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.

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.

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.