Monday 22 September 2014

HearthStone: The Breakdown

So I just recently got a new laptop, and it's also a tablet, so I picked up HearthStone and started playing. And then I wrote this. Simple enough. Lets see if I can get the lore right without pissing people off (I can only hope)
Oh god. Oh. God. I realized that by playing HearthStone and giving its backstory I inedvertently now have to give the backstory of ALL OF WARCRAFT! Well crap, that blows. Wait. No, I'm lazy here's the wiki: http://wowpedia.org/Portal:Warcraft_universe Have fun with that. 

I will say when reading up on WoW I read and read for hours and that was only Pandaria. This game and all of Blizzards works have one thing in common and that is that they have insane amounts of lore. And I don't mean that just each character has his or her own page or ten of lore specifiaclly to them. I mean that the bush you pass at this one town that you never even notice once has more backstory and lore than every Call of Duty game that will ever be made. Of course that was an exaggeration but still, tons and tons of lore. It makes you understand why WoW players get mad when someone messes it up. This may seem like ramblings, and well it might be, but it is also very much reflected in HearthStone. The game is a Magic the Gathering style card game that tries to simplify some quite complicated systems and add its own unique ones. But for the simple reason that every card is a character or ability from WoW just goes to show how much effort went into this universe. I mean they could add as many cards as MtG and they might still have characters to make into new ones. Which means that this game can actually thrive and  continue as a game without "running the well dry" It also means that each card reacts and acts like the character or ability would, meaning that in a slight way WoW players and lore fans can build decks or play with combos that use abilities from WoW to win. But because it is still a strategic card game, people who play MtG can transfer and use tactics that they learned. This makes the game very interesting to play.

While I've talked about the cards and scratched the surface of playing, I need to still give beginner strategies and the jost of how. Oh, grab something to eat, this'll take a while. (By the way the game plays similar to Magic so I will relate the two or at least try) The basics of the game in the lore of WoW is that two characters from WoW, sit down to have a friendly game of cards. Both players health bars are the characters life, and both characters have a deck and a certain number of cards in it. Each special class or character also has their own ability, it costs mana and can usually do some mediocre ability that can be interweaved with decks for powerful combos. Back to the basics, however is that one player can win by either taking the opponents health to zero, killing them doing so, or making the other character not have enough cards to draw, or one player can surrender to the other, still counting as a victory. The only other thing you have without cards is your mana, which I mentioned earlier. You start from one and gain one extra crystal each turn, for a soft cap of ten. Every card in the game has a mana value and costs that many to summon or use. And those are the basics. I will explain actual tactics but I have to start with the cards before tactics can be explained properly. There are four basic types of cards in the game: Minions(Creatures), Spells(Abilities), Weapons(IDK), and Secrets(Trap Cards). The first type of card, Minions, are perhaps the most basic so I'll start with them. A minion is a monster or any living creature that can attack and be killed. Each minion has a certain health number and attack number. The health number is the amount of damage it can take before it is destroyed an attack is how much damage it does either attacking a minion or being attacked (unless special circumstances apply) Minions, unless they have an ability, do not take priority over the player in combat, meaning as opposed to Magic you can attack the player directly when he has a minion out. Some minions have abilities, such as taking priority when you are attacked (like I said) or doing something when they die. These can be combined for strategies. The second type of card is Spells, which are abilities that can affect gameplay, such as instant damage or giving a minion an ability. Spells have no health and caneither be instants that last for one turn or an enchantement that lasts for a long time. Most spells also have a secondary requirement that is either assmued through what it does or expressly told. Some spells can't be used at certain times like when the secondary requirements aren't met and some cards react better under certain circumstances. The next card is Secrets, these are played "face down" where only you know what it does and most of them are tied to taking damage. A secret is in play until it is destroyed or used and when the requirements are met it activates. For example "When an enemy minion attacks one of yours, destroy both minions" These cards are very much meant to save you when you are losing or to assure your victory. They are especially effective in combos because combined with spells they can win the battle quite quickly. The final card type is Weapons, which to explain them I'll explain the mechanic that they utilize. Your character, as in the hero you play as/ your class, can attack. But, your hero doesn't naturally have an attack stat, just health. This means you have to use a spell to give them an attack stat that they can use to attack. There is a specific card, which is a weapon, that goves your hero an attack for a certainamount of uses. For example "3 attacks and it breaks, gives your hero 4 damage" These can be used in decks where you want your hero to deal insane amounts of damage. These are the card types, and while there are only four, there are subclasses and special exceptions that I will not explain for reasons (I am lazy).

Now that we've established the cards, I will try to to explain how to use them in a deck. So I'll try to explain the deck types and the ways to use cards in them. There are literally millions of decks you can make in HearthStone. So rather than explain that I will explain the four major groups that decks usually fall into. These groups are Rush, Counter, Control, and Combo. Rush decks mainly focus on high damage and trying to kill the enemy as fast as possible. The strategies and way to build your deck should revolve around low cost minions that have damage dealing abilities and spells that deal immediate damage. Counter decks mainly focus on high defense and countering attacks to last longer than your opponent or use their minions against them. The way to build and play this deck should revolve around using secrets and the ability Taunt to deal counter damage. By the way, Taunt makes a minion take priority in battle, meaning you can only attack that minion. Control decks are focused around controlling your opponent's hand and not letting them do anything. These are by far the most powerful decks, but at the same time the hardest to play in that they are complex. Control decks should be built and played to use spells and secrets and minions to do anything from put all of your opponent's minions back in their hand to spamming them with weak minions to stop them from playing anything. The final deck type is Combo, which focuses on combining card summons to either buff powerful minions or to deal massive damage. You can build and play the deck to do either of these, but it is nigh impossible to effectively do both. Just try using cards that will play off of each other.

So after a college essay of card game strats, time to cover the graphics! The graphics in this, like WoW, are very cartoonish and humorous, combined with the voice acting and music. The best part of the graphics experience is the explosions and animations as they are both fluid and dramatic, which brings attention to them and shows you what to look at. The graphics specs, even on my tiny laptop, is 1080p 60fps and looks good for a card game.

So as for my little "go buy this" dialogue, there is something I forgot to mention. That thing is simply the word FREE. This game is free up until you want to buy expansions or card packs but there are people out there who are in the top league and they haven't payed a cent. So yeah, If that isn't a reason to get this game or at least try it, I don't lnow what is. If you like card games and don't wanna spend 100$ for a good MtG deck, get HearthStone.

My Opinion

So I will be posting a normal ol' game review on Friday, but I thought I'd let some steam out with this post, and you as the reader can ignore this post entirely and continue on with your day. But if you do want to hear my ramblings, then here ya go.

So back in November 2013 I started this blog to be famous. I thought I'd be a major gaming celebrity as of course everyone that starts a blog does. I didn't have an idea of what that meant or how to do it but I knew I should do it so I could be a millionaire. I was stupid and dumb and I am an idiot. Yeah that's what started this blog. Yeah. I wrote a couple posts and no one really read them and I felt sad and forgot about this blog. Then a couple months ago I was listening to some podcasts (I am so into podcasts I literally have a new one to listen to every other day) and they said even if you don't want to be famous, you should still have your opinions and all of your thoughts about the community of gaming written down or recorded just to have them. So I went to Blogger and tried to make an opinion blog. While doing so I saw this blog just sitting there and checked it out. While browsing my young, and quite frankly, stupid thoughts on how CoD: Ghosts is the best game ever, I decided it would be a good idea to revisit my little review blog and to start posting on it. I then gave myself the idea to start posting regularily, so I chose Friday to give myself the week to write up something (to be honest my reviews are almost consistently written on the Thursday night before I have to upload the next day) and I wrote some of my opinions and bettered my writing skills. I then decided to differentiate myself from just a normal review blog and made up The Breakdown (still a review but without any opinion on whether the game is good or not, I am lazy) and made myself different, at the least. And now I have school and homework and I have honestly thought about leaving this blog again but I just can't for some reason. I mean it's not like I have a community or any real fans, and I'm not necessarily fond of my writings (My SoTC review still haunts me) But I thought about why I do it. I do it because my opinion on games changes all the time (CoD Ghosts being proof) so the real reason I do it is because if I keep a log of all the games I like at the time of playing them, later on I'll look back on this and (call myself stupid) remember my opinions. I might even find a consistent way to know if a game is good or not just by looking at all my past reviews, and comparing all of the things I like to the game to see if it does things that will inpress me. In a way I can use my own reviews as a kind of Metacritic to score future games. And anyone who agrees with my opinions and reviews can do the same. One day I might even compile a list of all the things in games that I like and don't and have a tell-all guide to buying games. So the reason this Article's name is my opinions are stupid is that they are. They are to anyone with a different life view or a different view on games to me. But to people with similar opinions, this blog might be perfect for you. And to the future me reading this article just remember, "Sweep the leg Johnny, sweep the leg,"

Thursday 18 September 2014

Plague Inc: The Breakdown

Well I would have played an actual game, but I'm too busy getting sucked into Destiny, so I'm doing another app review/ breakdown! I would also just like to point out that even though I didn't technically review Destiny in my last post, It has been a week and I'm still playing the game so that has to be an indicator of how much I like that game.

As this is another app with no real set story or plot, I'm going to make one up, so if you wanted a serious review, skip this section.

SPOILERS?

The world has become corrupt, and political powers now control all of humanity, the world doesn't yet know this and the everyday people have become brainwashed mindless slaves, all obeying their government and it's leaders. You are a mad scientist who wants to save humanity, BY DESTROYING IT! So you took control over a secret lab in an undisclosed location and hijacked some satellites to give you an aerial view of the earth. You experiment and manage to create a base virus that you inject into a random person in a country of your choosing, you can now take control of the virus and modify it to make it a super plague that you will use to free mankind of it's freedom... and life. Good luck in destroying the world.

The whole strategy of the game is to infect everyone on earth and kill them off, using different viruses and combinations of symptoms to create a plague that kills humanity before they can cure it. New player advice would be to play on Easy and use the base bacteria to learn the symptoms and abilities and what kinds of combinations and abilities you need to evolve to combat humanities attempts to stop you. (for example a random event is a love fest, so if you evolve nausea, which gives a slight chance of infection while kissing, it boosts infection) The best thing to keep in mind is that the DNA points don't expire, so save up a good amount in case something unexpected happens so you can react properly. And as the game tells you,  this is a highly researched simulator, meaning if you're trying a maneuver that would not pan out in real life, then in the game it wouldn't work either, so be prepared for what each country's actual government would do to combat whatever disease you made.

The game came out on iOS and Android, and there are some web versions as well  as a PC variant called Plague Inc: Evolved, but I only managed to play the normal version on iOS. The game is 99 cents and it is well worth the money. You can unlock several disease types, as well as special diseases like a zombie disease, a brain parasite, and the new Planet of the Apes virus. There is also special scenarios like "Black Death" or "Humans have robotic organs" that recreate a specific challenge you have to beat. As far as I know you have to pay for these, but everything else, including the normal disease types and some disease variants, you can unlock. i would highly recommend buying this game and if you ain't got time for unlocking the diseases, then buying them is a good option (not that I endorse DLC) and it goes to the dev, who is a cool guy. The game does just about everything right and that makes it one of the best games on the App Store.

Friday 12 September 2014

Destiny: The Breakdown




After my review of the beta I knew I wanted to talk more on the game, so I'll try to cover anything I didn't already or that wasn't in the beta. Hope you enjoy!
A long, long time ago, in a galaxy called The Milky Way, an ancient being called the Traveler emerged and helped guide humanity into a Golden Age of technology and progress. This lasted generations until a catastrophic event known as the Collapse happened, nearly destroying humanity. At this point, the Traveler's main enemy, known as the Darkness attacked. Because humanity was so weak and on the verge of destruction, the Traveler sacrificed itself to save mankind, splitting itself into miniature AI known as Ghosts, who found long dead great soldiers and revived them, bringing them back to life as Guardians. The Guardians built a last stronghold of the human race and started fighting back. You have been brought back from the dead as a Guardian, with enhanced strength, durability, and speed. You know have to find the city to bring back peace to the Borderlands, no wait wrong game.

So if you read my review (which you should have) then you know there are three playable races and classes. Humans are humans, but in this point in time they have mentally evolved to have made amazing technology like lasers and scifi weaponry. The Awoken class was a group of humanoids that survived a great catastrophe by venturing in deep space, where they were changed by SCIENCE! The Exo race, which is my favorite is a race of robots built by the humans during a period of war and became sentient, basically making them the terminator. The three playable classes are still Titan, which is a defense based tank that can ground pound. There is the Hunter, which is a long range class that can deal a lot of damage with melee and has to keep moving. The Hunters can also summon a bad ass golden revolver that deals insane damage. The final class is Warlock, which uses plasma grenades and a rip off version of the force to kill enemies. Their power attack is a plasma spirit bomb, which deals the most damage of anything in the game. They are all the scifi Warrior, Rogue, and Mage class. One of the first things i noticed having played the beta is that the game up until level 6 is exactly the same as the beta, so I will try to cover the game play after the beta. Once you get to level 6, there is a new area other than blown up Russia. THE MOON! The moon has several new missions and you unlock even more planets as you continue. There is also new weaponry and abilities. The Crucible now has more game modes other than Capture, which are Team Death match, Free for All, and a smaller team version of other game modes.

Aside from the new levels, the game play is still very similar to the beta. If you want to level up i would suggest exploring and playing story missions until level 10, and then playing the Crucible ad taking bounties from the hub to get to the technical level cap of 20 (you can level up more than that through other means)

So yeah, this review may be shorter than usual because i already covered the beginning of the game with my beta review, which you can check out here. So go do that and maybe buy this game.

Friday 5 September 2014

Borderlands 2: The Breakdown

So with both Borderlands The Pre Sequel and Tales From the Borderlands coming out soon(ish) I thought I'd go back to break down one of my favourite games, Borderlands 2. I think I've finally figured out the format for The Breakdown so I hope you guys like it.
Borderlands 2 is the highly acclaimed sequel to the beloved loot and shoot game Borderlands. Made by 2K, best known for games like BioShock and X-COM. They make notably good games and are a trusted brand so most (not all) games of theirs are good. BUT THIS ISN'T A REVIEW ANYMORE! This is a post that will break down the game mechanics and explain the lore to anyone who wants to get into the game. So let's do that

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING OF BORDERLANDS AND THE BEGINNING OF BORDERLANDS 2. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

So I will start off with the lore. The back story of the word is that Dahl Corporation came to the abandoned and dangerous planet of Pandora in search of a vault containing riches beyond imagine. Of course this brings in a cities worth of bandits to Pandora trying to get the loot to themselves. Four of these so called "Vault Hunters" are the playable characters, Brick, Lilith, Mordecai, and Roland. These characters go against Dahl and other enemies to find the vault, which is revealed to hold an ancient monster known as the Destroyer, which is a monster that was held inside for millennium so to keep it from destroying worlds. As any monster that can destroy planets, the four vault hunters defeat it (somehow?) and save the world. The defeat of the Destroyer releases an ancient and powerful element known as Eridium, which can give certain animals powers and is extremely rare. In search of a new vault, Hyperion Corporation, lead by the evil and quite funny Handsome Jack, goes to Pandora to kill all the bandits and use the new vault to become super powerful. On a welcome train heading towards Handsome Jack, the new players, Axton, Salvador, Maya, and Zer0(along with DLC characters Krieg and Gaige) are caught in a trap laid by Handsome Jack to kill them. The main characters end up surviving and are found by Claptrap, a lonely helper robot who is the supposed last of his kind. You then go on a revenge quest to both kill Handsome Jack and find the vault. When going into the story just remember that comedy can sometimes take a front seat to story so a lot of missions have nothing to do with the overall plot and are there for comedic relief.

As for the game play, the game play is very different for each character, so I'll just try and explain the general skills someone should use. So first of is the gun skills. Each class has their own gun type that they are proficient with, so if you choose Axton then machine guns will compliment your class or if you play Gaige then shotguns are your best bet. The second thing to learn is what your base skills are. Each class generally has two skills and buffs for those skills. Your main skill is the first one you get, but people like Gaige have a secondary one which is either a stackable buff or a buff to their stats under certain conditions. Once you learn how to use your main skill effectively in combat, learning how to gain stacks for a skill or get the certain condition like being lit on fire as Krieg to boost his stats. Also, just keep in mind what skills you want early on in the game because you can't get them all so if one doesn't help your play style don't bother with it. The other secondary level up system is Badass Tokens, which are challenges in game, that once completed give a token that can be redeemed for small stat boosts. So make sure to spend these whenever possible and try to go for challenges if they're not too far out of your way. Another thing to keep in mind is how to use your class. All of the classes have their own play style that their skills are aimed towards, but if you really like your character but not the play style, you can invest in certain skill trees to modify your class. Either look up or figure out what skills you'll need beforehand.

Next is your load out. You can carry up to four guns in your hotbar at once, along with a shield and grenade mod. Looking for the right shield can be daunting, but just keep in mind what you'll need it for. If you constantly tank, get a shield with a ridiculous capacity. If you need to recharge faster, get one with a higher recharge rate. If you get killed by melee weapons or elemental damage, get a shield that does damage to melee attackers or is resistant to a certain element. When picking a grenade, all you need to choose from is elemental modifiers or pure damage, and if you want a bigger spread to kill a big group of enemies or a smaller fuse to catch them off guard. When choosing the guns in your hotbar just remember to have four different types of guns because if they are all pistols and you run out of ammo, you may as well have had just one. Also look for any guns you would need a lot, whether it be sniper rifles or shotguns.  

The last thing you'll need to know about thus game is the most difficult part and the best aspect of the game. The loot. While the advertised 87 Bazillion guns may be exaggerating, there are a lot and they are randomly generated. Things to look for in a gun are Model, Rarity, and Manufacturer. The model of the gun determines it's base stats, so even though technically every gun has different stats randomly generated, if the shooty pistol Mk. III has mediocre stats, they will stay in that mediocre parameter, so always try and find the guns with naturally good stats. The next thing to watch out for is Rarity, which determines if the gun has special abilities or better stats than the common type of the same gun. The rarity levels from common to legendary are white, green, blue, purple, and orange. The higher rarity guns are usually better in either stats or have certain abilities, with orange weapons having names and amazing abilities like infinite ammo. The last thing to look for in a gun is Manufacturer. Each gun maker in the game has a signature trait that all of their guns have. For example Hyperion makes really inaccurate guns that get more accurate the more you fire it. And Jakobs makes guns that are semiautomatic but can fire each time you pull the trigger, making them fire incredibly fast if you spam the trigger. After looking at all these skills you should also take into account that sometimes a completely average common gun can have better stats than your purple weapon. That's the beauty of Borderlands.

So this is technically the first true Breakdown with the new format, so I hope all you enjoyed it and let me know if there is something I missed. Hopefully to anyone playing Borderlands 2 for the first  time in prep for the Pre Sequel this helped you out a bit, that's all this was meant to do, after all