Top 5 Games of 2014

Now with 2014 almost over, it is time for the mandatory top games lists to be coming out of the wood works, so I figured "Why not" And with that in mind... let's go!

5. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

This game was very much different from the other “nominees” of the top 5 list you are reading right now. For one, it is a very much independent game and by playing it you can tell. The game pits you as a detective looking through a forested and backwater town with a visually stunning backdrop that hosts many murder mysteries related to the vanishing of a young Ethan Carter, who can share the mystical powers of the protagonist to see the supernatural. This power helps the protagonist unravel the mysteries that bring this game together.

Pros:

• Amazing visual quality and gorgeous scenery
• quality narrative that strays from the norm
• supernatural elements that boggle the mind and help deliver the narrative
• Non linear plot with many ways to experience the story
• Very adventurous and exploration driven story

Cons:

• Short narrative
• No tutorial and easy to miss plot points

4. Far Cry 4

Although extremely similar to it’s predecessor Far Cry 3, this game is still an amazing and explosive romp through the country of Kyrat that gets continually more and more crazy as you play it. The game also has one of the best villains of the year, Pagan Min.

Pros:

• Explosive gameplay with solid gunplay.
• Expansive and gorgeous landscape
• Multiple ways to dispatch of enemies and handle situations

Cons:

• Loose and simple plot
• Polarized and boring characters
• Similarities to Far Cry 3 go too far

3. Dragon Age: Inquisition

BioWare’s newest pseudo-MMO, Dragon Age Inquisition has a very elaborate and well written plot along with hours upon hours of gameplay and a huge assortment of characters and locations. The game has many choices in gameplay and narrative along with a massive variety in the ways you can play. Dragon Age keeps up to it’s predecessors massive narrative.

Pros:

• Massive and elaborate narrative
• Multiple choices throughout the game
• Huge variety in gameplay
• Huge replayability and hours of gameplay
• Living world with lots of side quests and ambient environment
• Well established world and locations

Cons:

• Less intense and cutting narrative than original
• Very centered and dependant on grinding
• Some very uninteresting characters and places.

2. Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

This game, although very similar to the Batman: Arkham series, has a diverse plot and interesting characters as well as the spectacular Nemesis system. The nemesis system allowing for several spectacular randomly generated enemies and many a replay.

Pros:

• Diverse gameplay with variety of features.
• Interesting plot
• Nemesis system allows for huge variety of enemies and massive amounts of fun
• Solid characters and well developed world

Cons:

• Similar features to Batman: Arkham fighting system
• Little diversity in side missions

read the review here: http://qtdoesgames.blogspot.ca/2014/10/shadow-of-mordor-breakdown.html

1. Wolfenstein: The New Order

Although many games were going to be put in this spot, I decided on Wolfenstein as the gunplay is amazing and the plot is fantastic. This game has some of the most insane and interesting gun controls in games today as well as a very diverse level design and some crazy moments in the plot as well as in natural gameplay.

Pros:

• Amazing gunplay and interesting weapons
• Diverse gameplay with many options for each situation
• Interesting and well written plot
• Keeps true to the originals
• Very high fidelity graphics with some spectacular set piece moments
• Intense amounts of difficulty

Cons:

• Slightly repetitive mission design
• Easy to predict plot moments

read the review here: http://qtdoesgames.blogspot.ca/2014/07/game-review-wolfenstein-new-order.html

And so with all that said, this list is not perfect, but it is what I thought were the five best games of 2014. If there were any games I missed or it was in the wrong order, please leave a comment below and let me know. And happy new year!

TellTale Game Of Thrones SpoilerFest

So with the recent release of Telltale's Game of Thrones hitting digital shelves a little while back, I figured I might discuss it in a Breakdown. Beware, I spoil everything you love in this post.Game of Thrones is most likely the more well known of the IP's Telltale has used since the success of the books and more infamously, the TV show, was the basis for the game. The story in the game directly parallels the TV show in the middle seasons and references several times the events of the TV show along with having several characters from the show, portrayed in Telltale style. The story does follow the classic Telltale style of narrative, which is make you feel as bad as possible, and then when you are finally starting to cheer up. make you feel more sad. It is really a a roller coaster of emotion that leaves you stunned and confused. Now with all these emotions and sadness, AND the fact that this is a completely narrative game means that there is spoilers so...

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR GAME OF THRONES AND GAME OF THRONES TELLTALE GAME AHEAD, DO NOT READ BECAUSE EVERYONE DIES!

Even with the boiler plate out of the way, I still feel I need to say just how many deaths and plot twists happen in this game. George R. R. Martin is infamous for his killing of characters and the Telltale game does not let up on the death. You play many characters in this game, those characters all revolving around the house Forrester in Game of Thrones, the banner men to the Starks. You play as Gared Tuttle, the squire to the lord of house Forrester, who was given a message by the lord on his last dying breath during the raid at the Red Wedding. This message then gets delivered to the squire's uncle, who is an advisor to the new lord, and another playable character, Ethan Forrester, who is a young boy who was abruptly given the title of lord. You have to make grave decisions, including choosing who will be your advisor and who you will ask help of, because you need to look after your house, which is in constant danger of being destroyed by other houses looking for power. You even need to ask help of Mira Forrester, who is currently in King's Landing being handmaiden to Margaery Tyrell, who is currently marrying Joffrey Lannister, the king of Westeros. With Mira you need to ask help and even have the option of stealing other people's things for profit all while staying loyal and impressing the other Lannisters (including Peter Dinklage) Really the whole game starts off on a sad note with the deaths of many characters and throughout the game you have the option of killing people and are sometimes forced to. This is all pretty tame by Telltale standards, since the Walking Dead had death galore. And just like the Walking Dead, the main character gets killed off as a plot point. Wait...

SPOILER ALERT FOR THE WALKING DEAD GAMES!

Sorry 'bout that. Well, anyway, at the end of the first chapter, the main competition of the Forresters and seemingly main antagonist to everybody Ramsay Snow, kills Ethan and takes his sibling hostage. This sets the tone for seemingly the rest of the game. The game does have the benefit of making none of the characters except for the ones who don't die in the show yet able to die at any point as they would in the show or books. With that said, it is very good to have previous knowledge of the Game of Thrones mythos before playing this game, as it both helps you understand the plot a little more and can give you possible foresight to the future plot points of the game (Joffrey is still alive for example) With all of that out of the way the game has a very solid and very compelling narrative that I personally enjoyed. The art style of the game is going for a more watercolor theme than the cell shaded normality Telltale is known for. This brings the game into the more uncanny valley territory where characters from the TV show don't quite look normal. it also brings a lot of graphical errors as the depth of field effects will often blur out and make the immediate background jagged and unrefined. This makes the game look a little rough around the edges but I feel the art style was more appropriate to the world of Game of Thrones.

All in all I would recommend this game if you have read the books or have watched the television show as it really draws from both sources and adds a whole lot to the narrative. I would say for the low price point it is worth the dough.

A Dark Room & Unfolding Games

You wake up. Your head is throbbing and your vision is blurry. You see a fire on the other side of the room you are in. You light the fire. This is the beginning of a great adventure.


A Dark Room by Doublespeak games is a very interesting beast. It is a game made for browser and iOS using java and HTML. The game is of a genre only known as a "folding" game. This means the longer you play the game, the more features and game play is revealed. The folding game genre is heavily reliant on waiting and slow progression mixed with eventual discovery to drive the player to continue playing the game. This makes the player want to play the game simply because they want to know what mechanic or feature is going to be revealed next. This is not unique to games as other games have attempted and very rarely successfully managed to make waiting interesting (Farmville, many Facebook and iOS games) but a folding game like A Dark Room doesn't try and make the waiting in itself exciting. In fact, it does quite the opposite. The game makes the waiting boring, agonising. The game makes you hate the waiting, but makes the end goal of the waiting, which is that primal discovery. Even finding just one little hint that there is something more than what you are currently playing makes the player anxious to continue. But I think I have reached the limit as too what I can talk about without actually talking about the story.

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR A DARK ROOM AHEAD, READ AT OWN DISCRETION!

Like I said earlier, A Dark Room is slow. This isn't just in game play, but in story. The game reveals very little to you early on and continues with the mystery until the very end. The story told to you in the beginning is that you woke up in a dark room (surprise, surprise) with a burnt out fire and a mysterious woman. You light the fire and are immediately caring to the woman, in the same we she is caring to you. The woman tells you she can build things like houses and traps and you have to gather materials like wood and furs for her so she can build them. This introduces the new mechanic of gathering materials which has a progress bar that fills, allowing you to gather materials when full. When you gather the materials to build houses, people start to take residence in them, giving you resources over time relevant to what job they have in the village which you can assign to either a gatherer or hunter. By building traps you gain another progress bar to check the traps and gather furs. You eventually can build a trading post, which allows you to trade furs for other resources needed to build like scales and cloth. You are then able to build structures like tanneries in order to make leather and such. These structures give you extra job positions to give your villagers that have them use other resources like furs to make leather. You then are given the opportunity to buy a map in the trading post. Upon buying it, you are given an extra option that is one of the most fundamental parts to game play, exploring.

Exploring lets you venture out into the wilds around your village from a top down map view. You have a food and water levels that deplete slowly for every space you move, meaning you have to come back to your village or starve to death, In these wilds you are exploring are bushes and trees and paths, all displayed through ASCII art (using letters) and when you travel through the wilds, enemies will randomly attack you, sending you into combat. Combat consists of an RTS variant of turn-based combat. This once again constitutes the waiting mechanic as both you and your opponent have progress bars that can be tapped/clicked when full to attack (the opponent auto-attacks) This is the combat in the beginning, but you can eventually get weapons that do more damage, armour to take more hits, and water/food containers to travel further. You also loot enemies or building when finished with them. You take their items and can then use them. You have to watch out, though, because you have a very Fallout-type inventory that can hold a certain amount of weight, and better items tend to weigh more. This exploration mechanic is very important to the game as it allows you to know explore and discover at a more controlled pace. There is still a lot of waiting, but now you can explore the map faster or slower depending on how confident you are. The game now starts to expand on the narrative, not only revealing character traits of the protagonist through his interaction with the mysterious girl and his villagers (whom later he calls slaves), all the while giving you items that are very interesting and mysterious, but you have to wait to use them to their full extent

So I think I have competently explained the mechanics and narrative of this game. And in doing so I now hope to talk about the second half of the title, Unfolding games. I brushed over the subject before, but i want  to go more in depth in how these games vary from triple A games of today. The games that are released yearly, let's use the example Call of Duty, vary from unfolding games because of the differences even in the first ten minutes of the game. The first ten minutes of A Dark Room consist of huddling around a fire and next to no game play. The first ten minutes of Call of Duty is usually an action packed romp through whatever setting the game has chosen, explaining all of the game play features and narrative in one big tutorial. The tutorial is meant to tell you everything, so that the game can use the mechanics it's taught you and hopefully expand upon them. Unfolding games have no tutorial as the whole game tells you how to play it simply by throwing you in the game and expecting you to know. Yet while this works in A Dark Room, if the next Assassin's Creed did this it would be crucified. This is in part because an unfolding game gives you the game play in bite-sized portions, and the next AC game will most definitely have a million and one game play features. Yet I think that games with tons of features can learn to teach game play through game play instead of tutorials. in fact a good example of that is in Mega Man X, which you can watch here. The game doesn't tell you how to play so much as you figure it out in a learning scenario. This can be a great asset to games nowadays, as instead of a "Press A to jump" tutorial, games can learn to teach you fluidly.

So I hope this post was informative and makes you want to play A Dark Room. The game is on iOS and browser, and you can find the browser version here. So go check that out and hopefully have fun. And if you enjoyed this post, be sure to leave a comment below and tell me what you think of Unfolding games.

Spec Ops The Line & Ludo-Narrative Dissonance

Just about everyone who plays video games has either played or heard of the modern military shooters like Counter Strike that have been popular since the first Call of Duty released in 2003. Since then many games have expanded upon and, well to be honest, glorified the military as we view it today. We have seen the best of the military and just how powerful and action-packed it can be. But very rarely do we see the worst of the military, the things that we can only tell stories about. And even more rarely does a game pull it off without seeming "preachy" or "anti-government," So when a game like Spec Ops: The Line hit shelves it was a fresh look at an often overused subject.

In most people's minds, games where you shoot people like (Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc) the game usually gives you a reason either through the game play or the narrative to indeed, shoot people. The reason can either be "They are terrorists trying to kill innocent people" or even such things as "They killed your wife and family, kill them" but in any scenario you are usually the good guy doing the right thing by killing people. The main difference in narrative and game play that Spec Ops: The Line uses is that you are not killing people that are inherently evil or need to be killed, you are killing other soldiers in a scenario where only one of you will survive. This brings us to the plot of the game.

WARNING--- SPOILERS FOR SPEC OPS: THE LINE ---WARNING

The plot of Spec Ops is very similar in structure and delivery to most modern military shooters that we have today, but the story itself is very different. You play as Martin Walker, a Captain in the American military who has been sent with a squad of two other people to rescue Colonel John Konrad and the "Damned 33rd" Battalion that was trapped and presumed dead in Dubai, where massive dust storms have destroyed and collapsed most of the city. Once you enter the city you find insurgents that attack you, forcing you to kill them, moving forward to try and find the 33rd. You do find the 33rd, who have declared martial law and have started killing civilians and have engaged in a war with the CIA sent previously to rescue them. With this discovery you also find Konrad, who is leading the 33rd and overseeing their war crimes. Walker and his team end up in the middle of the battle between CIA and the 33rd, being forced to kill American soldiers in order to survive. Walker then starts experiencing hallucinations and in fact has hallucinated most of the events of the second half of the game. During these hallucinations it is revealed in fact that Walker has regretted the actions he has taken and that he is as much to blame for the deaths of civilians as the 33rd is. The game manages to perfectly deliver the story and makes you feel horrible for the actions you are taking. There are also decisions you must make throughout the game that revolve around either saving civilian or military personnel, and makes you question who's life is more valuable if both are innocent.

Now that I have recapped the plot, I can finally talk about the main point of this post, or in other words, the confusing term in the title, Ludo-narrative dissonance. This may sound like a word only meant in a university Language Arts term paper it simply means a conflict between a game's plot and its game play. This term is mainly used in a derogatory connotation, as in when a game mechanic or level directly contradicts the plot, pulling you out of the game and ruining immersion. I, however, would disagree and say that the ludo-narrative dissonance in Spec Ops: The Line actually immerses the player more, as the game's plot actively makes you feel horrible for slaughtering soldiers, whereas the game play promotes the killing. The way that the enemies will swarm in waves like lambs to the slaughter, and the tool tips on loading screens tell you things such as "enemies will only drop their weapons when executed" or "grenade launchers can kill several enemies in one area" suggest that the game indeed wants you to kill the enemies and use the most brutal ways to do so. This is very interesting that a game would specifically contradict itself in order to drive its story home.

 The enemies in Spec Ops: The Line are very different from other enemies, not only in the way that they are told through the story, but how they are presented through the game play. The soldiers you are fighting, as I have explained several times, are soldiers. And while they are fighting you and you are killing them, they are not enemies. Think about other FPS military shooters. Who are the main villains in these games? Middle Eastern terrorists, Russian terrorists, or Chinese/Korean terrorists most of the time. Can you see the pattern here? I talked in the beginning of this post about how most modern shooters give you a reason to kill the enemies you're killing. The way that they do this is by demonising and dehumanisation. This is because for a player to want to kill someone, they have to believe they are doing the right thing by doing so. Demonising is making the enemy seem evil in some way so that the player feels they are eliminating evil, making the player inherently good. Dehumanisation is making the enemy not seem human or trying to remove sympathy for the enemy, so that the player doesn't question why they are killing the people they are killing. This isn't just in games however, even way back in WWII and many other battles in history, both sides have to both demonise and dehumanise their enemy in order to make their soldiers actually want to fight. Even in modern America, the government is associating these Middle Eastern extremist groups as evil so that people will want to join the military to stop this evil. This is the same as in just about every FPS. The thing that truly separates the enemies in Spec Ops from normal FPS enemies other than the narrative constantly telling you "killing people is bad" is that in most combat situations in Spec Ops, you are the one to shoot first, often hearing enemies having casual dialogue or in the first level just trying to talk to you before you end up firing upon them. This not only drives that you are the instigator, but makes the enemies have entirely different motives to fighting you. They are trying to kill you not because they are evil, but because in their eyes you are evil and they are simply trying to stay alive. This brings me to the sentence that might just summarise the last several paragraphs of writing you have had to wade through. "Evil is in the eye of the beholder" This is saying that in Spec Ops: The Line, there is no clear enemy, as you are as evil to the enemies as they are evil to you. It is not a battle of good vs. evil, it is a battle of two equally flawed and equally righteous in their cause enemies.

After having read this, I hope that i have at least piqued your interest in Spec Ops: The Line as it is a very good game. Many people will say that the game is bad either because of the game play or the way the story is conveyed, but to anyone who has played a modern military shooter, it takes the genre and flips it on its head. This is why I would highly recommend Spec Ops: The Line to anyone looking for a story that can truly show you the horrors of war and it's consequences.

GTA V Just Got Better

When I heard that GTA V was getting a remake, I jumped on that hype train and rode it to release. But are some new features and a graphics update worth the purchase of the game twice? Well let's find out.

GTA V was originally released October 2013, and quickly rose to the fastest selling piece of electronic media to date. With the release of the new generation of consoles; however, Rockstar decided to rerelease the game with reinvented graphics and new features. It also added the new first person camera, which was a highly anticipated change from the normal third person view the series is known for. While this sounds like Rockstar just trying to make it's install base play the same game twice, they did add the ability to transfer your GTA Online character over to the new generation along with all of their stats and money. This really enticed me to make the switch as i knew I wasn't going to have to sink any more hours leveling my character up. But the most impressive thing to me was the graphics. The graphics of this game were already impressive on last gen, and with the overhaul of new textures and rendering capabilities the game looks magnificent. The way that water moves dynamically and the city streets are crawling with traffic and people just immerses you so much in the world that it is very easy to get lost in the ever changing  story Rockstar is trying to tell.

Along with the graphical overhaul I may as well get into the new first person mode. The game already played very fluidly so the new perspective doesn't look as natural in your movements as your character is constantly moving very erratically instead of fluidly transitioning from jog to sprint. Don't get me wrong though, the game is still as immersive as whatever first person loses in fluidity it gains in pure immersion as you see everything through the eyes of your character, making everything from shooting cops to piloting a chopper much more visceral and enthralling as you can now look down sights and play the game more like a FPS. It also adds to the interactivity being able to look around the inside of whatever cockpit or driver's seat you're in. One of the best additions to the game is definitely the PS4 controller support. It allows you to swipe up or down o change radio stations or quick throw a grenade by swiping up while aiming

As with the new content, all of the previous DLC is already in the game provided you have a constant internet connection (which was very much a problem for me last week) and all future content should support the new additions to the game like increased multiplayer player cap. There is new content coming out soon as well (HEISTS!) and all new guns and clothing added in already like the new rail gun (explosive round rifle) and such gruesome tools as a hatchet. With the new content also comes new missions to do to unlock some of the content. I don't want to spoil them as they are pretty darn cool but I will say the new car the Duke O' Death is the best vehicle and has the funniest way to get it.

So with all that in mind I would absolutely recommend buying the game again as it utilizes the new consoles features and adds a whole bunch of new content. So if you're looking for a reason to buy a next gen console, the new GTA update might just be on the list.

The Binding Of Isaac Rebirth: The Breakdown

If there are any games that can make a person more angry and tormented than rogue-like shooters, I have not heard of or ever want to play that genre. The game I am breaking down coincidentally happens to be one of these shooters.     *sigh*
The first thing that I have to say about this game is that even though I mainly played this on PS4, it was in fact first a flash game and made by Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl in 2011 that quickly built up a devout following and became a classic indie hit along with Super Meat Boy and Fez. The Rebirth remake of this game, which was released in November 2014, was made with a much bigger team and included a lot of new content including new playable characters, items and enemies. It also changed the art style from the "drawn" style of flash to a more suitable 16-bit style of graphics, but I'll get in to that later.

Before I can explain the art style I do need to explain the story in order to give the art some context. The story of this game is indeed very crazy and deals with very adult topics ranging from abortion to infanticide. The story; however, is broken up as the game's levels are broken up because of the randomly generated nature of the in-game dungeons and the story is in fact more told by the game play and the art than the explicit story sections of the game. The game that is told you is that you play as Isaac, an infantile child who is all but ignored by his religious mother until she receives a message from "God" telling her to kill Isaac, much like the tale of Isaac and Abraham from the Bible. Isaac overhears his mother's plotting and escapes into the house's decrepit basement, establishing the setting of the game. The rest of the story and background information are revealed to the player through transitional loading screens and through the various enemies and bosses throughout the game. This is in fact a very creative way to tell game play and rather diversifies the story from most triple A games that have come out in recent memory. The minimal amount of story also compliments the rogue-like aspects of the game, as you will be playing this game in different "runs" or lives that will last varying lengths before you inevitably die and have to restart the game from the start in true rogue-like fashion. As much as the story goes your goal is to reach the bottom of the basement and defeat your mother to unlock 1 of 13 possible endings, but there are levels and story given after this point that will vary from run to run.

The game play of this game falls into the mechanics used in the rogue-like genre. You start the game with the goal of going down through dungeons into the seemingly final boss dungeon. You start off the game as a literal naked baby with a low amount of life and a weak attack of shooting tears at enemies. The game's dungeons are randomly generated with random rooms containing upgrades and abilities and sinister enemies and bosses that will fight you. To beat a dungeon you need to defeat that floor's boss using whatever abilities and upgrades you have found. This will then unlock the next floor down with no way of getting back up. On certain floors there are also rooms containing gambling games or shops and special Deals with the Devil, where you lower your life bar for upgrades. As you progress, Isaac becomes more powerful with either more health or an upgraded attack or even a familiar that fights with you in battle. Throughout the game you will also be given bombs, which can be used to either blow open a wall Legend of Zelda style or destroy rocks blocking your path. There are also keys, which can be used to unlock doors or chests that contain special items. There are also coins, which are used to gamble or spend on items such as hearts or bombs. The game does have very in-depth item and ability systems that make it both unique and enjoyable. The boss battles and the inadvertent stories that they tell are also quite remarkable in how fun and diverse they can be. The final result, in which you either die or defeat the final boss, is amazing in how different your Isaac is in his appearance. And even after defeating the final boss there is an infinite amount of dungeons after that not only leading to incredible amounts of replayability but the ability to be immersed in the challenging and creative worlds.

The final segment of this here Breakdown will be covering visuals and sound. The actual fidelity of Rebirth on both PC and PS4 are actually staggeringly good, with the 16-bit graphics style lending to a stable 60fps. The art style is very beautiful in the way that all of the enemies and levels thematically merge into an immersive world and a beautiful game. The music in this game also just adds to the immersion with eerie and fitting tracks to go along with the general creepy theme of the game. The sound effects also hit bulls eye and fit very well with the various enemies and blood or tear based weapons.

After having played this game as much as possible and not even scratching the surface of the game's depths I can testify to how amazing this game is and just how much love and care went into it. The game's massive replay value and amazing art style warrant a high rank on anyone's list of good games. I can recommend The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth with confidence.

XCOM Enemy Unknown: The Breakdown

I have owned this game for a long time before i actually sat down to play it. When I did decide to immerse myself in the amazing game that is XCOM: Enemy Unknown, I knew I had to break it down.

This being the game franchise that has rocked the difficulty settings to the extreme, I did wimp out and play on Normal, but trying out Impossible and Classic difficulties I do have to say, This game will wreck you. just about everything on the higher difficulties goes wrong for you and right for the enemies. But I'll get to that later. For now let's talk story.

It is the near future, and mankind has been expecting hostile alien life to come to earth. That is why when life did come from outer space and start terrorising humanity, we joined together to create the XCOM Project, a coalition of countries coming together to form a defence against the aliens. You, as the player, are the head of this project and you control everything from what departments get funding to what soldier moves to cover in combat. The game doesn't really ever explain the enemies in depth and you have to perform autopsies on the enemies in order to find out what they are and what they want. This pulls from a very Dark Souls style narrative where you as the player have to look for your story. i personally love this, but a player who would want their story explained to them might not. In terms of environment and immersion, this game gives you the feeling of being in the world right from the start. You are in control of the soldiers and it is your fault if they die or get injured. You feel terrible when one of your soldiers dies in battle and you have to continue fighting. The game play reinforces this with the perma-death and the resource management.

Speaking of game play, this game has a definite theme of difficulty. There are two main aspects of game play. There is the base building part, and the turn-based combat part of game play. The base building aspect involves the mechanic that your whole operation is funded by the countries you are protecting, so you can actually fail the game by all of these countries leaving the coalition. You may be asking why they would leave. Well, there are some missions where you have to choose between several countries to save, and whichever countries don't get defended increase in "panic" levels. If their panic level reaches the full five bars of "panic", they leave. This adds a difficulty that can only be described as "you lose twenty minutes before you realise you've lost" Other than keeping these needy countries happy, you can build new facilities and upgrade your equipment. You have to research into new equipment and then start production on the equipment, as long as you have enough resources to build and enough engineers and scientists to research/build them. This is the most mellow part of the game, because even with the countries constantly threatening to leave, nothing typically goes as terribly wrong as in combat.

Speaking of combat, this game may be difficult in the base building portion, but nothing compares to the difficulty of the combat. Now old school players will remember how the older games are much more difficult. Well, I never played those games, so this game has to stand on it's own in difficulty. The combat consists of a turn-based cover shooter. You control your soldiers from a top down perspective. Your soldiers (without upgrades) can move a certain amount of spaces, and then either shoot enemies or enter Overwatch, which makes them automatically shoot at the next enemy to move at a slight aim penalty. There are also abilities such as grenades and rocket launchers, that allow you to either do some good AoE damage or break enemies cover. The combat is actually very in-depth, with strategies like flanking. The main reason that the game is hard is that your soldiers, at least very early on, can't aim. The enemies, however, have sniper-like accuracy. This means you have to be extremely careful not to rely on your character actually hitting something or the enemy missing because if you do, you will break your screen with anger. But this also means when you do hit something or manage to complete a mission with no casualties. This high risk, high reward game play can become extremely addicting to players looking for a challenge.

So as it would turn out, choosing to play this game was a good idea. The game really emphasises on the difficulty and the world is very immersive. I would have to say that to anyone wanting a challenge, XCOM: Enemy Unknown is for you.

Why The New Borderlands Game Is DLC

After having played my fair share of spooky games for Halloween, it's time to lighten up the mood with some good old raunchy comedy and big guns. That's why I played the new Borderlands game!


Borderlands games are well known for having a good comedic value to them that distinguishes them from other shooters. Between that and the RPG level of loot that you can collect and improve your characters and weapons with, the games are pretty unique. So why is it that every critical assessment of the game calls it the new Borderlands DLC? Well there are a couple reasons for that. The first reason is the same reason why Saints Row IV fell from popularity pretty quickly. Saints Row IV was originally going to be Saints Row The Third: Enter The Dominatrix before someone at Deep Silver presented it as a new game at a board meeting. And although it was a new game, they continued using the same map and graphics for all of the characters. This was the game's main criticism at it's release and why a lot of people didn't buy it. But the main selling point contradicting the game using the same map, was how different the game play was. You could run at supersonic speeds and glide across the sky. The guns were all very different and crazy in what they did. The missions and story weren't serious at all, having you complete insane tasks and spout ridiculous dialogue. You could tell what the game was when in the beginning 5 minutes you are the president and Keith David is your ally. The game used the same map and characters, but fundamentally was a more insane and much less serious game. Borderlands The Pre-Sequel, on the other hand, was too similar in game play and story to even be considered it's own game.

Borderlands The Pre-Sequel is a game that could have entirely been covered in one DLC. In the same regard, some of the Borderlands 2 DLC has more original content than Borderlands The Pre-Sequel. This is because the DLC is meant to be different enough from the main game that you would want to buy it, either in game play or in story. The Borderlands DLC has always been out there and different, from fighting robot ninjas, to playing D & D inside the borderlands mythos, The new Borderlands game doesn't do this however. This is because to create a sequel you need to include the lore and back story that the other games have set up and you need to expand upon it. This means on a fundamental level, the game needs to be similar in order to be a sequel. With DLC, you have most likely played and experienced the story of the main game and so when playing DLC, you will see little reference to the main game other than that the DLC exists within it. This means that the DLC can be much more different than the main game than a new game could be. Borderlands The Pre-Sequel has to do this, making it inevitably similar to the other Borderlands games.

The most major concept the game uses to dig it's own grave is it places itself within the first and second games, ergo a pre-sequel. what this does is make the game have to tell the story of the first game, but it constricts the game to have to set up to the next one. This is the only way the game can be canon. So by doing this the writers have given themselves a strict guideline they have to follow. This kills any ambition the writers have, which is exactly what makes Borderlands games so fun, the ambition and the spectacle of all of the bosses. But the worst part is that any boss or main character they create has to be completely irrelevant to the story of the game, because you can't kill a main character that exists in BL2 and you can't fight a character from BL1 without majorly throwing the flow of the story off. The game has no way of setting itself apart, at least on a story perspective.

The game play of the game, while adding new features, doesn't seem to improve upon or change any existing features from the last game. It adds a new oxygen mechanic and some weapon types, but really nothing to differentiate it from the other games. The oxygen mechanic is that you are on the moon, so there isn't a breathable atmosphere. You have to use an oxygen mask in order to breath. This precious oxygen can be used to double jump or ground pound, but reduces the amount you have. You have to refill the oxygen by moving into breathable atmosphere/ oxygen vents or by killing enemies. This means if you are in the middle of nowhere it is entirely possible to run out of O2 and suffocate to death. While this is cool and stands out, the only reason it exists is to push the player forward and keep you from just roaming around. It gives you an incentive to move from mission to mission, which is not dying. The new laser gun types and the new Cryo effect are pretty much what you's expect so I won't really talk about them. And the new characters are not that different, only really including Clap Trap as a playable joke. They are very much using the formula of turret character, character good with guns, character good with melee, and character with random abilities (replacing the Maya and Lilith characters with Clap Trap) so there's really nothing to talk about with them either. The game is fundamentally the same.

So after essentially writing a high school essay on why this game is DLC, that doesn't mean it's a bad game. It just isn't different from it's predecessors. So if you either haven't played a Borderlands game before or played all of the DLC for the other Borderlands games and want more, then go buy this. i would highly recommend waiting for a sale to lower the price a little bit. Trust me, you won't miss anything not playing this game day one.

Game Review: Warface

Crytek is an absolute behemoth of the video game industry with Crysis leading the way in graphics and CryEngine powering some of the best games in the industry. But can their new free to play shooter Warface contend with other FPS giants like COD and Battlefield?

The first thing about Warface that struck my interest was that it was a Crytek game. The guys who made Crysis, which was and is one of the best graphically looking games of all time. I mean for god's sakes there was probably more detail in Psycho's face in Crysis 3 than all of the Tell Tale Walking Dead games combined. Their games and their engine are amazing and they are very high on the dev food chain. So when I saw a free to play shooter by them on Steam, I had to get it. 

Now this may just be my experience, but the game was underwhelming. The graphics, even set to the highest settings (which almost crashed my PC BTW) looked less impressive than Battlefield 4. The rag doll effects and hit boxes are both a little off, which can make it frustrating to shoot a guy in the head several times before realising the hit box is smaller than the model for the head. The only noticeably different graphics I mentioned are that the environment isn't as high textured as the guns unlike other Crytek titles, which disappointed me. But I guess graphics shouldn't matter when it's free to play. That is another thing that grabbed my attention, there is no cost to buying Warface. There is however, special currency to buy rare items that costs real money. So that's a little B.S, I mean even Battlefield didn't have guns that could be purchased with real money- wait a minute. So yeah almost all shooters let you buy guns. but you don't then make special super items that only last a week. That's real low for them. However, attachments, weapons, and Armour can be unlocked with every level, having you choose which one you want to unlock when you level up when you start the mission, so that's fair. They do have the Crysis feature where you can open an attachment menu at any time with the press of a button and then just click (no controller support whatsoever buts that not an issue) on attachments to choose them and I like that a lot more than doing it in between matches.

The game play itself is really just mediocre, with co-op and PVP as choices. There are four classes to choose from. The Rifleman is Assault with a machine gun and ammo kits. The Sniper has a sniper rifle, pretty self explanatory. The Medic has a shotgun and both health kits and defibrillators. The engineer has an SMG with both armour repair and special land mines they place down. All classes have a primary, secondary, knife, two grenade types though some only have one unlocked, and finally their special which replenishes either armour, health, or ammo. The gun buying system is a little whack, with both timed items and durability for permanent items, meaning you need a lot of money to keep using your good guns. The game modes as a whole are bland. The co-op is just a PVE "clear out all enemies" sort of thing with a few optional objectives like killing a super heavy soldier (which is really OP and hard) or blowing up a helicopter with an RPG. There are only a couple maps and so the harder difficulty challenges just reuse maps with more enemies, tiring out the idea really fast. The A.I in co-op is pretty bad. All they do is rush you and try to melee you or try to snipe you from afar. Even on hard they have terrible aim, except the snipers which literally lock on to you no matter how fast you move. The PVP multiplayer is like Battlefield mechanics on a COD map, meaning slow game play but really the same as other shooters. No different game modes or anything. 

I'd normally talk about story here, but I'm not sure there is one. You are Warface, a ragtag military squad sent to stop the evil Blackwood. That's it. I'm serious, that's all they tell you. There aren't even any actual characters, like in Titanfall. There is no story. Which I guess there doesn't need to be in an FPS, but then why would they establish groups and settings. Why not just say "You are a good guy, kill the bad guys, GO!" Oh wait they did exactly that. It's just silly.

To sum up my opinion of the game would be that this game tries to be other games and does them worse. I would recommend buying an actually established FPS like COD or Battlefield instead of this. Actually just go buy Crysis 3, a good game by Crytek.

Game Review: Wolfenstein The New Order

Wolfenstein and Return To Castle Wolfenstein, known as some of the games that pioneered the way for the modern titles we have today, has recently had a sequel released called Wolfenstein: The New Order. Can the New Order continue the tradition of great games. Or do the old style of games not work in today's generation?

WARNING: SPOILERS AND STUFF

Bethesda and id Software are two names  of the industry that are both known for amazing games. I mean, id Software MADE the video games of today a reality. Doom and Wolfenstein completely redefined what video games were. They both pioneered a now multimillion dollar industry and then they improved it and made it fun. Bethesda, on the other hand, made the Elder Scrolls series. They also adapted and made the Fallout series their own. Both series are considered some of the best games of this generation. So you can clearly see the hype and expectations that were loaded on to the Wolfenstein sequel. This game was to be nothing less than perfection. Playing this game, I can say that this game was amazing. I found very little in this game that was bad or even mediocre. The game deserved the hype.

The graphics of this game are astounding. It runs at a very smooth 1080p 60fps. And I can say those specs are amazing. Every other game in the world right now is trying for those specs and Wolfenstein just waltzes on in like "Sup bitches! 60fps! 1080p! Later!" and then walks out as the intro to CSI plays. This game looks beautiful and plays great. The art style is very nice and seems both real and gory at times and funny and silly at times. The game knows what it is and what it is is blowing away robot Nazi's with duel wielded shotguns, then coming being forced to choose which friend you save from being dissected alive. The game knows how to be itself and it does it in a way that no other game *cough* Duke Nuke 'Em Forever *cough* could pull off. The only issue is that it takes some getting used to the models because they all look very Source Engine reminiscent, specifically old Counter Strike looking hand models, but that might just be me.

The story of Wolfenstein could either be the best written story ever or the worst one depending on how seriously you take it. Like I said, the game is both incredibly stupid and incredibly smart in the way the game presents itself. You play as the hard as nails William Joseph Blazkowicz, or his nickname B.J/ Blazko. He was the main character of Wolfenstein 3D and almost every Wolfenstein after that. As a main character in today's generation, B.J is actually pretty three dimensional and has faces and emotions like a normal human being. He also walked the thin line to saying the kick ass and chew bubblegum line the entire game. Consistent theme with this game, ain't it? The story of the game is that it is an alternate reality where technology in the 40's was much more advanced  and robots and lasers were invented in a very steam punk fashion. In this reality, B.J is an air force troop sent to kill Hitler's lead commander, Deathshead. In this reality, you are forced to choose between two of your friends on who you save. This immediately splits the main story into different "alternate realities" and adds replay value to the game. I personally chose the Fergus storyline first, so that's the one I'll review the story on. After choosing to save Fergus, you and him try to escape before an explosion blasts both of you out into the ocean. You then reawaken, only to find yourself paralysed and in a mental home. You spend the next fourteen years watching the owner's of the home and your caretakers be hassled by Nazi's and you eventually see the mother and father of the girl who personally looked after you be murdered in cold blood and the home destroyed before you regain control of your body and fight your way out of the home. You save the girl, Anya, and find out that the Nazi's won World War II and took control of the world, stomping out resistance. This is the story of the game. And I love it. It is very serious and has very adult overtones and themes. Yet, the game adds humour regularly and has almost too much cheesy 80's jokes. But the two sides of the coin that is this game's plot seem to blend perfectly for an amazing experience. 

This game is a first person shooter, as we all know. And as most of you know, id Software invented first person shooters. So with my whole heart and no regrets, I can confirm that this game may be, no IS the best FPS for the foreseeable future. Your character has no powers, and no supernatural elements. B.J just has lots of guns and the knowledge to use them. And with just guns, this game has some of the best and most fluid, seamless, and brutal combat I have played at least until I wrote this review. I love it when I'm a bad ass, and respect it when I die. It is solid and wholesome and I love it. The mechanics are actually very simple, but the combinations and variety are what make it great. The game play in a nut shell is this: You have both health and armour, health regenerates but only to the closest 20% margin unless you pick up health, and once you are at full health, you can still pick up health to overcharge your health, which keeps giving you more health, but it slowly decays until you are back at your max health. Your armour is simply yet another health bar that does not regenerate or overcharge. You pick up health from health packs, meals, or even dog food (callback to OG Wolfenstein) from fallen enemies or around the map. The gun play is that you have a gun and you shoot it at guys who drop ammo and guns. When you pick up another gun, you can duel wield the guns which removes aiming but doubles damage. The guns also have different fire modes and attachments like burst fire and silencers to switch from or attach. You also have a melee, which is an instant kill and a stealth kill if the enemy doesn't notice you. If you pick up another knife, however, you can throw it for a stealth kill. The stealth in this game seems almost forced, yet spotty as to if it will work. You almost never have to sneak in this game, yet there are some clear areas where you would be better off sneaking, which is easy, but there is no clear indicator as to if someone sees you, and sometimes they can notice you when you lean out of cover, or won't notice you when you are clearly in their vision. And then the melee is very iffy. You have to be directly behind someone, at the same height as them (which is only a problem at stairs) and then the prompt shows up to instakill. Or else you simply shank them and break stealth and then have to spam them with melee to kill them, at which point every one in the level knows exactly where you are. Kinda bad, but you can play the whole game just fine without it, which is really what makes me forgive them. Another thing in this game is the perks system. By completing certain in game goals, you unlock perks, which boosts one of your stats or gives you a new ability. It is just a perk system though, and they're all the same. Though it was cool that you only unlock perks relevant to how you play, meaning that you only get better at skills you will actually use. The combat in the game feels especially smooth with the big, wide open level designs that allow several ways to complete the level, or several paths to get to your objective. The game feels nice. It feels goddamn amazing actually. I loved every minute of it. Also I just have to point out that there are some areas where you have to run from something and you have no control just to move the plot forward, but I didn't mind, so yeah. There were also collectibles in this game (did you like my butter smooth transition there, yeah you did) There were a lot collectibles, so much so that there were extra modes you unlocked by collecting these enigma code things in each level. I was going to praise how the game modes boosted replay value but I couldn't even collect all the enigma codes in a chapter so I couldn't unlock them yet. But I bet they're just twists like dying in one hit or unlimited ammo or unable to look up and down, things like that. But that aside the game was my favourite next gen game so far unless Destiny blows me away but until then, Wolfenstein takes the cake. Go buy this game, it is super good and well worth 60/70/80$ or whatever it costs. Go get it.

Hey, the game had some problems for me so here's me rambling about it. 

Ahem.

The game had a five gigabyte day one update and that apparently fixed the bugs but without the update the game crashes frequently and has clipping problems and huge graphical issues and stuff. Once you update it's fine so... cool. Now go buy this game and sing its praises. Do it. 

(Also there was a bonus secret where you play a level of Return To Castle Wolfenstein and that's cool)

Game Preview: Destiny Beta

Bungie, the company behind the highly acclaimed Halo series for the XBox, has now made a first person shooter MMO called Destiny that is ready to launch on September 9th, 2014. Until then, however, they have an open beta going on to people that pre-order or from giveaways. Can the beta live up to and satisfy the hype for the main game?

For now the beta includes the first big zone with the starter missions, low level and limited items, and a PVP mode called "The Crucible" that consists of a Capture game mode. The game is limited and can get repetitive and boring after a while but this is to be expected and is totally acceptable to be in what is in essence a demo. They do disclose that there will be bugs and rough edges here and there as in a beta but honestly I've never experienced one yet, I have experienced lag but that's on my end not the server's. There were honestly no glaring issues or things I majorly hated at all. Anything bad with the game is very minor. But let's get into that. 

WARNING: MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

The back story of the universe is never truly revealed as you wake up in the middle of a wasteland by a floating A.I robot (voiced by Peter Dinklage) called a Ghost which can show your objective marker. He leads you to a weapon to then fight of a hostile alien race known as "The Fallen" who have inhabited what is an old, desolate Russia. You fight your way to a space ship and manage to fly off planet to a city somewhere in America. The city is actually located directly under a giant space object called Traveler that helped bring Earth to enlightenment, also called the Golden Age, before a great evil known as the Darkness came to destroy Earth along with several violent alien species. The Traveler also created the Ghosts to revive and help fallen warriors that could be imbued with special abilities, making them Guardians, protectors of the planet after Traveler died. It is revealed that you are one of these individuals and you were chosen to go out and free Earth from the oppressive alien forces threatening mankind. You meet some other characters along the way, including several factions and interesting people. One of these people is The Voice Of The Traveler (voiced by the incredible Bill Nighy) who is your adviser and can sell exotic and rare armor. The game's world is very cool and very thoroughly written with extensive back story and great characters.

Destiny's graphics look beautiful. I played on PS4 and it looks gorgeous. there are amazing lighting effects and high quality textures with pretty smooth animation too, even the environments look amazing. I honestly got too caught up in the game to worry about frame rate but it stays consistent, and even though it is 30fps I'm more okay with it because of the insane looking graphics and the fact that it never dropped even when so many things were on screen helped it's case. The environments are beautiful, with old relics like rusted helicopters and grounded ships littered everywhere. All in all this may be the best looking next gen game for a while.

When thinking of what to start the game play section of my review off with, I had a hard time. There are SO many game play mechanics and abilities and features, yet I never felt overwhelmed and learned all of them very quickly. That was my favourite aspect of the game. It's willingness to tell you all of it's features yet it never crams information down your throat, in fact you discover and learn by yourself a lot of the features. 

Well I have to start somewhere so I'll explain mechanics in the same order the game does. The way you start the game is with three races, The boring old humans, a peaceful alien species known as the Awoken who are known to be at one with themselves. Then there's the Exo's, who are advanced robots that were built as war machines that eventually became sentient. You can change their appearance to a pretty advanced degree so that each character looks different yet they all look similar. There are then three classes to choose from. The Titan class is meant to be a basic warrior tank class meant to take heavy damage yet deal the same. There are the Hunters who are stealthy assassins who can execute enemies with a flurry of moves. The final class is the Warlock, which can bend space and time to throw telekinetic grenades and use special power blasts. The classes feel once again different in most abilities yet some are different versions of the same ability, like double jump and grenades yet even the grenades have different effects per class. Also, once you reach level 15 you can upgrade to a superior subclass variant. The variety of game play is very good and I like it. The game itself handles very much like Halo in the movement and weapon feel. The actual open world and health bars make it seem very much like Borderlands without the humour, which it doesn't need but males the game feel generic without its own style. There are a lot of cool features like a Diablo reminiscent decryption system where some items you pick up you don't know what they are until you find a city's Cryptarch who will decrypt it, allowing you to use it. There is a bland mission objective marker mode where you hold up RoboDinklage and he shows you where you have to go and allows you to summon a hover bike that moves fast or you can exit a mission or return to your ship in this mode. When you put DinkleBot away though, you have to rely on your radar, which is a compass on your HUD that will point to your objective and both point out enemies direction relative to you, and show their general distance from you. The radar I did prefer over a mini map and using the touch pad on the PlayStation controller as the Dinklenator button was a nice use of it. Speaking of the PlayStation controller, this game made me really appreciate both the light on the controller and the vibration upgrade. The controller very precisely vibrates to mimic your gun and the light will change from blue to orange to red based on if you are in danger or in open battle, and it will turn bright white when your in game flashlight turns on. The main hub of the game is pretty neat. It turns from a first person perspective to a third person one, allowing you to see your character. There are many shops where you can buy equipment, though you have to "dismantle" the items down into currency and parts instead of selling them. Your equipment set is armor, which is helmet, chestplate, gloves, and boots/leggings. Your weapons are your primary, which is rifles and handguns, Your special is shotguns, sniper rifles, and fusion rifles, which charge up shortly and then fire a burst of bullets. You also have a heavy weapon, which is rocket launchers and LMG's. Each weapon can be upgraded if used to have different sights or more damage and sometimes special features like "If you get a kill on the last bullet in the clip, your reload speed greatly increases for a short time," There is also some other gear like custom hover bikes, special ships to fly around in, and emblems that show in your character profile. There is also the general hierarchy of gear, which is common, uncommon, rare, legendary, and exotic. They all have custom colors to signify rarity too. They also have modifiers like fire damage and such. The gear and loot is very unique, once again reminding me of Borderlands but more limited as they are not randomly generated. The mechanics mixed with cool features and unique loot all make you feel like a bad ass. The levels in the game are all one level right now, but while it's cool that there are areas that have many different missions in them, it gets old very quickly. But that's the beta, it's to be expected. The missions right now are two types of story mission and two types of side quest. The story missions are all either move forward while clearing enemies, then fight a boss, or move forward, clearing enemies then fight off waves of enemies. The side quests are either kill enemies/kill enemies for loot, or scan area while fighting enemies. They are VERY generic but that's only the actual map making it so. You can already see several missions teased for the full game. There are also random events that spawn in like to kill 3 waves of enemies in 3 minutes, or to hold a capture point from an onslaught of enemies. Once you complete them you get special rare loot and some nice gear. Sometimes there are even events in the hub like The Iron Banner, which was a special store open for a limited time for people who completed special timed missions. There are indeed both some very cool and exciting missions, and very boring and generic missions. the full game could go either way on that aspect.

So after this huge gush fest of a review of an incomplete game, I am just going to say buy Destiny. Do it. Go buy it. But don't pre-order it for the beta. All the beta is is a demo that wipes your characters making you grind for levels all over again. But I think I'm in love with what the game could be. And you should too. It's a framework of Borderlands filled in with the story telling and mechanics of Halo.

Also, go watch my video I made, it shows exactly why I like this game. 

http://youtu.be/4NALeBH7kJ4?a