door with bullets as opposed to your hand? do you hack electronics to open a door or to shut down some pesky cameras? or do you go all mission impossible and zip line into compounds? My personal favourite is what I call the ‘Martyr Tactic': decide which of my four agents I dislike and get them to make noise, a lot of noise, enough noise to bring anyone with a gun in the block to come looking. Meanwhile the remaining members of the squad can just stroll into where ever I require.

The presentation in this game is already exquisite, the neon colours blasting out like explosions in the rain mixed with the drab decor of the city make for an emotive experience. Sirens blare, security shoot, people scream, and this is all happening before you get involved. The A.I. of the world is doing its job perfectly at this stage of development, it’s making you think it is a world. Ignoring some to be expected place-holder art, the design and audio come together to make this city fully realised. A discorded series of notes start the soundtrack but before long a pseudo techno beat is running. If someone said to you imagine a cyberpunk future, this is what comes to mind, and this is what Satellite Reign is all about, the collection of various cogs syncing to make a truly realised cyberpunk scene.

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Early Access games are always a hard thing to cover, I’ve got to cover the potential of a project as well as whether it is a usable product in its’ current state. There’s something to be said for the Early Access approach, I felt bad I didn’t back this on Kickstarter, and now it has made it to Steam I feel like throwing in some money now is the equivalent of backing a project on KS. In its current state the game is more of a proof of concept or demo. It’s mostly playable, there are things to do, people to kill and things to hack, but then there’s clear dead ends where there should be an item, person or objective but it hasn’t been materialised in the city yet.

As a writer and reviewer the following sentiment is one I try to avoid at all costs as it is a cliché and a cheap way of ducking opinion giving, but in this situation of Early Access and nostalgia it’s true: If you’re a fan of Syndicate or cyberpunk then you should get in on this. Syndicate holds a special place in the hearts and minds of many people so to see a project like this makes a number of us geeks and nerds get wobbly knees, if that is even remotely you, then throw the team some money and actually take a fascinating trip with them seeing how the game comes along and adapts with each update. When all is said and done however go in with realistic expectations, the game isn’t finished, this is a pre-alpha build, but my god, if this is just pre-alpha then the full release is going to be something special.

Satellite Reign is available now in Early Access:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/268870/

Price: £22.99 (at time of writing)

Tower of Guns – Xbox One / PS4 Review

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Being a gamer encroaching on 30 I feel I’m at that stage in my life where I start questioning the younger generation. I look at trends like the insane popularity of a Fifa card game, and its influence on Youtube, I question the rise of MOBA’s and how I only found out what that was last year. My point is that I’m slowly but surely becoming a walking embodiment of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch from Monty Python. When I was a lad shooters were a challenge, there was none of this regenerating health, none of this handholding A.I. it was pure balls out, low gravity, always strafing, constant running, bullet dodging hell. Few games make me feel nostalgia in the way Tower of Guns has, it’s a blessing and a curse for the game, but one that brings back so many memories of the 90’s I might as well slip on my Adidas track suit and start praising the artistic credit of Bez’s maracas.

Tower of Guns features a tower, with guns inside. If you’re looking for more story that than then you’ll be sadly disappointed. The game is bare bones on its surface, it doesn’t try to pretend to be more, you in a first person view must take your one life, and your one gun, and make it from one floor to another pushing your way through a barrage of bullets. Autonomous guns and their comically oversized bullets are your enemy in this game, that and hubris and arrogance.

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Each floor has a chosen theme, lava, cogs and clean sci-fi white. To describe this game as procedurally generated is slightly misleading. Although in it’s true sense it’s accurate, many will interpret that as being completely random, instead like a mix and match puzzle you’ll see similar rooms but connected in different combinations.

Aesthetically this game may as well be an extra mode on Gearbox’s Borderlands series, this is not to be seen as a negative. In this age of consistent pixel art or hyper realistic graphic from indie games it’s nice to see someone do something different. Dirty cell shading like Tower of Guns hasn’t been done much and so although it’s not entirely original, it is refreshing. Musically the soundtrack does the job of making you feel like a superhero badass as you jump through the air jumping 20 Bullet Bill sized pieces of ammunition that fly towards you. Epic is something I have avoided saying for the past decade thanks to its overuse by the uneducated and hipsters but in its true sense this soundtrack is epic along with the rest of the experience.

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With rogue likes you need an incentive. Something that makes that permadeath a reasonable burden to bear, something that makes the difficulty progression and repeated visits to the main menu worthwhile. With Tower of Guns that reason is, well, guns. You start off with two weapons at your disposal, unfortunately you only have one pair of hands and no pockets so you can only take one gun with you on your slower ascent up this bemusingly laid out tower. The sting of only one weapon is an easy one to take, mainly because you won’t be alive long enough to get annoyed with it and secondly because of shiny blue tokens. When you kill an enemy three items have the potential to leave their mechanical carcass, firstly health, which is meagre and barely worth it, money for in run shops and finally blue tokens that will level up your weapon. Each weapon has a few levels to it, each increasing the damage, rate of fire and normally the bullets you shot. The pitiful pistol that you could start with is painfully bad, but it’s just there to get you through a few runs until you meet the requirement to unlock a better gun. Requirements range from Kill X Enemies to Shoot X Bullets, nothing too taxing but they will need a number of runs to meet.

The basic flow of the game goes as such: Enter room, guns spawn, bullets fly, you kill or run, reach another door, shoot door to open it, repeat. Obviously this is an over simplification of the system at hand here, but not by much. One run through this game will tell you how into it you are going to be, for me I was lucky enough to fluke a way below par time and meet a boss on my first go. And that’s the appeal for me, the bosses in Tower of Guns are epic, dumb and wonderful fun. Much like games of old on the Amiga where you were playing something like R-Type, you’d be going along and fighting normal enemies and then you enter a big room and your screen is filled with a huge behemoth of an enemy, that’s the joy Tower of Guns provides. Stupid boss names like Mama Spinbot, The Longhorn and my personal favourite Big Ol’ Spikeroom, really set the mildly immature tone of this game. If you’re not really going to bother with a story, why give personalities to these machines.

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As well as the main campaign you also have an endless run mode, as opposed to the usual 7 floors, and Dice mode. Dice mode is my go to in this already random game. Each room has a different tweak to gameplay, draining health, super jumps, enemies drop lots or nothing or something inconvenient like always jumping. These are meant to be a silly addition to the game as an aside to the main run, but for me this element of danger makes it nearly essential to speed run as you often need to shift a buff (or curse) as quickly as possible. As well as guns, perks are unlocked throughout the game, some of these are similar to the Dice rolls but generally positive and within your control, they’re available for each mode and can add a certain must have ability like multiple jumps.

The simple fact is that Tower of Guns will divide many gamers. To play this game you need to ask yourself some questions, did you play first person shooters in the 90’s? Have you ever played and enjoyed a bullet hell game? Do rogue likes make you quiver with anticipation? Are you cool with dying 100 times in a computer game? If you answered yes to the questions then there is no reason to not try out Tower of Guns, if you were unsure about any of them then I say take a punt on Tower of Guns, it’s a tower, full of guns, what’s not to love?

Goat Simulator – Xbox One Review

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For a while now I’ve resented a certain class of games, these games I refer to as “Pewdiepie Bait”. These are games without a story and generally have a comedic element that means Youtubers can cut together a 5 minute montage of them going “WHAT?! OMG! LOL!” and then pull a face or two before asking me to subscribe to their channel or like their video. Recently these games have included Surgeon Simulator, I Am Bread, Octodad and Goat Simulator. The problem is that when I’ve finally taken the leap and played these games they are addictive and fun, it’s just a shame that Youtubers ruin them.

Goat Simulator is a sandbox game in its true sense, there is little to no objective here. Don’t come to this game expecting cut-scenes, hell, don’t come to this game expecting a story. The story starts and ends with your a goat, and a bit of a dick goat at that.

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The problem with having such a truly open-ended game is that there is no direction. Upon first loading the game I looked around and thought “Ok, now what?”. In Goat Simulator you play a goat, a bog standard goat, apart from the fact it is immortal and has a very long sticky tongue. Controls are simple enough, one stick to move, one to look. Pulling the trigger makes you headbutt and with a jump and lick button on the face buttons you have your arsenal or actions to irritate the locals of Goatville. My first idea was to jump out of my pen and run into a house, from there I ruined a family meal by headbutting the table and flipping a guy out of a window. I was awarded points for this, actual points and a combo score. That’s when I knew for sure this game had one real objective, they wanted me to just mess stuff up. Destroying a petrol station, ruining Stonehenge, going to a DeadMau5 concert on a skyscraper, all these things are elements of Goat Simulator. Throw in some over the top physics for you to play with and you have the basics of the game down.

With maps it may seem at first that the game is a bit limited in scope, a tiny town and a sea front city are your playgrounds, but with the different elements in each they actually feel bigger than they are. For example in the city there’s a canal, a skyscraper, a graveyard and a theme park. Each of these has numerous aspects to them meaning you, like any good sandbox game, make your own fun. You’ll see a firework and wonder why it’s propped up, walking into it you are sent rocketing into the sky before the boom sends you back down to Earth. Simply put, if you need structure to your video games then you’ll really struggle with this. For me I felt slightly burnt out on the causing chaos after a couple of hours, it was at that point I saw the achievements, I had found my personal objectives. A couple of hours later I was deeply involved in the game and was hunting for statues and blocks collectables or trying to work out what I was required to do to sacrifice people on a pentagram.

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A lot of these objectives unlock mutators, for example if you sacrifice enough people, or goats, on the pentagram you become Devil Goat, giving you the ability to cause a black hole in front of your goat face drawing in people and objects from all around and allowing you to then hit them a great distance. Completing the goat fight club gives you the body of a Ripped Goat who grants amazing strength. All of these mutators effect the look of your goat but also grants abilities, all of which can be turned on and off at will from the pause screen. In multiplayer especially, these mutators take on a life of their own and add a great spin on a game that could run dry easily.

Graphically the game isn’t drawing on the full might of the Xbox One’s capabilities, which in itself isn’t a huge problem, but having experienced some quite major frame rate issues in my time with Goat Simulator I have to wonder what about it is slowing down the Xbox. The textures are there to do a job and nothing more, the humans walking around seem to all be cut from the same handful of basic models and musically the game seems to only have a couple of tracks that loop over and over. None of this matters though, because when you swap position with a bull riding machine and a human gets on your back you forget how rubbish the individual elements look and enjoy this game for its unnerving stupidity.

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A feature that seems to be dying out in this generation of consoles is present in Goat Simulator, split-screen multiplayer. Up to 4 people can play split-screen on Goat Simulator and it’s about as chaotic as you’d expect. The two locations in Goat Simulator are available for the split-screen fun, but you all must remain in the same area. Multiplayer is as aimless as the single player experience, but as with single player requiring you to make your own fun, so does multiplayer. There are challenges like races and score competitions littered around the world but often these may require a skill level that isn’t instantly there for someone who’s literally just picked up the game for the first time.

When you load up a game like Goat Simulator you know what you’re getting, this is a release valve, this is an explosion of stupidity that we, as gamers, need every now and then. Sure you could be playing something intense and big like any number of triple A games coming out, you could be going down the rabbit hole of intense horror survival games, you could be getting your arse handed to you by online fighting games. But the thing to remember, the thing that often passes by us in this age of realistic graphics and physics is that games don’t have to be real, they’re an outlet for us to have fun and do something stupid, and at the end of the day, what’s more stupid than a goat blowing up a petrol station by headbutting it.

Project Root – Xbox One / PS4 / PSVita / PC Review

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Bullet Hell Shooters are something of a niche genre. Although first conceived in the 80’s, Japan in the 90’s hit heavy with this concept of ‘you are one person with one gun, your enemy has more, get ready to dodge’. From the top down classics like DonPachi and Ikaruga to more modern versions like Jamestown and even Geometry Wars. Project Root from OPQAM looks to join the small list of western developers trying to make it big with the Shmup genre.

Normally Bullet Hell Shooters follow a formula, you are a small ship of some kind and you scroll vertically or horizontally shooting enemies in front of you whilst hundreds of pixel bullets fly around requiring you to pull of brave manoeuvres to out fly the enemy ships and munitions. Project Root takes this concept and flips it. Instead of the usual permanently scrolling screen of most Shmups you are now given an open area for you to fly 360 degrees around. On the face of it this is an interesting concept; complete objectives in this open map whilst avoiding enemy fire, the problem is that there is a difference between a Shmup and a twin stick shooter, and at its core this game seems to have gone with Shmup where it would have benefitted from being a twin stick shooter.

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You can fly your ship around a huge map, taking on primary and secondary objectives ranging from destroy this building to destroy this other building. In your arsenal you have ground and air attacks and from pick-ups you gain a super screen wipe attack picking off all enemies around. There is no ammo limit for the ground or air attacks, as such you may as well just hold down the shoot buttons permanently and spin in a circle. To be blunt, this needs to be your main form of attack in this game. With normal Shmups you know that the enemies are coming from the front, they may wave around the screen but generally you know where to look, making Project Root a 360 degree open map means that enemies can shoot you from behind. On the face of it that may sound reasonable, but when your ship is so low down the screen at all times and the radar being wonky at best it means most of your deaths will come from being shot in the back. On top of that you’ll find yourself flying for long periods of time not really feeling like your achieving anything. Most of the missions will have you fly from one side of the map to another repeatedly, and that’s before secondary objectives, long haul flights are not this games strong point.

project_root_screen_05There are parts of Project Root that look great, the explosions, the bullets, parts of the landscape, but then you see the art on the Xbox and Playstation Store. There’s an overall feel of the 90’s in this game. The UI on the menus, although functional, aren’t exactly inspired, the audio is an overly repetitive heavy beat techno/dance track. Everything just looks a bit too shiny, everything just looks a bit too ‘budget’. Putting aside potential snobbishness there are basic design issues that should have been ironed out in the beta tests. All fonts in the game are tiny and the layout is awful. There is a story hiding behind the game somewhere but with giant text boxes being shown on the screen but the font size being tiny and only using a third of the space available you have to wonder why no one pointed out issues with this layout. In game text appears in a small speech field in the lower right of the screen, but reading whilst playing a Shmup is hard enough, add to that a font so small it reminds me of the old issues Dead Rising had when that first came out on 360.

project-root-04The real problem is with Project Root that it has a lot of potential, there’s a core concept there that in small bursts is fun and can be exciting, but then you realise that after you get a couple of levels in the game is cruel in its difficulty and not all that interesting. In short form quick sessions Project Root could be a game you could have fun with, there’s a concept here that on paper sounds fun and to some individuals it may stick, but for the vast majority the overall presentation and flaws in the gameplay will cause stress and, at times, boredom. The game had and has potential to be something awesome and something fun, it’s just a shame that a number of design decisions made during production are somewhat uninspired.

Sayonara Umihara Kawase + – PS Vita Review

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I’ve always collected games, but the intention of it and dedication took an upswing a couple of years ago. I can’t pretend to own many rare or complete in box games, but I have enough to cover at least the ‘best’ games of most mainstream consoles. My real joy is finding and playing hidden gems, games that for whatever reason got buried at launch and haven’t caused many ripples in history. Much of the time, for an European collector like me, games will often pass me by because of its region of release, the Umihara Kawase series being a prime example of this. I first heard of the series last year whilst someone was touting the DS release (import) being a true hidden gem of the series. The concept is appealing in its simplicity you’re a girl with a fishing rod, you need to use it as a bungee grappling hook to get to a door.

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Umihara Kawase was a series started in 1994 on the Super Famicom, SNES for us PAL region heretics. Outside of Japan the series has had a muted release here and there. Clearly bringing this perfect pick up and play out digitally on the Vita is a canny move for raising awareness in European PAL and the US regions.

If you’re looking for a deep story here then you’re sadly going to be at a loss, to go with the little I have understood of the series so far the basic idea is there is a school girl, Umihara, who’s world gets invaded by fish and eels. She breaks out the natural enemy of fish, a rod. You must traverse floating platforms swinging with your bungee fishing line a la Bionic Commando. Using the D-pad you need to point need to aim where you’re going to fire your sticky fishing line and then swing like Tarzan over insta-death drops into water. Each level should be able to be completed in a minute or two. With a looming clock counting up and numerous reminders of your time a clear thrust of this game is improving yourself and your times on each level.

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The original game in the series had a wonderful sprite based pixel art aesthetic, obviously limitations of the system, but 20 years later that design still would have done the game well. Graphically the game has gone 3D and although the colours are still bright and the design is surrealist nightmare it doesn’t quite sit right, especially after playing the original which is included in full in this package. One place this game does stand out is it’s wonderful soundtrack. Every track, which you can unlock through playing and finding hidden back packs, is perfect for the world and chilled enough that when you’re getting stressed through constant failure.

Sayonara Umihara Kawase +is a good game that harks back to a 16 bit age that many of us miss. Unfortunately many areas of that era of gaming have been brought kicking and screaming into this Vita version that really should have been kept as a product of the 90’s; namely the controls. This game will only accept input from the D-pad. When a game requires precision aiming and I can only use the directional pad as opposed to the analogue it can only be described as irksome and, in a game that is already difficult, it becomes an extra annoyance when needing to send out your swing line mid jump. When you inevitably fail, whether from falling in water or climbing a ladder into an enemy, as I often did, you’ll have to return to the level select before jumping back in. In this generation of consoles, and to maintain the game as pick up and play, this should have been Hotline Miami style instant re-start.

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In precision platformers like Sayonara Umihara Kawase + the game is broken up into two emotions, the first is the players constant frustration at the midway point where difficulty jumps to a level that can only be described as cruel, the other half of the game is spent with an exaggerated sense of skill that comes from the satisfaction of pulling off the jumps and defeating particularly awkward enemies that patrol the levels. One particular level contained a giant fish that I had to dodge, after numerous attempts I just couldn’t work out where I was meant to be or how to pull off the level making it to the exit door. Thankfully the game offers a “here’s how to do it” option where you can see how a developer went about completing a stage. Little touches like that and the multiple branching paths of levels, if you find a secret door, all come together to make this feel like a solid fleshed out product. The inclusion of the entire original game is icing on a cake that’s already full of interesting ingredients. Sayonara Umihara Kawase + should be picked up by anyone looking to expand their gaming experiences into early 90’s Japanese games, this is a solid and fun, if frustrating, remastering of a hidden gem in gaming history.


Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson – 3DS Review

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On Netflix in the UK there is an anime called High School of the Dead. It’s a cartoon about a zombie apocalypse hitting Japan and how a bunch of school kids deal with the first week or so of the virus taking over. It features blood, guts, a really fascinating story and boobs, lots of boobs. About 5 minutes into the first episode I realised that this may be something my girlfriend could enjoy if the overtly sexual nature of it doesn’t get in the way. I had that moment, where two worlds collide, like how some people keep there work life and home life separate. I wanted to watch this series with her and try to see if she could continue to get into anime, after enjoying Attack on Titan, but would the boobs and school girls get in the way? Well thankfully that was briefly commented on but then ignored as the series got its hooks in her. With Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson I had a similar fear, I’ll often talk about the games I’m looking at for Pixel Bedlam, but with jiggle physics and school girls would this be the point my girlfriend would need to talk to me? Thankfully not, but playing the game I still spent a lot of time wondering about the ‘nature’ of the game, well, I wondered about it when I wasn’t giggling like a 14 year old boy.

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Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson is an anime brawler for the 3DS, Think of the corridor walking of Streets of Rage or Golden Axe mixed with the balls out craziness and high combo numbers of Dynasty Warriors. The game sees you play as a number of ninjas in training as they go out and fight their evil ninja counterparts. There seems to be some sort of world balance here, a Yin and Yang of both light and dark ninjas each looking to take control of the school and potentially the world. Within a few levels I had already lost what the overall plot of the game was, mainly because of the mechanics of the game but also with each level focussing on one girl and her nemesis I was more interested in some of those relationships than the story at large.

The game spends a lot of time in the traditional Japanese genre of  Visual Novel with the girls spouting mounds of dialogue in their native Japanese tongue with English subtitles for us uneducated westerners. When you’re not watching these mini soap operas play out you’re treated to gameplay that although simple on the surface is painfully addictive and can, if you let it, draw you into trying to master each characters play style.

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Each girl you play as has different weapons, combos, and insane special moves. As the player you’ll mainly be using your 3DS’ face buttons, A to Jump, X and Y to attack in various strengths and finally, the most important button, a grappling button on B that lets you zip to the enemy you’re pointing at in the 3D environment. Each girl has their own speciality from dual wielding swords to umbrellas and a weird rabbit that may be a cuddly toy or may be something more sinister. At the end of each level you’ll face a hard as nails boss and for a number of them the only way I was able to get by was spamming the grappling line button followed by a ground smash and special move. The bosses are traditionally your nemesis and before and after each fight you’re given a bit of exposition about who you’re fighting any why victory is wanted by either party. The difference between the before and after dialogues is the amount of clothing each character is wearing.

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I’ve gone 600 words before mentioning this, and to be honest, I’m actually a little proud of myself for being so restrained. There is a health bar for every character, but for a quicker way of knowing whether you’re winning your brightly coloured and super fast match is to ask yourself a simply question “Do I hope no one is looking over my shoulder?”. With each big chunk of health lost clothing gets torn and disappears. A weird saving grace is that you can justify it slightly by saying these girls are wearing bikinis under their already somewhat missing clothing. It’s not unusual, with my lack of tact and skill, for both the boss and my character to be bouncing around in their swimsuits at the end of every fight. The weird thing is, it’s not as bad as you think. Sure, the jiggle physics make it awkward but much like High School of the Dead, if you can look past the girls bouncing around, making occasionally suggestive comments and being dressed like their about to hit up a beach in Ibiza on their first holiday away from their parents, it’s not that bad.

There’s easy ways to justify the clothing, be it a Japanese game, the fact that tongues are firmly placed in cheeks or even the fact that the game is really fun and it could be worse. This game shouldn’t be looked at for its portrayal of women, or rather its depiction of women (girls). This is not the game to stick your flag in for or against female representation in games. There are games that do better, and games that do worse. From screenshots, trailers, and hell, even this review, you know if this is going to be a sticking point for you.

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When all is said and done Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson is a great and fun anime game. Sure you won’t be playing it on a bus or at you desk at work during your lunch break, but with its short 5-10 minute levels you can get a lot out enjoyment out of the breakneck speeds and chaos of this button mashing combo fighter. Just don’t go into the photo studio mode, that….that is just too much.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes – PC Review

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Often Hollywood films and American TV shows skew how we think about certain job professions, be it the role of teachers in their inspirational nature of students or the quality of a priest in solving murders. With bomb disposal people we often see a the cop sat in front of a load of wires and an old-looking alarm clock, with their blade they inch their shaky hand closer to the blue wire, sweat dripping down their face until…the moment comes, the snip the wire and the timer stops.

The reality however, I have to assume, is a lot more tedious, complicated, scary and above all else; stressful. Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes looks to bring bomb defusal to gaming without it being “Hold X to defuse” or a quicktime event. Instead it wants you to solve puzzles and perform memory games before you virtually explode. What’s so hard about that? Well returning to the Hollywood version of events in bomb making often they’ll have their partner on a walkie-talkie telling them which wire to cut, what you don’t see is the huge bomb defusal manual that they have to flick through to find relevant information, don’t worry, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes has your back on this with a real world 25 page booklet for all your bomb defusal needs.

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Keep Talking has a huge gimmick working in its favour, not only are you dealing with a virtual bomb in a virtual world, a friend is going to have to be in communication with you and have a hard copy manual nearby. The bomb defuser is presented with a case, inside there is any number of ‘modules’, each module contains a different puzzle. One may contain a series of symbols on buttons. The player must relay this information to their partner who is not looking at the screen and then decipher from the wonderfully complicated manual which order the buttons should be pressed, once the correct order has been entered the module turns green and it’s onto the next. All the while the defuser and the partner with the manual must remember that they only have limited strikes and limited time before the bomb goes boom.

 

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This game would be interesting just on the face of it having this bomb defusing series of puzzle, but throw in the blind partner and the need for heavy clear communication and suddenly you have an even more fascinating concept for a title. I’ve seen it described as a party game and a mini-game puzzler, but to me there’s another way to look at it, this game is wonderful example of a virtual boardgame, something that with it’s reliance on communication and hard copy manual you’ll want to be playing when you have a few friends over for games night.

There’s a ‘campaign’ mode where the game slowly but surely over the course of a number of missions gives you more to learn, more to understand and more to screw up. If that’s all a bit to regimented for you and your nerves of steel then you can go into free mode and set how many modules you need to diffuse and how much time you have to achieve this.

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From wire cutting to a cryptic Simon Says game, the various modules will test your ability to stay calm and to communicate with your partner in anti-crime. I took a major risk and gave this game a go with my partner, we took it in turns jumping between diffuser and manual reader, very quickly we realised I was rubbish with the manual and couldn’t even understand instructions let alone verbalise a response that was cohesive or in fact accurate.

This is a game that has the potential to cause friendships and relationships to take a hit, but when you pull off a clean run on a bomb and take on hard puzzles and manage to get things sorted with relative ease you both feel unstoppable. This game will bring you together, just be aware that it could also smash you apart. Whether you’re the one on the computer looking at the device on the table or you’re the partner ‘radioing in’ instructions like “If there is a vowel on the serial number and no yellow wires cut the first blue wire”, you’re going to feel like you’ve just take on the world and succeeded; this feeling is unjust, there is no bomb, there is no danger, unless you’re roleplaying heavily, but you still get a rush from the whole experience. There’s no way to play this on your own unless you want to look up things yourself, so if you know you have someone nearby or on Skype you can get in touch with then this game is a must, it’s fun, chaotic and satisfying. Just be aware you have to download the manual from www.bombmanual.com and even just reading that has put us all on a government list somewhere…don’t worry though, it’s worth it.

Kaiju Panic – PC, Xbox One Review

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I’m one of those freaks that actually enjoyed the 1998 Godzilla film. I was 12 at the time and I didn’t know any better. I’m older now, as most people are inclined to do, and I’ve gone back to watch it, I’m sorry to say I still like it. Since that trip to Virgin Cinema for Nick Sharpe’s birthday back in 1998 I’ve loved everything about the concept about big monsters tearing up a city. Perhaps it’s down to my middle class habit of suppressing all emotion makes me want to Hulk up and kick down the Empire State Building, or perhaps big monsters punching cardboard buildings is cool. Either way, Kaiju (Japanese name for big monsters) are cool, I gobble up any games featuring them like the creatures in Rampage chewed on people.

Kaiju Panic brings a new style to the setting, a Tower Defence / Real Time Strategy game. When you think about it, its kind of amazing that this RTS Kaiju game hasn’t been done before, but often that’s the ideas that stick so well. On it’s face you are a person dropped into various locations with the goal of stopping a myriad of various monsters from attacking your town or city and in particular saving you main base of operations. To aid you in this you must first attempt to locate and then mine giant purple rocks that have come down from space. Once you’ve collected enough you can then spend your purple gems on resources like weaponry, better mining equipment or something simple like a blockade.

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Once you’ve started mining for the purple resource they pop out on the floor like spilt rice requiring you to run around sweeping them up into your pockets, this aspect of the game causes no end of tedium. Kaiju come from all directions on a map and the only prep you have is an icon floating in the direction they’ll be coming from, unfortunately you’re unable to garner how many are coming or in some cases what kind of back up they have with them. One or two of the initial red balls of bouncing death that turn up are easy enough to take out with a turret, but their bigger brothers require an acid spray to break an outer shell before they’ll take real damage. The flaw here is that often the game resorts to an almost trial an error affair where you’ll need to attempt a stage a couple of times to work out what you even need to prepare for and then you need to work out placement of turrets to ensure enemies don’t walk right through them. Mix with that the constant need to be sprinting back to your purple rock supplies to ensure that you have the currency to build the weapons on the fly and you find yourself not trying to just keep plates spinning but whittle the sticks they’re spinning on and bake the plates from scratch all the while Cthulhu wants a piece of you. All in all it’s a stressful and not always a fun experience.

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To give you some help in all this chaos you are tasked with searching for a recruiting people to help your cause. Often you can just walk up to a random joe hanging out in the town you’re saving and they’ll follow you around like you have gold in your pockets. Sometimes though they need some persuasion in the form of saving their kitty or dog first and then convincing them to come with. These people, as well as being good cannon fodder if you’re a jerk, also can hop into most of your armaments and provide a significant boost to their attack capabilities. Obviously though, hunting down people is another element you have to keep track of whilst trying to save the world. At this point I would often wonder why they put the whole of the worlds defenses into my hands, shouldn’t there be a committee or a team dealing with this? It seems odd that one bloke would be required to mine, build and maintain all aspects of the world defence.

I reviewed the Xbox One version of the game and apart from some minor confusion on my part early on about how to place weapons down the control scheme works amazing well for a console RTS/Tower Defence game. With a series of radial wheels at your disposal you always feel in control of the action and can, after a bit of playing, often find what you need with muscle memory alone.

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Aesthetically the game has an amazing style to it. The design of the whole product is a hight point of the experience with the game. The cute monsters, people and world on a whole really meshes well and is a pleasant change from how most RTS games go. The only down side is the main menu is a little lacking; this isn’t something most people will complain about but with the attention to the monsters and the world got, having a menu that is straight outta MS-DOS is a bit of a let down. Music and sound effects all do their job well maintaining the feel of the game but neither will grab you by your Mothra and make you sit up.

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Overall Kaiju Panic is a solid game with some really interesting concepts, the problem is that there are so many concepts involved some basic gameplay elements seemed to get missed out or marginalised where they should have been built upon. Elements you’re used to with Tower Defence games; like a clear path for the enemy or knowing what’s coming are side lined along with RTS elements like resources just sorting themselves out once you’ve got the basics down. It’s not right to say this game is a Jack of all trades and master of none, certain aspects work really well and when the game and you, the player, get the balance right the feeling of satisfaction and enjoyment are astronomical but the minute to minute gameplay of Kaiju Panic can easily stress you and cause more confusion than fun.

Corpse Party: Blood Drive – PS Vita Review

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I don’t often review horror games, there’s a few reasons; I have issues with most horror games relying on jump scares, but also I’m actually a bit of a wimp. I jump at the drop of a hat, and can easily creep myself out with just a memory. It comes from watching horror films at a very young age and having a way over-active imagination. The thought of a Japanese horror game however piqued my interest. The original Ring has one of the creepiest sequences I’ve ever seen; for reference it’s the actual video itself, something about that dude stood in the stream breaks me. With Japan being masters of unsettling horror I had high hopes for Corpse Party: Blood Drive, unfortunately I’ve come through the experience more confused than scared.

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Corpse Party is a series of survival horror games that have appeared on various handhelds and systems over the past decade. The latest, Blood Drive, is a continuation of the previous instalment Book of Shadows. Unfortunately I wasn’t aware of this and as such I can safely say that if you are new to the series, Blood Drive is not the place to start. I’m torn as to whether to blame the game for my lack of knowledge, it’s not like it’s easy to understand Star Wars if you began with Return of the Jedi. It just feels like the game makes very little attempt to accommodate those of us not versed in the canon of the series. What I could decipher was that in a previous game that our heroine, Ayumi, arsed around with a magic book and the outcome was that various horrors happened, including numerous friends being killed, except they weren’t just killed, they were wiped from existence and the only people who remember them are Ayumi and her friends who got caught up in the same nightmarish troubles.

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Although the game sells itself as a survival horror, that aspect takes a very far back seat to give room for the far more prevalent visual novel side of things. The opening of the game sees you click your way through what feels like hours of confusing exposition that needs to be thrown out before you can get the ball rolling. Characters are introduced and reintroduced at an ungodly rate and you’re left reeling from trying to take in all of this information. Eventually you’re released from the press x to hear next piece of Japanese V/O and Ayumi is the first character to return to Heavenly Host Elementary, a location that I was led to believe had been destroyed with her friends, but it turns out it was just hanging out in a different dimension. Seriously, this game’s story is not user friendly.

The bulk of the actual ‘game’ is spent in darkened corridors and classrooms, navigating your way by torchlight or phone light. Batteries die and with a scarce amount of spares lying around you end up walking to a new location, turn on torch, look at what to avoid, be it traps, hazards or enemies, turn off torch, remember route. This isn’t the streamlined and well-paced experience I was hoping for. Adding to the clear lack of streamlining with Corpse Party: Blood Drive you’ll also have to face the true horror of atrocious load times. On occasion I was able to get up from my sofa, pour myself a drink and return to see the loading finish. It’s not even the length of the load times which will cause frustration, it’s the sheer number. A relentless tide of ‘Loading’ blinking on your screen when you try to perform any action.

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In, from what I can tell is a change for the series, Blood Drive has decided to go with a Chibi cute art style for all non-Visual Novel graphics. On the face of it this change is quite cool, it’s a style I enjoy and is something a bit different. Unfortunately about 20 minutes into the game you get a scene where a character self-harms with a pair of scissors. Rather than being a horrific cry for help this comes across as somehow slapstick and can’t help but induce a laugh for the sheer surreal nature of it all. Had this been done in a cutscene or even in frames in the visual novel section this would have had so much impact, instead I just laughed.

The sound is Corpse Party’s strength, with a set of headphones the whole game’s audio is one creepy experience after another. It all comes together to be a jarring experience, the unnerving tones and approach to sound design with the Chibi character animations is a juxtaposition that I found it hard to look past.

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This game needs to tick off two boxes for me to recommend it to a certain crowd, is it a good horror game? And would fans of the series be satisfied? To start with fans of the series my response has to be yes; from an outside perspective this game seems to be pure fan service, a constant reintroduction of old faces and locations that if I remotely understood what was going on I’m sure would have me giddy with excitement. But for a horror game? I can’t say it’s worth a purchase. On a system that has classic’s like Resident Evil and Silent Hill available the repetitive and uninspired techniques to induce fear into the player come across as more played out than frightful. For a game to be truly scary you need immersion, nothing will take you out of the mood quicker than the load times and the generally slow pace of the experience. If you like the series you’ll be buying this game anyway, for everyone else? I’d just hit up Steam and play whatever Youtubers and screaming about these days.

Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition – Xbox One Review

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I’ve been with my partner for four years now, before we met she had played some computer games here and there but she didn’t advance much past the Playstation One. She had nerdy tendencies with film and TV so it wasn’t long before she was getting into the world of gaming with me. We played a few games together here and there but then she tried Diablo 3 with my friend and I. She was hooked. When it came to consoles the hook was in even deeper and then throw into the mix my formative dalliances with being a Dungeon Master for a Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition campaign she was sold on RPGs. With Divinity Original Sin: Enhanced Edition coming to consoles it was an easy sell for me to make, “It’s like Diablo but deeper and with the talking and concepts of D&D”.

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We started this isometric RPG up and were greeted with our Co-op character creation screens. We worked through our appearances and chose from the huge list of starting classes. As I played through the game I realised that class doesn’t mean much as you can more or less put points in anything, this does give a little bit too much choice however as it isn’t always clear what you should and shouldn’t be pumping your valuable XP into. My partner chose a female fighter called Bonnie and I went battle mage called Denvir. Quickly you’re covered in exposition as the game tries to set the scene and the world at large. You are Source Hunters, workers for a military/agency/cult that goes around using magic to stop bad people who use magic, I couldn’t help but see the hypocrisy here. Out first objective was to solve the murder of a councillor in a nearby city. In the 2 hours it took to get there we fought orcs, raided a dungeon and accidentally killed numerous civilians as we tried to be good guys.

The transition to console has meant the obvious need to now use a controller and playing on the Xbox One it worked great. There are radial wheels for the main selection of which menu you want to hit up and the hot bar is a simple raise and scroll affair for you to choose what you want to blow stuff up with. Inventory’s fill quickly and are slightly cumbersome but VS the alternatives it serves its purpose. Combat is turn based in Divinity Original Sin and moving your left stick to move a pseudo cursor around to select who you’re attack is as simple as you’d hope.

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Combat is one of Divinity Original Sin’s strong points. Much like in a number of pen and paper RPG’s you’re given a turn order and a set number of Action Points. With each ability and movement distance costing a different amount of Action Points you must think ahead and plan your turn to get the most out of your available points, there’s nothing worse than trying to attack someone, realising your out of range, walking over to enemy within range, then running out of AP and realising you’ll have to wait until next turn before doing anything.

As well as the combat the game features a lot of talking. This isn’t stuff you can just skim through either, you’ll need to be awake and aware at all times and listening to what people are saying. There’s a number of opportunities to re-read things in your log book or get a basic run down of what was said but unless you’ve listened well there is often times you’ll have no idea what to do. About 3 hours into the game when you’re trying to solve a murder of someone who sounded like a bit of a douche you’ll hit a major pacing issue in the game. You go from a good mix of combat, talking and puzzles to just walking back and forth across the city talking to people and not really having an obvious direction. Through dialogue trees you may find out something new but mostly you’ll hear the same stuff over and over. It was at this point I lost my partner. Harriet could no longer take the CSI: RPG stuff and flat-out claimed boredom. I tried to break up the hour of overly talky gameplay with some combat on a nearby beach, it was here we realised that dialogue trees were not levelling us up and we were severely outclassed by a giant orc.

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Despite her issues with the early sections of the game we had fun, mostly because of the unexpected elements. Without going heavy on the spoilers very early on you meet a couple of drunk legionnaires guarding a bridge, ‘Bonnie’ talked to them. I was still in control of Denvir at this point and started wandering around picking up some junk and just pottering. I saw something the other side of the bridge so I decided to nip across and grab it whilst this conversation happened, as soon as I got halfway across the guards took a dislike to my lack of sneaking and combat started. Harriet proclaimed she was winning them over and I screwed up her plan, this game followed a real world logic, something I wasn’t expecting. With people not liking their stuff being nicked and you being fined if caught, fire spells on oil spills blowing up, rain spells putting out flaming boats and locked chests being opened with a fist rather than a key; all things that make you realise how deep this game is, how much logic and room to improvise there is, how many opportunities for stupid plans and entertaining successes there are.

Graphically the game looks great on console. There is the usual RPG disconnect on the character models looking slightly ‘cartoony’ but with the attention to details on all the locales you can’t help but be drawn in. Add to that the absolutely wonderful soundtrack and you’re given the potential for a truly immersive experience. All characters have voice over now and despite some hammed up acting for some NPCs you are given a new sense of character for many of the people you need to interact with. Some however are just too over the top to even be near, the recruiter for the Fabulous Five and soon after Zixzax are both particularly grating.

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Divinity on Xbox is a great experience, the transition to console and controller has been as smooth as Diablo 3’s migration. It’s hard not to compare the two, especially with Diablo’s insane popularity on console, and I’m pleased to say Divinity Original Sin Enhanced Edition holds its own. With lots of improvements over the vanilla Divinity Original Sin, as well as an obvious move to console, this Enhanced Edition is great for fans of the original or console folk looking for something to get their teeth into. It may be a bit deep for some and the pacing gets a bit wonky in the early stages but the sheer depth and intuitive nature of NPC’s and the game’s reactions to your actions means that you’ll rarely go 10 minutes without being impressed that the Larian Studios thought of a particular tactic or mistake. If you have a good attention span and want something to test yourself on your console then you can’t go wrong with Divinity and it’s awesome split-screen co-op.

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