a log of gaming exploits
Long term readers of this blog may recall that I was a little unsure about The Walking Dead after playing the first episode and was unsure if I should carry on playing the rest of the series. It's a good thing I did....
After some quite common technical difficulties getting my saves from Episode 1 working again (although I don't think my 400 days decisions were recovered) I was ready to dive into season 2 but I made sure to brace myself before I did because I heard it was quite a rough start.
The game play itself follows the same kind of point and click pattern as the first season in that you go through a fairly linear path making dialogue choices along the way. You also get into encounters with "walkers" and sometimes other people. These usually play out as quick time events. But the appeal of the game lies in the great writing and dialogue in the characters and how even the smallest of choice that you make can have unforeseen consequences further down the road. You control Clementine, your young sidekick from the first season, although now she is a little older, a little wiser, a little stronger and much more capable at dealing with threats than she was before. Which is good because you will come across many of these.
It's difficult to say much in a review of this because the best part of it really is the story and the way the events unfold, but saying too much will just result in spoilers. All I can feel comfortable saying is that in the games introduction, you are still wandering with some of the characters from season one, but very quickly things go to shit and you found yourself split up from them and falling in with a new group trying to find your old one again. But needless to say, a lot happens in and around those events. And most of it is unpleasant. One over-arching theme of The Walking Dead is that most of the choices you are forced to make have no real right or wrong. They're all wrong. Just to varying degrees. So you really are trying to make the best of bad situations for the majority of the game and not trying to get anyone else killed.
This first episode is a good bit shorter than I expected taking me little over 90 minutes to finish and ended quite abruptly so I'm hoping they can keep a quick and consistent release schedule for the following episodes. I am also very excited to see how my choices come to play in the long run. Bring on Episode 2!
Fans of the Final Fantasy series may have noticed the games declining in quality over the years. I have yet to play any of the newer ones beyond Final Fantasy X (what I regard to be the last true Final Fantasy) but everyone other that games reviewers, who we know cannot be trusted, have said almost nothing but bad things about the newer Final Fantasy games. Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV are simply an MMORPGs with Final Fantasy branding slapped onto them. I started Final Fantasy XII when it first came out but played it one time for 3 hours and had no desire to return to it because it was so boring. I will have to someday though.... And from what I've heard of Final Fantasy XIII, it's simply a 30 hour tutorial where you walk from A to B through linear corridors.
Most of this downfall in quality in the newer games is due to the vast majority of the teams that made the older Final Fantasy games leaving the studio and the new ones are now being made by entirely new people and just can't put out the same quality games the original team did. But thankfully, most of this old team are still making games and still together in the form of Mistwalker Games. And some of the games that they put out, mostly this one and the incredible Lost Odyssey) can genuinely be considered to be the true new Final Fantasy games in all but name because they have a lot more in common with the legacy than the new pretenders to the throne do.
All that being said, I can indeed confirm that this feels like a true Final Fantasy game through and through. The battle system is quite different to the usual fixed standing battles and instead adopts a free roaming system where you move close to an enemy to hit them. You can also command other characters to attack or use magic and distract enemies or enhance ally spells once they have been cast. Despite seeming simple at first, there is a lot to the battle system that I gradually realised as I went through it hacking things to bits.
It adopts a system similar to Final Fantasy IV in that new spells and skills are unlocked just by levelling up so you do not have to hunt down new spells or equipment to get them. There is also the usual armour and weapon systems like Final Fantasy games but in this one, like a few others, you can upgrade both weapons and armour with the use of cash and/or specialist items breathing new life into old equipment. I did a fairly straight run through the game only doing a few optional side quests, but even doing this, I was almost always flush with cash and good equipment so this aspect of it seemed fairly easy except for the difficulty ramp at the end of the game.
One minor deviation from Final Fantasies of old that this game takes is that you are not trying to save the entire world. Just your own island, Lazarus Island, from a reptilian species called the Gurak that you are war with. You play a character who is in a band of mercenaries with his friends who has ambitions to become a knight of the empire. You start off doing small times jobs, but as usual, you get embedded in larger and larger jobs with more widespread effects and end up battling for the fate of the island itself.
The characters in your gang are all very notable and different and well fleshed out through both the main story and some side missions. All but one character who just seems to be there to tick a box and is quite irrelevant in the big picture.... The NPC characters are also very well fleshed out and you do feel strongly about helping/stopping them all. Basically what I'm trying to say here is that the characters and story are very expertly done and do a great job of drawing you in to the world.
This is also one of the most visually impressive Wii games that I have ever seen and it seems Mistwalker did a great job of squeezing every last ounce of performance out of the machine's limited spec to make every character and location look as detailed and wonderful as they could. It even feels like they push it too far a couple of times because there is hints of slowdown in very busy areas and battles where it is asking just a little too much and the Wii struggles to keep up.
I was a little hesitant to play this before hand because I had heard mixed reviews on it from many sources. I had considered striking it from the backlog due to lack of interest but now that I have been through it, I am very glad I did not because it was a truly wonderful JRPG that continues the legacy of the classic Final Fantasy games in the best way possible. Once again, it seems more and more that reviews can not be trusted.
Even the name "The Last Story" is quite similar to "Final Fantasy" when you think about it....
Sidenote: barring any games that I add after the backlog is finished or anything done in co-op, this is the last game on the list for the Nintendo Wii. The backlog is finally coming to a close....
And yet another game in yet another yearly franchise presents itself. And just like Assassin's Creed IV, this is another "next-gen" launch title that must also be able to run on current gen hardware. But fortunately, this is another game that uses the mighty Frostbite 3 engine so it will look impressive on everything. But more so on newer hardware. And more so again on a high end PC which is what I played it on.
This is now the 3rd entry in the Need for Speed series made by Criterion. Yes, technically this was made by Ghost Games
And it was awesome. A short way of describing it would be that it is Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2. A very similar but much visually enhanced follow up with an open world structure and different and varied task lists acting as levels of progression instead of just linear progression.
Again, you can play as both a cop or a racer. The cops must bust the racers and the racers must avoid the cops. The events are again similar to Hot Pursuit: time trials, races, interceptors and hot pursuits. Time trials and races are self explanitory. Interceptors are cop events where you must chase down and bust a single racer and Hot Pursuits are different depending on which side you are on. As a racer, in a hot pursuit, you must simultaneously avoid the cops and beat the other racers to the finish line. As a cop, you must bust as many of the racers as possible before they reach the finish line.
You progress through the game by completing lists of tasks (called assignments as cops and speedlists as racers) where you must perform a certain number of tasks such as win X number of races, take down Y number of racers, score Z number of points etc etc. These start off as short and easy lists of tasks but soon get to be extensive and difficult as you progress. progressing also unlocks more events, cars and pursuit tech. Ah yes, the pursuit tech. Think of these like your items in Mario Kart. Each car can have 2 and you can pick from a variety of offensive and defensive weapons. Some are limited to cops, some to racers and some available to all. For example, only cops can call in helicopters and set up road blocks, only racers can use super turbos and shock pulses but everyone can use EMPs and electrostatic fields. These weapons mix things up and give you a wider set of tactical options while trying to bust or avoid being busted.
As mentioned before, the game runs on the Frostbite 3 engine so it looks absolutely stunning even on current gen consoles and low end hardware. But this also allows for a lot more flexibility in the environment. In racers of old, you were limited to drive only on the road and there would be barriers all around the roads (either visible or invisible) to stop you going off the road. However the Frostbite 3 engine allows for a huge amount of destructibility and complexity in the environments so you can now go tearing off road, through fields, fences even buildings. It creates a much better feeling of action and immersion to be able to slide wide on a corner, tear through a field full of fences and come out on the other side realising you had just accidently taken a shortcut. And did I mention it looked gorgeous? Just look at the shots for yourself above.
It's not all good though. There are some minor complaints I did have with it. Truly huge load times going in and out of the open world to change cars, bank points etc. No way to pause the game (this is due to it being aimed at primarily online multiplayer which I did not partake in). The cops are truly out to totally murder you when you are a racer. And I mean they absolutely will not stop until you are 6 ft under. And a large difficulty imbalance between the racer and cop careers. Racer task lists are generally much harder to do and racers must buy new cars whereas cops are simply given them. There is then also the fact that a racer is targets of other racers and cops so everyone is out to kill you but cops have allies in the other cops and a racer will rarely be aggressive towards a cop and simply try to outrun him. Also due to the extreme high speeds that you are usually travelling at, you regularly crash into things before you have the chance to avoid or sometimes even see them. But this has always been the way with Criterion's racing games so it's to be expected.
These are all fairly small niggles though and none of them stopped me having an enormous amount of fun with this game just as I did with Hot Pursuit and I would give this a very very strong recommendation to any fan of racing games. But if you're new to Burnout or the newer Need for Speed games, you may be unprepared for the initial learning curve and get frustrated with it but stick with it, crash through it and speed your way to victory and awesomeness at 225mph.
Long live Criterion (and now Ghost Games). They can do very little wrong in my book.
Here we have yet another entry in another annual franchise this release season. After the quite mediocre and poorly received Assassin's Creed III of last year, everyone was hoping this would lift the series back up to it's previous success. And it does. Kind of....
The base mechanics of the game remain pretty much the same as all the Creed games before it. Despite Ubisoft constantly saying they're redoing the engine from the ground up, your Assassin always seems to move and climb and run and stab in exactly the same way as all the others did. Maybe it's in the genes.... As usual there are some small improvements and tweaks and new things such as more gun-play, more weapons, using people as human shields and such. And thankfully, there is quite a lot of killing and planning assassinations and carrying out assassinations in this title much like the older ones. This felt sorely lacking in the 3rd game which felt like it was going to every possible extent imaginable to stop you actually doing any assassinating.
Many people (including myself) reacted quite strongly to the initial trailers for this game which focused heavily on the naval warfare aspects by assuming that they had taken the under-whelming naval warfare from Assassin's Creed III and made it into a full game. Thankfully, that was not the case. The naval warfare is a much bigger part of the game now but thankfully, it is a lot more fun and fulfilling than it was in the previous game. Your ship is your primary method of conveyance around the world, other than your feet which sadly cannot traverse large bodies of water, so you rely on it heavily to get you from one place to the next. And because this is Assassin's Creed, you also rely on it to kill others. So because you use your boat(s) a lot more now, you are more focused on upgrading their defensive and offensive abilities as naval battles are quite common-place now. You can install and upgrade a slew of weapons to blast opponents out of the water and their use it quite cleverly dependant on where your viewpoint is. I.e. if you are looking straight on, you will fire chain cannons, if you are looking to the side, you will fire larger broadside cannons, if you are looking through a telescope in the distance you will fire long range mortars, etc, etc. There is also a vast array of enemy ships to combat from small cargo ships to gigantic heavily armed Man'O'Wars which will blow you to pieces if you are unprepared. Once a ship is damaged enough, you either sink it totally and gather a small amount of resources from it or board it, kill the crew and get a much larger reward. This makes for many Hollywood-esque swashbuckling scenes of swinging onto deck guns blazing and swords swinging which are pretty awesome. I did enjoy the naval aspect much more this time round, but it does get quite hairy quite quickly before you really have the money required to upgrade your ship enough so you are either forced to grind for cash or go into battles sometimes massively outclassed.
I usually went in outclassed and eventually won through mostly by sheer hard-headedness, but if you don't mind a bit of grinding there are an enormous number of side quests to get cash from ranging from plundering ships to diving for treasure to taking on Assassination jobs given to you by the Assassin's Guild. And it is the fact that they are side jobs that brings me to my next point which was a bit of a gripe for me personally: In Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, you are not actually an assassin. You are a pirate who within the first few minutes of the game kills an Assassin (albeit seemingly not a very good one), takes his clothes and wears them for the duration of the game while he goes about his merry way trying to make a better life for himself through general pirate-like antics. The Assassins and Templars do become a bit more involved in the story down the line but for the most part, they feel like things that are going on in the background and not really a huge concern of yours generally but just something you are doing to eventually achieve your own goals. To me, it felt like a pirate game that Ubisoft had inserted the Assassin's Creed game mechanics and a small part of the plot into. And this still makes it a very fun game. But...not...really an Assassin's Creed game.
Not wanting to dish out any huge spoilers, but the real world side of the story that takes place outside the Animus is now also reaching quite lofty levels of absurdity but you can find all that out for yourself.
Visually, the game is the prettiest of the series so far especially if you play a "next-gen" version as one would expect. The island scenery and vast oceans do look very colourful and vibrant and inviting and every area seems to have it's own unique charm. I played the PC version which is also very easy on the eyes. However, seeing as this is one of the very first games of the next console generation, and also had to be designed for current generation hardware, it is not a huge leap forward visually yet from what we have seen in previous games as it must cater to both old and new hardware. Think of early XBox 360 games that were not terribly graphically impressive because they also had previous gen versions such as Just Cause or Far Cry Instincts and you will get what I am referring to.
None of this detracts from the fun of the game though and it is still definitely worth playing if you are a fan of Assassins or Pirates or the Assassin's Creed series. Just expect quite a few WTF moments along the way.
Also, it had a few too many boring "Tail this guy" missions for my liking.
Yet another title that I got many years ago but has been left by the way side until now. I had put this entry in the Wipeout series off in apprehension of it's high difficulty level. But after actually playing it, it didn't seem terribly difficult after all.
It did however seem very short. The campaign as it were only consisted of 9 races across 3 difficulty levels. There were other modes too like head to head and time trials but I was not interested in those and only wanted to do the main races.
The game play is the same as every other game in the series. Namely high speed anti gravity racing that gets more and more high speed as you progress. It's been said that the handling in this game is the best in the entire series but having played them all now, I would still say that Wip3out had the best handling of all the games in the series. And is still my favourite by far. But the handling in this one definitely comes a close second and Wip3out just refined it a little more.
Although this was only the second game in the series, this was the first game to pioneer the absorption of unwanted items allowing you to regain shield power without having to wait to get to the pits at the end of each lap. It also introduced many of the now staple weapons such as the quake and energy drain. It also featured a huge amount of advertising for Red Bull for some reason.
An excellent Wipeout game all in all even if it was a bit short but it set the precedent of the better handling and more feasible tracks making it much more approachable than the bone shatteringly difficult first game.
It's also a tearful goodbye for me to Wipeout because I have now played every game in the series and with the closing of Studio Liverpool, there will never be any more made.
Quite sad. Goodbye Wipeout. Thanks for the wild ride.
I had originally intended to play this when it first came out in 2011 but then I decided to wait for the game of the year version because a lot of DLC came out for it and I ended up purchasing it in a Steam sale and as was the style at the time, it was pushed back in favour of other games. But now finally comes it's turn.
This game had very mixed reviews when it came out some saying it was awesome and some saying it gave them a weird uncanny valley feeling because the faces were very real but the rest of the bodies were usual stiff game characters. Then there was the reported controversy over the working conditions for Team Bondi during the development of the game and then their eventual lay-offs casting doubt over whether or not they will ever get to make any more games.
Despite all this, they did manage to make one very interesting and different game that is unlike anything I've played for quite a while. The basic premise of the story is that you play as Cole Phelps. A recent recruit into the L.A.P.D. who starts to make a name for himself by being a great detective and being able to crack cases that no one else can. You start off as a beat cop but soon get promoted to a traffic detective and work through a number of different desks including arson, vice and homicide. Each case you work involves searching crime scenes for clues, questioning people and trying to tell if they're lying to your or not. You can do this by just bluffing them or catching them out in a lie with evidence that proves them wrong. This is where the detailed faces come into play as you are meant to be able to tell when a person is lying to you just by their facial expressions. I found this a little hit and miss however but it might just be that I'm bad at reading people like this. There are also a number of action sequences in some cases that can involve chasing down criminals and either tackling, shooting or threatening to shoot them, vehicle chases where you must disable the suspects vehicle and shoot outs where you move around cover and shoot dudes. These action sequences don't seem too important to the plot and this is emphasised in the fact that you can skip them if you fail a few times. Although this rarely happened to me as I quite enjoyed the action parts as a good change of pace. Progression through cases can be different depending on how you do in questioning people, I.e. some things may not be revealed if you do not succeed with some questions so some people or areas of investigation may never be unveiled. At the end of each case, you are given a rating depending on how thoroughly you investigated everything, how you did in questioning and how many clues you found, but apart from achievements, these ratings do not seem to do much.
While it was fun working through the cases at first, coming into the middle of the game, a lot of them seemed to get very very samey and it felt like it was starting to drag. With the exceptions of the end missions in each desk which were usually different and almost like a 'boss level' in some ways. Fortunately, towards the end, the cases did start to have a bit more variety to them so that by the time things wrapped up, it had a good sense of momentum going. It's just a shame that the middle dragged so much as I feel that could have easily put a lot of people off or made them get bored and stop. I also learned that there were 2 other additional desks planned to be putting in making the game even longer, and it was already quite long taking me nearly 22 hours to get through. Rockstar axed these 2 additional desks saying the game was "long enough already" and I'd have to agree with them there.
I found this to be a very different and unique game. It did have it's shortcomings in the aforementioned dragging in the middle of the game, but all in all it's definitely something everyone should try because for now, it's as close as we're likely to get to a game being crossed with a film (maybe with an exception or 2) in a properly believable way. It also does a great job of capturing the era of the 40s in every way from the cars to the people, to the language and even attitudes of people involved. Plus it feels super-cool to be a detective in the 40s.
Bravo, Team Bondi. I hope you can pull yourselves together and make that follow-up.
After being severely under-whelmed by Oblivion, I was giving serious consideration to skipping this sequel to it. Fortunately, I was convinced otherwise by a friend because this one was a very very large step up in every way from it's predecessor.
To start with, I played it with the very nice PC exclusive HD texture pack which made it look a lot prettier than it's console counterparts. The PC version also allowed the use of the console which was necessary to get around a few game breaking bugs. This is quite a buggy game....and as I read more of the Skyrim Wiki through my progression, I became more and more aware of how many holes there are in the engine and quest scripting and just how many ways the game can be broken and how much harder it is to fix on console versions.
Asides from the obvious graphical upgrades (both stock and HD addition) which provide both much nicer looking locations as well as a great deal more variety and detail in said locations. This makes all the walking that you do (of which there is again, a lot) at least interesting to take in all the scenery around you. The voice acting is also greatly improved, although does not have quite the star-studded cast of Oblivion. The keyboard short-cuts and interface are enormously improved allowing for much speedier navigation of everything taking full advantage of the keyboard and mouse which is greatly appreciated.
I also enjoyed the story much more in this game over Oblivion. Instead of just being some dude who just stumbled into a quest, this time you are a "Dragonborn". A descendant of a member of the Royal family from Oblivion who have the ability to use their voice as a weapon by learning magic words or "Thums". You come into this knowledge at quite an opportune time in that Dragons are just starting to return to the world and the Dragonborn is the only one who can truly kill a dragon by absorbing their soul and their "Thum" along with it. This gives the story a much greater sense of an epic and a great sense of accomplishment when you complete your mission and even the smaller goals along the way.
The game-play itself remains mostly unchanged from before in that it has action RPG level progression and you pick the kind of traits you want to develop. Again, I went with a skull-cracking bruiser who cuts dragons into very small pieces.
The only drawbacks that come to mind are the aforementioned enormous amount of walking. And while the nice scenery does help to alleviate the boredom of walking, even this wears off eventually. And some of the areas that you have to get to are in very inaccessible places either around or on the other side of or on top of enormous mountains that you have to find a way around or up and this can also wear a bit thin over time and starts to feel just like padding the way with pointless obstacles.
I only did the main quest in this run but will definitely return to it to do all the DLC at a later date. With many more mods attached to it to make it look even prettier. The screenshots here will be something to aim for. And while I did thoroughly enjoy it and would easily recommend it to anyone I still don't think it lived up to the enormous amount of hype surrounding it or all the "best game ever" claims. It's good, but not that good. Looking forward to going back to it though and pushing it and my PC hardware to the limit.
I have very fond memories of playing the first game in this series, the original Knights of the Old Republic back in my first year of Queen's University almost....10 years ago now. Man, I'm old.
It was a fantastic action RPG set in the Star Wars universe roughly 4000 years before the original films. But not much changed in those 4000 years because most things are by and large the same. You controlled a character who the force was with, so to speak and would go through the game accumulating experience, levelling up and choosing new force powers to develop or strengthen as well as new abilities traits. So you can do the usual multi-varied approach to most situations like talking (which is this time aided by force persuasion), stealthing or shooting (and lightsabreing). Except for the later games in the Jedi Knight series it offered what I feel to be one of the most authentic and immersive Star Wars universe experiences that you could possibly imagine. Every detail and line of dialogue and piece of grime on old rust bucket ship just feels like genuine old school Star Wars and it's great to be able to run around in that world chopping shit up with a lightsabre. Naturally, you meet a lot of characters along the way and some of them come with you for the ride. This gives you an opportunity to develop other types of characters such as gunslingers or support characters and also gives you people to talk to about stuff and many opportunities for the phrase "I have a bad feeling about this." to pop up.
I often thought this was a precursor to the Mass Effect series because before I had played those games, everything that was described about them to me sounded like a direct copy or further development of the systems in place in Knights of the Old Republic and now having played all of those that initial suspicion was confirmed. The dialogue systems in particular share a great deal in common and KOTOR's dialogue trees seemed to pave the way for Mass Effect's dialogue wheels.
It may seem odd at this point that all I have done is explain what the original game is like, but the reason for that is simply this: barring plot, locations and characters, the sequel is almost identical. The engine is the same, licensed out to Obsidian by Bioware to make this game. The weapons are the same, the levelling system is the same, the dialogue system is the same. Pretty much everything is the same and that's not all the surprising seeing as this came out barely a year after the original in what seems like was probably just an attempt to cash in on the critical acclaim of the original. And while that may sound bad initially, when it's a rehashing of a game that good, it's not a bad thing at all. Immediately after I started playing it, old memories came flooding back to me and I was soon greatly enjoying being back in the swing of being a Jedi in training.
The only one minor complaint I'd have about this one is that the story is less epic than the original and by the end, I was having a bit of trouble following it to be honest. But you can't have it all. It's still a fantastic game and a very worthy sequel to another awesome game. Some reviews were not so kind to it, but I could not find any reason for this at all because the only minus point it has compared to the original is the aforementioned rehashing. And that due to it's rushed release schedule, a lot of content had to be cut and quite a few bugs were left in it. But it developed such a following that a fan made mod was developed to fix these bugs and add back in the majority of the cut content. Check it out here.. And go play this game while you're at it. And the original too. Because they're both great.
Another game bought in a Steam sale just because it was cheap. I hmmed and ahhed about this one for a while when it was on sale because it has a bit of a less solid reputation than the much lauded Fallout 3 that came before it. Some people said they enjoyed it more but a lot more said it was not as good. But then I eventually did buy it in that sale and I can say with certainty now that was a mistake.
This was made using the exact same engine so it looks and feels and behaves pretty much the exact same Fallout 3 did and also uses the same mechanics, menu systems, character building system, inventories, etc. It's all the same. The only differences are:
I don't know what it was about this game that rubbed me the wrong way because mechanically, it is identical to the awesome game that came before it but I just did not enjoy it at all. I did not care at all about this nameless courier or the fate of New Vegas. And it just felt like a chore going through all these events that I was uninterested in after enjoying Fallout 3 and all of it's missions so much. It may have been a bit of an uncanny valley situation where it was so similar to something that I liked a lot, but it was not that and one of the main aspects of what made the previous game great (the story) seemed so pointless and inconsequential in this one, it just turned me off.
If you enjoyed Fallout 3, by all means try this one but beware because it seems to be a bit of a Marmite game.
This is a now 5 year old game that I wanted to play when it first came out, but as usual, it was sidetracked by other things. But I get to them all eventually and now it's the turn of Fallout.
There was a lot of hype surrounding this one having been told by many who had played it how awesome it is as well as knowing that it had won many game of the year awards from multiple sources as well as plenty of other awards so expectations were fairly high. Also, Liam Neeson is in it and that's always a good thing.
As many know, it's your basic kind of action RPG deal where you pick a class and some skills and then level up by killing lots of things and pour your experience points into the areas you want to specialise in. So you can be a murderer or a smooth talker or a hacker or a stealthy assassin. I poured all mine into assault rifles and health so I could take beatings and shoot things in the face. Theres also a cool targeting system where you can freeze time and pick an enemy and a piece of their body to hit which makes the combat easier to control.
The basic story is that you live in a underground vault because the world was destroyed in a nuclear war and everyone now lives in vaults and never leaves because the outside world is destroyed and irradiated. For some reason, all the in-vault propaganda and equipment and such has a very 1950' vibe to it, so right up until I started the game I was under the impression that it took place in an alternative 1950s timeline but apparently not. It is set in the future.... So people are born in the vault, live in the vault and die in the vault. But this turns out to not entirely true because your dad, Liam Neeson, leaves the vault suddenly and without explanation and it's up to you to chase him and find out what's going down.
Naturally you visit many places along the way and meet many people and there are multiple outcomes and methods to accomplish almost any goal depending on what kind of skills you have. You can talk your way into or out of situations, you can pick locks, you can kill people in your way, you can pay them and on and on. I tended to lean towards trying to talk my way into places because it can save a lot of ammo and supplies. But when that didn't work, I would go with all out murder. It's another game that it seems like you could play a dozen times and do it differently every time and I do enjoy having that kind of freedom and choice. But even with all the options, it feels like you rarely get stuck in a no win situation where you simply don't have the means to proceed and have to retreat. I feel this did happen a lot in earlier games like this such as the first 2 Deus Ex games and the first Hitman.
There is an enormous amount of equipment and weapons and items in the game and you will regularly get newer and better stuff so you'll have to be constantly checking inventory to see if you're using the best you have. Equipment and weapons also wear down and eventually break, but can be repaired with spare duplicates. But remarkably none of this feels like busy work and it was enjoyable to keep my inventory clean.
I also greatly enjoyed the story because it felt very personal at first, but then it does pan out revealing greater consequences and more parties but because it was all started by your dad (still the awesome Liam Neeson) it still feels personal and you want to carry on his work. And the endgame is totally epic.
I'm sure pretty much everyone has already played this, but I would strongly recommend it to anyone who has yet to do so because it's just lots of fun from start to finish wandering the irradiated wastelands in search of Liam Neeson dealing with waste-landers and shooting mutant jerks in the face. Unfortunately, I have been told from sources, that I missed out on finding a dog companion called "Dogmeat". He sounds like he would have been cool.
I did enjoy this a lot and I got the game of the year edition on Steam so I will be going back to play the DLC (of which there seems to be a lot) at a later date for sure. My only minor complaints are that there is a huge amount of walking before you can do much fast travel so it would have been nice to have a vehicle or if your dude could move a bit quicker.... Also, Liam Neeson kind of sounded like he was phoning in his part. But he's still cool. Also, you make what seems like should be a game long nemesis right at the start who I was expecting to be the end boss, but no. After the first 10 minutes you never see him again. Missed opportunity.
Here we have the latest long anticipated entry in the Battlefield series. Touting the latest and greatest Frostbite 3 engine developed by the awesome DICE. Although I'm sure the anticipation for most people was for the multiplayer. However, I do not give two shits about multiplayer but after hearing that this one had an actual campaign this time, I was keen to give it a go and see how it would run on my rig as it is touted to be a very visually impressive engine with beautiful vistas, great detail everywhere, super realistic character models and the series' signature feature, destructible environments including whole skyscrapers. As you can see from the screenshot roll above, it is undoubtedly a very very pretty game. And it features a very realistically modelled Chalky White from Boardwalk Empire starring as the aptly named "Irish".
The campaign itself revolves around an escalating war in the east between 'Murica, the Russians and the Chinese. You start off trying to escape with intel and VIPs, but it soon escalates into all out war and you have to ensure the survival of one of the last US ships in the region.
I don't plan to touch the multiplayer but the campaign was a fun, if fairly safe and run of the mill soldier romp. It did however create a real feeling of being in war with the chaos and cover being shot or blown to bits and not being able to see or hit shit most of the time. Give it a go if you're a fan of FPS or gorgeous visuals but if not, don't bother. But I still had fun going thorugh it.
Bought this game quite a few years ago on the recomendation of a friend who had played it. But it kind of got pushed to the back burner due to an almost complete lack of knowledge of it. But now that the backlog is finally starting to shrink and choices are getting a bit more limited, I decided to give this one a go. You play Michael Thorton who has just been initiated into the titular secret Alpha Protocol outfit. Who are there to carry out clandestine government operations which can then be denied and the outfit itself can be dissolved and remade if needs be. You start out being sent on a fairly routine operation, but then naturally everything starts to go wrong and conspiracies start to happen and you end up having to save the world as usual. The pro-dominant feeling I got when I was playing that it was that it was some kind of present day love-child of Deus Ex and Mass Effect. It's all about the character you build up and what you put your stat points into to make him a killing machine or tech expert or silent killer. And making dialogue choices which were touted as being the 3 "J.Bs". That being James Bond, (suave, charming and flirty), Jason Bourne (straight to the point and professional) and Jack Bauer (in your face and very aggressive). Different characters respond positively or negatively to these dialogue choices. So business like people will respect the professional approach whereas mercenaries and soldiers will prefer the direct and aggressive approach so you have to figure out what works best with each type of person. While this is interesting initially, it quickly becomes very easy to read and predict what people will like what so this fairly quickly becomes redundant.
