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(02/18/16 12:00am)
You are a Viking woman named Thora, the leader of your tribe. At least, you were until your ship sank on a raiding voyage and you drowned. Tough luck, considering that those who die in battle are not allowed into Valhalla, the afterlife. But the gods have witnessed your great deeds on Earth and have given you a second chance – under one condition. You must explore the realm of Ginnungagap and defeat the five Jotun in battle. The Jotun are lesser gods that are often referred to as giants in Norse mythology. Each of these Jotun is associated with an element that shapes their world: nature, ice, earth, wind and fire. Once you have completed your mission, Odin himself challenges you to battle. Only then will you will be granted entrance into the afterlife.
The world of Jotun is stunningly beautiful. The game is entirely handdrawn, which makes for a unique aesthetic appearance and sets it apart from many other games in the mythic genre. The game developers took full advantage of this by placing several scenic views throughout the game. When you approach one, your camera slowly zooms out to reveal an overlook of an ice-covered wasteleand or a massive dragon hidden in the background.
Jotun’s gameplay is refreshingly simple. There are four controls: move, roll, attack and use an ability. Thora has two types of attacks: a quick one, in which she deftly swings her axe through the air, and a heavy one, in which she lifts the axe over her head before slamming it into the ground. As you explore the realm of Ginnungagap, you discover shrines to the gods. These shrines grant Thora certain powers, such as the ability to heal, shield herself from damage or deliver a devastating heavy attack. The focus is less on what your character can do and more on what your enemies can do.
Jotun is centered on exploration and boss fighting. You must find the runes in each area to unlock the next boss fight. In addition to the runes, each level contains shrines for new powers and items to boost your health. The exploration is mostly puzzle-based, with each puzzle based on the theme of the boss. Often, aspects of each level will tie into the encounter with the Jotun in charge of that area. The areas are well-designed, allowing the artistic style of the game to flourish between boss fights.
The player spends most of their time fighting the Jotun – and these boss fights are as difficult as you want them to be. Though the game is hard enough when played the traditional way, it offers further challenges by awarding achievements for defeating the bosses in other manners – for instance, by banging your head against a wall or by foregoing the use of any abilities whatsoever. Personally, I chose to take the middle ground and fight without drawing on the god powers.
Overall, Jotun is a great game. Drawing heavily from Norse mythology in both plot and level design, it features a simplistic play style that is not often found in games of its caliber or difficulty. The boss mechanics will test your skills and patience without relying on cheap tricks. There are clear-cut stages to every encounter, each more difficult than the last. On top of the satisfying combat experience, the developers did a great job with the world itself both in terms of art and the player’s interactions with it outside of combat.
My only qualm with Jotun was the main character, Thora. Her development is slow, and ends up being rather shallow when compared with other female protagonists like Red from Transistor or Aurora from Child of Light. She can also feel a bit clunky and slow in her movements, which can be a pain when you are trying to move quickly across a large boss arena.
In closing, I give Jotun a 9.0 out of 10. I bought it in search of a challenge, and I found one. Though I have yet to defeat Odin (and have tried more times than I would like to admit), here’s to seeing more from Thunder Lotus Games in the future.
(01/28/16 12:43am)
Your ship is shot down in orbit over an uncharted planet. You and one other shipmate manage to make it onto one of the remaining escape pods and are sent careening toward the planet’s surface. Unlucky for you, the escape pod doesn’t stop when it hits the surface. The escape pod buries itself deep into the planet. There is only one way to go and that’s up.
Dungeon of the Endless is a squad-based, top-down, dungeon crawler. The game focuses on your ability to manage a small team as you gather resources, defend yourself against hostile aliens and recruit other survivors as you slowly climb through the extensive dungeon hidden beneath the planet’s surface. The game moves forward as you open doors on each floor of the dungeon. Behind each door lies any number of things. Monsters, resources, merchants and other survivors are only some of the possible outcomes of opening a door. Once all of the doors on a floor are opened, the player must successfully muster all of their characters as well as the power supply crystal to the floor’s elevator while fighting off swarms of aliens to progress to the next floor.
Dungeon of the Endless has a lot going on at once. As the player, you have to be in complete control of all aspects of the game to succeed. You need to make sure you are generating the right resources and spending them at the right time. You also have to stay on top of which rooms you keep powered and which to leave off. In addition, characters need to be assigned roles and placed in strategic locations. Lastly, the player must monitor all their characters during waves of hostile aliens. If this sounds stressful, that would be because it is. The game is very difficult which makes it that much more fulfilling when you complete a successful run. The game has two difficulty settings: very easy and easy. Don’t be misled. This is cruel joke on the part of the developers. The settings should be labeled as “Very Hard” and “Lord Help Your Soul”.
The game is built around replayability. Every time you beat the game, you unlock new ways to play. This variety comes in a couple different ways. When you recruit a new survivor, you unlock that character and can start any future game with that character. The other way the game can change is with the addition of new escape pods. The different pods offer different challenges for the player. These challenges include the removal of healing abilities and the removal of certain resources from the game to name a couple. Extra challenges like these ones prevent the game from becoming stale even after multiple successful playthroughs. There is always one more difficulty to test your resolve and your ability to work as a team.
One of my favorite aspects of the game was its multiplayer feature. You can play the game with up to three of your friends. This gives the game a social component that makes any game better. Some of the stress is alleviated because you can split responsibilities up between players. However, this by no means makes the game easier. You are simply trading one type of difficulty for another. Multiplayer removes the ability to pause the game. In addition, there is the added element of maintaining a clear line of communication between you and your teammates. Each player must fulfill their role perfectly if the team hopes to be at all successful in making it to the next floor. The builder has to keep resource supplies up. The researcher has to make sure new defenses and resource generators are constantly being researched. Finally, the door man acts as the final checkpoint, making sure all other duties are completed before opening the next door. I spent more than a couple late nights over vacation desperately trying to complete a run with friends. Most ended in laughs as a lack of communication led to multiple doors being opened at once, which resulted in an unmanageable horde of aliens overwhelming our characters.
Overall, I give Dungeon of the Endless an eight out of 10. The game does what it set out to do and does it well. However, I never felt like the game went the extra mile to shock or wow me. At the end of the day, Dungeon of the Endless is a very solid game and definitely worth picking up with a group of friends. You will have no shortage of challenges or excuses to yell at each other for scrapping a perfectly good run two hours in.
(11/19/15 12:48am)
Just over a year ago, I wrote a mixed review of Bungie’s Destiny. The game was plagued with connection bugs, a lack of any semblance of a story and a pretty flat player experience overall. I gave the game a generous 7 out of 10, with hopes that it would improve as time went on. It took a year, but the massive multiplayer online shooter has finally come around with its latest expansion: The Taken King.
TTK was released two months ago on Sep. 15, marking the beginning of year two for Destiny. The concept of a game running through a “second year” is unique to Destiny on the console platform. Previously, the only games to use such a concept were PC games like World of Warcraft that steadily released expansions over time. This was made possible because such games required the use of internet. Constant internet access allowed developers to keep improving and adding onto their games as players enjoyed it.
Destiny has taken advantage of modern consoles to follow the lead of those aforementioned PC-based games. To date, Destiny has released the base game along with three expansions, the most recent being TTK. Bungie uses these expansions to move the story of the game world forward, as well as respond to some of the criticism from Destiny’s community on how to make the game more enjoyable and balanced.
One of the biggest things Bungie has done with TTK is establish a clear and easy-to-follow storyline — something entirely absent upon release of the original game. What happens?
In the game’s first expansion, The Dark Below, the player set out to stop the invasion of Earth by an alien prince-god named Crota, who took the Moon from humanity with an army of “Hive,” one of the evil alien races waging war on the Last City. The expansion culminated in the death of Crota at the hands of the player using the god’s own sword. Crota’s father Oryx, also known as the Taken King, catches wind of the death of his son and comes to our solar system upon his ship, the Dreadnaught, seeking revenge. He brings with him an army of Taken. The Taken are creatures that Oryx has “taken” or stripped them of their will and given new powers in return. Thus, the developers have remade old enemies to change up the combat experience for players.
Your job as a Guardian of the Last City is to sneak onto the Dreadnaught, shut down its weapons and establish a beachhead from which you and other Guardians like you can advance to challenge the Taken hoard. The expansion ends in a brand new raid called King’s Fall, where you and five of your closest friends plunge into the depths of the Dreadnaught to destroy Oryx once and for all.
As previously mentioned, the developer, Bungie, often uses expansions to respond to the community’s criticisms of the game – and TTK does mark several important improvements to Destiny. The foremost change in TTK is the introduction of three new subclasses. The Warlocks gained arc abilities with the new Stormcaller subclass, the Hunter learned to harness the void with its new Nightstalker subclass and, in turn, Titans went eco-friendly with the addition of solar power in the new Sunbreaker subclass. Along with each new subclass comes a new super ability as well. The Stormcallers channel their inner Chancellor Palpatine and shoot lightning out of their fingertips. The Nightstalker is the first assist-based Hunter subclass whose new super, Shadowshot, allows them to anchor enemies in place. The Titans use the Hammer of Sol to throw exploding hammers that decimate their opponents.
Another big addition to the game is the Infusion mechanic, which allows you to upgrade your favorite weapons and armor to a higher level by sacrificing another piece of gear at a higher level. This allows players the freedom of choice in which gear they wear unlike in previous expansions where everyone was wearing the same gear they got from the raid.
The developers also addressed the issue of boss fights. The new boss encounters use a variety of different mechanics to keep them interesting, unlike many of the older encounters which simply required you to put an ungodly amount of bullets into your target.
TTK is not without its flaws. In classic Destiny fashion, certain aspects of the game are extremely tedious. Several quests require you to spend a ridiculous amount of time going around and collecting resources in the game’s Patrol mode – the removal of purchasable upgrade materials in TTK only exasperates this problem. As useful as the new Infusion function in the game is, it often takes too long to find a piece of gear of a high enough level to upgrade a weapon or piece of armor in your inventory. Finally, the introduction of the Sunbreaker class has thrown the competitive multiplayer way off balance in favor of the Thor look-a-likes.
In the grand scheme of things, Destiny has come a long way since its release in September 2014. TTK has improved upon a lot and the developers are already looking into fixes for many of the issues I just mentioned. Overall, I give Destiny: The Taken King an 8.5 out of 10 for now.
(10/07/15 11:24pm)
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be the captain of a spaceship carrying the Federation’s last hope on the run from an evil rebel fleet? Of course you have. That’s why programmer Matthew Davis and artist Justin Ma of Subset Games created FTL: Faster Than Light. In FTL, you are in complete control of your ship and its crew as you race across the system to deliver valuable information to the Allied Fleet. Along the way, you run into all walks of alien life and every event that you’d imagine would take place in the outer reaches of space. Space pirates, asteroid fields, plasma storms, lost alien races, FTL has them all.
When I say you are in command of everything on the ship, I mean everything. Shields, engines and weapons are all at your fingertips. You decide where your crew members are at any given time. While most of the ship is automated, sometimes a crew member is needed for maintenance or to speed function up a bit. Each crew member has a specific skill set that makes him or her better at some jobs on the ship than others. You might have a designated pilot that stays at the wheel while another crew member lives in the engine room. Another crew member might be your designated bruiser who waits around for someone to try and board the ship. Your crew learns over time, so the more they perform a given task, the more efficient in completing that task they become. In addition, each alien race has its own set of perks. For example, humans are quick learners, Zoltan can power a room simply by being in it, and the Lanius can survive in a room without any oxygen. The list goes on to include several more races each with a unique ability.
The game progresses as you move through sectors, each of which has a theme given in its description decided by which race occupies the area. Along the way, you upgrade your ship with weapons, drones, and other useful augmentations you find or purchase. Within those sectors, there are points which you must go through to get to the exit beacon. Each point has a randomly generated event associated with it. Some points contain combat events, while others contain merchants that offer upgrades for your ship or crew members for hire. Others still offer unique events of which you determine the outcome. Most points offer you rewards for completing the event like fuel, scrap (the game’s currency), or upgrades to your ship.
FTL’s diverse combat takes place in pause-able real time. The goal is to take down the enemy ship by eliminating its shields and then taking aim at its primary systems. The game allows for this to be done in a variety of ways. You could take a brute force approach and outfit your ship with the biggest lasers and missile launchers you can get your hands on. On the other hand, you can use a little more cunning and finesse by outfitting your ship with a teleporter and sending several of your crew on board to take out the ship from the inside. There are other strategies that include the use of drones, cloaking systems and ion cannons that temporarily take a system offline.
Because there are countless ways to play and things to experience in the game, FTL is designed to be played again and again. Each run through takes about two to three hours if you are successful, which is rare. FTL is a throwback to the old space arcade games in more than just its visual detail and backstory. In the fashion of yesterday’s games, it is also very hard to beat. The game has three difficulty settings and I personally have only led a single successful mission on its medium difficulty. There is nothing more heartbreaking than making it to the final sector and losing to the Rebel Flagship. Unfortunately, there is also nothing that makes you want to click the restart button more and try one more time.
Overall, I found FTL to be extremely enjoyable. For coming from such a small development team (two people), it has an astounding amount of content. There are always new ships to unlock and events to encounter. At times, it can be frustrating when your run ends early because you just couldn’t find fuel. However, these times are few and far between. FTL does exactly what it sets out to do: create a great arcade-like space game that can be played over and over. It is for this reason that I give FTL: Faster Than Light a 9 out of 10.
(09/24/15 1:01am)
You and your men crest the hill to find the enemy in a mad dash climbing up steep terrain. You give the signal and your men hold their position while your archers rain a volley of arrows onto the enemy’s vulnerable position. When the survivors begin to gain ground and encroach on your position, you signal your infantry to charge. As the dust settles, your cavalry chase down the deserters and finish them off. The day is yours and the men cheer to your victory. This is Mount and Blade: Warband.
Warband is a third-person role playing game, in which you play as a newcomer to the war-stricken land of Calradia. You begin as the leader of a small band of mercenaries and pledge allegiance to one of six nations vying for control of the land. As you gain the trust of a nation’s figurehead and renown through conquering your nation’s enemies, you are granted the privilege of becoming a king’s vassal. From here, the choice is yours as to whether or not you want to assist your king and fellow lords in conquering all of Calradia or split off to form your own nation.
The politics are only half the game, however. The other half involves participating in and directing large battles with your enemies. Mount and Blade offers a blend of the combat styles found in popular games like Age of Empire and Star Wars: Battlefront. While control of your own character is important, one man does not win a battle. Each battle can be won or lost by the orders you give your army. A good commander holds his troops back at the charge of cavalry and has his archers pick the riders off from behind his line of infantry. Only a fool brings his troops into a valley surrounded by archers.
Warband also comes with a multiplayer mode in which players can select from three different character archetypes to play (Cavalry, Archer, Infantry). The game modes include several traditional game types that can be found in many first person shooter games, such as capture the flag and team battle. It also includes a unique game type that is taken directly from the single player game, castle siege. In this game type, the players are split into two teams, attack and defense. The attackers must scale the castle walls using medieval siege equipment and overwhelm the defending force on the wall.
I bought Warband during the Steam Summer Sale and spent many hours playing it in my spare time. One of the things I enjoyed most about the game was how complex the mechanics of the game were despite its simplicity at the superficial levels of graphics and character design. Beyond vying for the attention and approval of some of the lords of Calradia, the player must also run, defend, and maintain any land given to him by those lords. The game creates its own goods economy as well. Some commodities are worth far more than others depending on the supply of and demand for each commodity in that region.
Another aspect of the game I enjoyed was its difficulty. After thirty hours of gameplay I still found myself having to rebuild my army from scratch after disastrous encounters with superior forces. While this can be frustrating at times, it prevents the game from becoming monotonous or boring.
The different factions also added a lot to the game. Each faction has its own personality that is modelled not only in dialogue with characters of the region, but also in the soldiers you recruit or fight from that region. Fighting heavily armored cavalry from the plains of Swadia is a completely different experience than engaging a force of rugged Nordic infantry. These alterations in the composition of your foes’ armies cause you to change up your battle strategy every time you go to war with another nation.
Overall, I found Mount and Blade: Warband to be a very entertaining game. The challenge that each stage of the game presents, coupled with the promises of the next promotion, make for a very exciting and sometimes even addicting combination. While the horseback combat can be a bit clunky at times, the satisfaction of landing a good long shot with a bow or a well-aimed javelin more than make up for it. The challenges that the political side of the game bring are also very interesting and complex. You have to show the people of Calradia that you are a capable ruler and that you have friends in high places or else they will refuse to acknowledge your rule. As all good medieval games, the world is full of loot and peasants to exploit. At the end of the day, I give Warband an eight out of ten.
(04/15/15 3:57pm)
You are dropped suddenly into a strange Tim Burton-style world with nothing but empty pockets and one objective: survive. Welcome to Don’t Starve.
Don’t Starve is a survival horror game that was released in 2013 by Klei Entertainment. The goal of the game is given in the title, and also includes avoiding the insanity that slowly creeps on at night and fending off the creatively horrific creatures that hunt you in this new world. The realm of Don’t Starve is a beautifully dark place. Just about the only thing in the game that doesn’t look like it wants to kill you are the Beefalo herds which later serve the player as a source of protection and warmth.
Don’t Starve is a refreshing look at the survival genre because it keeps its initial level of difficulty well into a play through. Getting your character to a spot of relatively comfortable living takes a significant amount of time and is no simple feat to complete before the fall of the first winter. This maintained focus on survival is a nice contrast to other survival games where the goal switches from surviving to flourishing after a relatively short period of time. Even after you establish a sizeable group of farms or animal traps around a base, a lot of your time is focused on maintaining those resources. I also enjoyed that the game allows you to implement multiple modes of survival. For example, you can grow your own food by building small farms. However, these are of no use during the harsh winter when everything stops growing. You can also build a system of traps for small animals like rabbits and birds, but these require a lot of maintenance and need to be checked often. The last and probably least efficient way to feed yourself is the way of the hunter-gatherer. This mode requires you to travel the world searching for berries, carrots and smaller monsters that you can easily kill (there are not many of them).
Don’t Starve presents players with plenty of challenge, which is why many people like the game. However, I thought they went a little overboard in some areas. For example, combat is simply unfeasible in most situations you find yourself in during the game. The enemies need only two or three strikes to kill your character and the click-to-swing combat system does not leave you enough mobility to defend yourself from their attacks. This means you often simply have to run to the nearest group of Beefalos to transfer your enemy’s aggression onto another target. There are other ways to get around this difficulty, but they all involve indirect combat and something else fighting your battles for you.
As much as I enjoyed the extended survival phase of Don’t Starve, it runs into the same problem that all other survival games do and that is almost definitive to the genre. This is the problem of what to do once you can survive comfortably. After a while you are just walking around collecting more food for yourself. The sense of urgency is lost because you have growing stockpiles of provisions for yourself. Minecraft and similar games deal with this by offering the player the freedom to build things. Don’t Starve attempts to solve this problem by introducing more complex recipes for magical items that can act as weapons, reduce hunger, etc. However, the raw materials for these items are extremely hard to come by and will most likely result in the end of your game at the hands of a very large nightmarish creature.
This past December, Klei Entertainment released a multiplayer version called Don’t Starve Together. This brought me back to the game because I greatly enjoy playing with other people. I played a lot with friends over the past February break and this collaborative version did not disappoint. It removes a lot of the urgency from the experience because you can do twice the amount of things in the same amount of time. This removes a lot of the anxiety from the first winter, which can be quite daunting in the single player version. It also frees you up to attempt some of the harder feats without fear of bringing your character to an early end.
I really enjoyed Don’t Starve for its fresh look at the survival genre and its high level of difficulty. Its strange world drew me in and challenged me in ways other games did not. Its multiplayer expansion only made the game more fun. Overall, I give Don’t Starve an 8.0 out of 10 and Don’t Starve Together an 8.5 out of 10.
(03/11/15 2:17pm)
Child of Light is a platformer role-playing game that takes place in the fantastical world of Lemuria. You play as the young girl Aurora, an Austrian princess who wakes up to find herself in a strange world with even stranger creatures. Over the course of the game, you meet the different characters of Lemuria, from the mouse-like Populi to the circus-performing Aerostati, and befriend all of them. You learn that things are not quite right in this country and that the malevolent Queen of Night is keeping the people captive through the use of dark magic and evil minions. Aurora must fight her way through this strange world to save Lemuria and return to her ailing father. Along the way, Aurora learns that to be a good ruler, she must often put the needs of others above her own desires.
Ubisoft Montreal, a big name company in the gaming industry known mostly for the Assassin’s Creed series, released Child of Light in April 2014. However, Child of Light is a step in quite a different direction for the developer. The game showcases an absolutely stunning animated backdrop. All of the different environments were carefully hand drawn and scanned into the game. The player feels as though they are walking through a painting as they traverse the beautiful landscapes of Lemuria. The artists did a fantastic job making the game feel just like a child’s dream.
Over the course of the game Aurora must face many dark creatures and servants of the Queen of Night. Combat in Child of Light is time-based. At the bottom of the screen during an encounter there is a time bar which all of the characters move along depending on their speed statistic and the action they are about to take. This is not a common style among these types of games – most similar games use a simple turn-based mode. Compared to the combat style, the time-based system kept me more involved with each encounter. While I was waiting for Aurora and her party to move along the bar, I was busy trying to slow my opponents down and timing my hits to interrupt their attacks.
Another thing the developers did well with the combat was making characters compatible with each other. You are allowed to have two party members on the field at any given time during a fight. Over time, I found that certain characters worked especially well together. For example, my favorite team consisted of Aurora and her sister. Aurora’s sister Norah has abilities that slow down her enemies while speeding up her teammates. This allowed me to minimize the attacks of the enemy while allowing Aurora to bombard them with her spells and sword.
The best thing the game has going for it is the storyline and the way it is presented. The entire game is presented as a poem. All narration and dialogue within the game follows a rhyming scheme. This aspect of the game was not only beautiful, but also very entertaining at times. One of the characters has an inability to rhyme and is often corrected by the others with a word that fits the rhyming scheme. The main reason I enjoyed the poetic narrative is for its originality. I have never played another game that has used this style of storytelling and I they did an excellent job with it.
I only had two complaints with Child of Light. The first was that the levels could become a bit grindy. I found myself running from one battle to the next with the same enemies which could get a bit tiring at times. My second complaint was that the puzzles they presented you with were the same every time. You needed to open a door to the next area, used Igniculus the firefly to illuminate a few panels on the door and voilà – it opened. However, given that the game is only about 13 hours long, these were minor annoyances which didn’t add up to much in the end.
Overall, I give Child of Light a 9.5 out of 10. I immensely enjoyed this game for its engaging story, original narrative and engaging combat system. While the game could be a little bit of a grind at times, the feeling never lasted too long and new developments in the story followed soon after. If you are looking for a good, story-centric game to play in between exam weeks or to play through over the upcoming break, I highly recommend Child of Light and hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
(02/11/15 11:40pm)
In my last column, I talked about which games from the holiday season I liked and disliked. Now that I have gotten a few hours of playing under my belt, I will discuss one of those games in detail. Halo: The Master Chief Collection is a series of all the numerical Halo games, one through four. It includes graphically re-mastered versions of the first two games and online multiplayer for all four titles. The game was released by 343 Studios and Microsoft Studios back in November for the Xbox One.
One thing that drew me to this game was the opportunity to follow the story of Master Chief from his humble beginnings on the Pillar of Autumn all the way to his defeat of the Didact in the final installment. Playing through the re-mastered games was a very enjoyable experience. The story was the same, but the graphics upgrades made it feel like a whole new game. The plot came even more alive against the beautifully designed backdrop. With the touch of a button, players can switch back and forth between the original graphics and the new ones. This unique functionality serves as a shocking reminder of how far videogame technology has progressed in the past fifteen years.
Aside from the graphics, the developers did not change much else from the original games. I believe this was a very smart decision on their part. The Halo 2 fans wanted Midship and X-BRs back. Halo 3 fans wanted to relive Guardian and the all-powerful four shot Battle Rifle. If the developers had suddenly added something like the class system from Halo 4 into the rest of the games, it would have upset a large part of their prospective audience and cost them in sales.
The shortcomings of the Master Chief Collection lie in the multiplayer experience. On release day and for many weeks afterwards, players endured extremely long wait times to get into a matchmade game. Horror stories of thirty-minute wait times for games began to float around among players on the Internet. It soon became apparent that the Developer 343 Studios was having serious server issues. Personally, I was very disappointed with this, since the main reason I bought the game was to play the Halo 3 competitive multiplayer again. It was not long before I gave up on the multiplayer once and for all.
Overall, I enjoyed going back to the games that had formed my earliest video-gaming experience. It was nice to reminisce about the days when I would play games with my aunt, since we didn’t have a console of our own, and on the Christmas Eve that my brother and I stayed up all night playing Halo 3 online together. Besides the difficulties with the multiplayer version, which has only gotten marginally better since release, the campaign half of the game was done superbly well and deserves the highest praise. At the end of the day, I give Halo: The Master Chief Collection a 6.5 out of 10.
(11/20/14 12:02am)
Every year, a phenomenon occurs where the best games of the year seem to be coming out at the same time. What time is this, you ask? Well, I wouldn’t be writing an article about it if it were not right now. October and November are historically the best times to buy new video games. Companies love to shell out their best games before the holidays. In this week’s column, I am laying out the new games that have been released or are going to be released this holiday season. At the end, I’ll tell you which ones I am looking to buy and why.
The holidays are a season of sequels. This season, keep an eye out for new installments of some of your favorite series. A month ago, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! came to PC, Xbox 360 and the PS3. Borderlands is an adventure shooter that is known for its cooperative multiplayer and its wacky characters. The game was received with good reviews, scoring around 7.5 out of 10 on most sites. The main complaint with the game was that there was not enough to separate the game from its predecessors.
Ubisoft expanded its Assassin’s Creed saga with the release of two brand new titles last week on Nov. 11. Assassin’s Creed: Unity was the larger of the two releases and takes place in the city of Paris during the French Revolution. As with the rest of the series, you play as an assassin on a mission against the powers that are trying to bring about a new form of government in a city rattled with rebellion. The game’s reception was hampered with frame rate and connectivity issues, leaving it with a good instead of great Metacritic score of 75/100. The game was accompanied with the release of Assassin’s Creed: Rogue in which you play an assassin-gone-bad who joins the rival order, the Templars. The game was also released on Nov. 11, but was only released to the PC, 360 and PS3 while Unity was released for the PC, Xbox One and PS4.
The new Call of Duty game, Advanced Warfare, came out on Nov. 4 for all platforms with the exception of the Wii U. This new installment seems to have done well for itself as most reviews claim that it is an improvement from the previous installments which seem to be reprints of the same game and mechanics with little new content available for consumers. Overall the game was given an 8-9/10 by most users for its refreshing multiplayer and new gadgetry.
The new, much-anticipated Super Smash Bros. game comes out on the Wii U on Nov. 21. Its analogue was released on the Ninetendo 3DS back in September and has done exactly what you would want it to do. It delivers the same fun and satisfying hand-to-hand combat experience everyone has enjoyed since the original Smash Bros. on the N64. This installment adds many new characters to the mix like Pac Man, Mega Man and the Wii Fit Trainer while bringing back all the classics like Pikachu, Samus and Captain Falcon. The 3DS version was received well with a Metacritic score of 85/100 so hopefully the Wii U version holds up just as well, if not better.
Last but definitely not least on my list is Halo: Master Chief Collection, which was released last week on Nov. 11. This is a rerelease of Halo 1 through Halo 4 with graphically remastered versions of the first two games. This bundle also includes all of the competitive multiplayer modes for all of the games. The game has been received in the last week with great acclaim, being awarded an 88/100 on both Metacritic and GameRankings.
This year, at the top of my wish list is the Master Chief Collection. Remastered versions of legendary games like Halo 1 and 2 alone would be enough to get me to the nearest video game outlet at midnight on a Tuesday. Add a couple of the best competitive multiplayers to date with Halo 2 and 3 into the mix and you had me at “Blood Gulch.” Even though I do not have a Wii U, the new Super Smash Bros. takes number two on my holiday season wish list. The game is a classic. There is no greater feeling than coming out on top from a brawl with three of your closest friends, especially when one of them is playing as Pikachu. The last game in my top three is a bit of a wild card. I cannot deny my urge to play as an assassin hunter in Assassin’s Creed: Rogue. While the production value of Unity is undoubtedly higher than Rogue, there is something alluring about playing as the bad guy. That’s it for my holiday preview.
Thanks for reading and happy gaming.
(10/22/14 10:50pm)
On Sept. 9, 2014, one of the most highly anticipated games of the year was released. The game was called Destiny. I’m sure you saw and/or are seeing ads for it everywhere. The game was advertised on TV, billboards, trucks – the whole nine yards. They even had it up on the screens in Times Square at one point. Destiny was announced by videogame developer Bungie back in 2012 through a contract that was published in the LA Times with the big name publishing company Activision. Since then, FPS gamers had been eagerly awaiting its release and eating up any information about the game Bungie would share with them.
Destiny is a first person shooter MMO. The term MMO means massively multiplayer online and means that while you are playing, you can see and interact with other people playing the game. Destiny is the first game to bring this to the first person shooter genre. This adds a very social component to the game, a concept which Bungie built the entire game around.
Destiny is a team-based game; all activities can be done with a team, and many cannot be done without one. Most activities are built around a three person “fireteam” with the exception of the competitive multiplayer, “the Crucible,” and the ultra-hard 6-person raids. A raid requires you and five of your friends to team up and go up against the toughest challenges the developers could come up with. They require a lot of teamwork and coordination. Raids can only be done with people on your friends list, which can be inconvenient due to the difficulty of finding five other people who not only have the game on the same console as you but are also all available to play at the same time. For this reason, Bungie created “clans” which are an easy way to find friends to play with. Clans are just groups of people with similar interests and levels of commitment to the game. There is one clan called Dads of Destiny that is exactly what it sounds like: a bunch of dudes with kids that like to play videogames.
My favorite aspect of Destiny is the competitive multiplayer, or the Crucible. The game matches you up with other players and splits everyone up into two teams. Each playlist has different objectives which include controlling zones, capturing objectives or just killing each other. What I really enjoy about it is that the developers work to make the game as equal as possible by making no single type of player dominant. The player who sits back with a sniper is supposed to be just as effective as the player running in auto rifle blazing. About every other week they update the game to adjust the damage and range of the different guns to make it so that people are not all pulling out the same gun when heading into the arena. I am looking forward to when the developers add new playlists to the game with the classic objectives like king of the hill or oddball, which is essentially a game of keepaway.
My least favorite aspect of the game is the storyline. The game gives you almost no background on what is happening when you start and you finish with more questions than answers. The missions are loosely tied together at best and I am left wondering what I just accomplished after finishing a mission. Bungie tried to make up for this with what they call Grimoire Cards. These are cards with snippets of information on them that you earn while playing. The cards are supposed to fill in the gaps in the story. Unfortunately, they do not do a very good job. I have hope that as the game expands, they will patch up the story and make it worth playing.
The game also has a lot of bug issues. Often times I get kicked out of an activity, cannot access my friends list or, worst of all, get on to find that some of the items in my inventory have disappeared. Bungie is working to fix all of these errors, but it will be a while before the game is completely error free. It is understandable to a point because the developers are in uncharted territory with a game like this, but I will be a lot happier once everything is sorted out.
Although I want to score it higher, Destiny earns a 7 out of 10 in my book. The absence of a story and continued issues with a lot of in-games bugs leaves it a little off the mark. I have a lot of hope for the game and in a year I believe that it will be one of the best games out there, but, as of right now, it leaves a bit to be desired.
(09/24/14 2:26pm)
As this semester’s new videogame columnist, I will cover games ranging from small indie releases to big name games like Halo and Call of Duty. I want to start the column off with a review of a game I picked up this summer called Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.
Brothers was released on August 7, 2013 by Starbreeze Studios and was made in collaboration with award-winning Swedish filmmaker Josef Fares. Starbreeze Studios is a small company based out of Stockholm, Sweden with fewer than 100 employees. The game is centered on the adventures of two brothers who set out in search of a magical herb needed to heal their dying father and the only family they have left. The game takes you through a breathtaking world that looks like something straight out of a children’s fantasy novel. Along the way, you encounter all sorts of creatures like griffins, giants and even the occasional mad inventor. The story, however, contrasts this environment beautifully. There are surprisingly dark moments throughout the story that you would never expect from such a seemingly innocent world. There is little to no dialogue in the game so it is these moments that the writers use to develop the characters. You watch as the younger brother confronts the issue of death again and again in the story and how he changes as a result of it. Meanwhile, the older brother does his best to protect his younger sibling from the harsh realities of the world.
You play the game from a third person perspective looking down onto the two brothers. You can play the game alone or experience the incredibly deep story with a friend. The play style of the game is very simple. The only controls are walking/running and an action button that you use to interact with each other or the environment. When I began playing the game, I was worried that the minimalist controls would become boring and dry as the game went on. However, the creators of the game mixed in several enjoyable mechanisms across different levels to prevent this from happening, such as goat-riding and glider operating. In combination with the game being a relatively quick playthrough, I never found myself tired of the controls. While I enjoyed the fresh and original style of controlling both brothers at once, I found myself frustrated trying to keep from getting the controls confused. Often, both characters would be running straight into a wall or a corner instead of going where I was trying to direct them. As you can imagine, my summer roommate got more than a couple laughs in at my expense because of this.
By far the game’s best feature is its environmental art — and the game creators knew it. Most likely, this came as a result of collaboration with the filmmaker Fares. To better enjoy all of the hard work they put into making such a picturesque world, the developers placed benches along the brothers’ paths. The player can walk up to these benches which overlook the breathtaking world they are traveling through. There are no rewards or achievements for doing this other than a great view. However, the benches are not the only way to take a quick break from your journey in the game. If you look hard enough and travel off the beaten path a little, there are several side activities to do like helping a sea turtle find her young or sounding a giant horn. I was a little disappointed because during my time playing the game I only found about a quarter of these things — they are a little more hidden than I would have liked for the laid-back style of play that the game showcases.
With a captivating story and a pleasant playing experience, I found Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons to be well worth the three hours it took to beat the game. I would definitely suggest that you pick it up off Steam, the Xbox Store or Playstation Network. Grab a copy and play it with a friend so that you don’t end up running the brothers into walls for minutes at a time and making a fool of yourself like I did. Overall, I give Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons a 9.0 out of 10 for its story and its gorgeously rendered world.