The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition is an open world RPG published and developed by Bethesda Softworks for the Playstation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC.
A great initial experience, but trucking frustrating later on.
PC version reviewed.
Clustertruck is a first person shooter published by tinyBuild Games and developed by Landfall Games for the Playstation 4, Xbox One and PC.
GAMEPLAY
I'd go as far as saying the final level is the most frustrating I've ever come across in a game before. Not just because it has a huge difficulty spike and learning curve, but because it just feels so out of place, being completely different to the rest of the game.
GRAPHICS
SOUND
I really liked the soundtrack, the redeeming part of the final level would have to be the really good music over it.
VALUE FOR MONEY
OVERALL
While I would have said this game was great, a few levels in the later worlds, especially the final level, made this game more frustrating than it should have been.
Heroes & Generals is a first person shooter published and developed by Reto-Moto for the PC.
GAMEPLAY
Pretty much pay to win, different guns, vehicles, tanks, planes, anything you either need to grind for hours for, or buy with money. This wouldn't be a huge problem if they allowed new players to use more than one gun, the starting one will be a semi-automatic rifle, useless at close range against machine guns and also useless at long range against the snipers which can one shot you from ages away by hitting anywhere on your body, yes, that's really a thing, and plenty of these weapons will probably have been brought, rather than earned.
If you're finding them annoying, then the only way to really beat them is by joining them and buying guns too, or by doing the online equivalent of bashing your head against a brick wall and eventually being able to earn another gun. The fact that you can't even chose between a few different guns at the start of the game, in case you don't like semi-automatic rifles, is really the problem. The game seems to be designed to push you towards buying more guns, rather than at least having the ability to change to something that might suit you more, or at least give you a bit more variety in your approach.
So it seems being infantry isn't working out for you, so why not switch into a tank, or a plane? Well to do that you have to continue to grind for hours and hours, or buy it with your real money. You could always drive a car, or join someone in one, although don't expect to be able to use your weapons inside vehicles, because that would simply be too dangerous.
If you want to switch sides between the Americans, Germans and Soviets, you'll have to pay to do that, and if you want to customise your different soldiers for each side, you'll have to pay for that, and for more load out slots. You even have to pay to change any of your soldiers names.
You can't change your load out while battles are in progress, meaning that if no one on your team has selected to play as a tank driver, good luck being able to stop your enemies tanks, or even if you simply want to change between a machine gun and a sniper because no one is taking the enemy snipers out, you'll have wait till the end, at which point you probably won't need to change.
The spawns are simply awful, allowing the other team to spawn camp and kill you without you really being able to do anything about it if you've been pushed back to your final point.
The spawn delay timer is a mindbogglingly stupid decision. You have these massive open maps that could fit hundreds of players in at once, but instead limit it to just below 20 most of the time, with players having to wait for other players on their team to die before they can rejoin the battle. I can't even begin to fathom how that's a good idea, unless the engine can't handle more people, which would be terrible when you consider the size of the maps.
Report system for griefing or hacking is pretty bad. There is no option to kick, only to give them a strike if they kill you. These people seldom seem to get banned though, so the likely hood of you finding more people like them certainly seems plausible. There are also numerous reports of players being banned because people simply complained about them en-mass, even though they had done no wrong, and them getting for people whining about them.
Three way battles are at least a nice idea. It would be nice if there were more factions though, the British, French or Italians should surely fit in somewhere, although for all we know the Americans may have conquered the whole of Western Europe, the Soviet Union the whole of the East, and Germany took Central Europe, the game never really explains why the Americans are fighting the Soviet Union.
GRAPHICS
The game isn't gritty enough for a WWII game, when I play games like Call of Duty: World at War, I see limbs flying everywhere, people crying desperately, ruined cities, graves and even unwelcoming, dark music. In Heroes & Generals I spawn in and see a small countryside village and a few tanks around, it doesn't look or feel like a place locked in fierce battle like any WWII game should.
SOUND
You won't hear either side upset by the horrors of war or anything, sometimes characters don't even seem to scream when they get killed. The guns and other things sound alright, far from the brilliant effects you'd usually hear in franchises like Battlefield though.
There isn't really much of a soundtrack, there's some music at the main menu and some more plays towards the end of rounds, it's nothing special anyway. VALUE FOR MONEY
It seems a bit odd to be doing this for a free-to-play game, however considering you need to spend money to even try and play this game on the same level as others, I think that justifies it. Quite frankly, if you want to enjoy the game you will need to spend money, or at least grind for hours with inferior load outs to other people, and if you don't enjoy the game you won't have to spend any money on it. If you have as much fun as I did playing it, hopefully you won't have to worry about spending anything.
OVERALL
I really can't justifying playing this game over other franchises in the genre such as Battlefield, or even Call of Duty, even the fact it's free isn't appealing once you realise why it is. The fact that this game came out of early access without any update or any kind of fan fair, but just decided to slip out one day suggests that not even the developers thought it was worth promoting. The only redeeming factor to this game is the fun you can have messing around with friends in it, otherwise you should avoid this game.
Zombitatos the end of the Pc master race is a point and click game published and developed by Bmc Games for the PC.
Before really getting into it I think it's worth clarifying that this game isn't even a funny kind of bad. This thing is just so awful you'll want to turn it off soon after you start, regardless of if you thought it looked funny, and you should really save your money and support some real games on Steam, rather than promoting things like this.
GAMEPLAY
The game does actually have a few multiple choice parts, although if you actually make a wrong choice and get a game over screen you have to watch the unskippable intros to the chapter you're on, which was certainly annoying.
Quite frankly this isn't really a game and wouldn't really even qualify as one of those point and click DVD games that some family movies had in the early 00's. It seems that the people behind this game had too much free time between lessons and decided that they wanted to put a game on Steam, with this being the result.
STORY
Terrible jokes, no zombies and seemingly no acting. Despite obviously being a joke, this game really isn't funny, the only part that comes remotely close to being so is that they had the audacity to charge people money for this.
GRAPHICS
The game can't even go full screen and everything looks like it took a few minutes to produce.
The grammar in the game is also pretty bad, along with just about everything else.
SOUND
At least you could skip past the song at the start.
The cutscenes were mostly recorded in a school/college courtyard so the sound of vehicles, children and other things make up the background. VALUE FOR MONEY
If this game was free it would seem like it was just a bad student tech demo or something but it's not worth any money, let alone your time. This game will take about 15 minutes to complete.
OVERALL
Zombitatos raises the question of just how successful Steam Greenlight is, and as to whether there should really be a greater bar of entry for games to be put up. You could better spend your money by throwing it into a fountain and making a wish, rather than "playing" this game. There are thousands of games on Steam to buy, some around the price of this one, some that are actually funny, and some that would be worth saving your money towards. Do that instead, and ignore this thing.
A space exploration game that has ended up being very divisive. Sound familiar?
PC version reviewed.
No Man's Sky is an action-adventure game published and developed by Hello Games for the Playstation 4, Xbox One and PC. The games' main premise is to explore the universe, with the eventual goal of reaching the centre.
I liked Spore. Yeah, I said it. No Man's Sky isn't bad either and seems to have suffered from its own hype. It would certainly be interesting to see how people would be treating it if the huge hype and expectations hadn't have been around. Sadly I think some people have misinterpreted what this game was supposed to be, although some vague statements from those behind it haven't helped. If you ignore the hype and the expectations, then this game should be more enjoyable, but it's certainly not perfect.
GAMEPLAY
Exploring can be a blast at times in this game, rushing up to an Earth like planet and then finding it's actually a toxic death trap can certainly lead to some interesting adventures. You can find cave systems with rich resources that sprawl from the land to the ocean on other planets, while some have sprawling forests with animals intent on attacking. All of these things can be going on while you're in the shadow of the other planets in the solar system, lurking far beyond the nearby mountains.
Some locations can just end up being dead end places you'll want to leave immediately, due to the whole thing just being large rocks and dust, or you can spend hours admiring the views some planets have to offer. Perhaps one complaint I'd have is how once you've been on a planet for a few minutes, in most cases you'll have seen it all, some planets do have enough variety and fascination about them to keep you there longer though.
The game is undoubtedly repetitive, with resources required to be collected to create new things for both you and your spaceship. While it can be quite fun scouring some planets for certain resources some people will certainly find it a bit dull, exploring is certainly where this game shines, and at least many resources push you to explore more interesting parts of worlds, rather than just the same old interiors in buildings.
Speaking of buildings, almost every building or space station in the game requires an Atlas V2 or V3 pass, which only seem to be available from rarer star systems, or simply by chance. When you consider how many buildings have doors locked by these seemingly rare items, why make them so hard to find? It only tainted the experience of exploration for me a bit.
I've heard complaints that the game is perhaps a little too forgiving, and I feel I largely agree. There isn't much of a penalty for dying, as long as you save often enough and the chance of dying seems somewhat more challenging than it should be, as crashing your ship either leads to a small amount of damage or just bouncing off whatever you hit. Most sentinels also take a large amount of time to take you down. I don't usually mind games being too easy, but even if you have basic equipment and stand still it takes them too long to bring you down.
Enemies can damage you when you're talking to NPC's or at monoliths too, which is a small but annoying thing. A bigger annoyance is when the achievement screen invades you screen for a good few seconds, disabling your ability to interact with anything, usually to read a single word.
Sadly you're always left alone to combat things, as nobody will help you battle pirates in space, or journey with you around the universe. The combat is nothing special either and the game becomes a simple shooter when fighting things like sentinels on planets. While better combat would be nice, I don't think this is a huge flaw as the focus is on exploration.
The game has a real lack of space things for a game set in that big place. Gas giants, worm holes and binary stars are all things missing from the game. I understand that some parts weren't implemented into the game because they could have ruined the gameplay, however that excuse doesn't sit right with me as, for an example, you can't travel to any solar systems' sun in the game, if you go too close the game simply keeps them at a fixed distance, while that's annoying, couldn't the same feature at least be implemented for gas giants?
Black holes are used as worm holes for some reason, why they couldn't have them act as different things I'm not sure, but they could have had so many exciting mechanics and ideas for them. Imagine jumping into a new solar system only to find everything being consumed by a black hole and finding yourself needing to escape quickly, perhaps even finding a worm hole to escape into. Instead solar systems feel rather samey, no planet even has more than one moon.
Any of the places you can encounter aliens strangely only ever has one such life form there. Vast space stations that can be decorated as stock exchanges or cafes only ever have someone at the desk, as no one ever gets out their ship. Even just sitting another alien down at a chair or something would have been a nice touch, instead of leaving everywhere feeling almost abandoned. I understand the universe is a big place, but surely everywhere wouldn't really be so empty.
There are three advanced alien races in the game (four if you count humans) and none of them have a permanent home in the universe, as apparently everyone just zooms around in ships now, as it must be deemed classes to be spotted with someone else. There are no cities, towns, villages, or any form of real settlements of planets, only their small research labs. Outside of these labs, trading posts and space stations you won't find any other aliens out of their ships exploring. It seems, at least at launch, that you can't encounter other players either, hopefully that mechanic will be implemented in the future, because it sure does feel a bit lonely at times.
The lack of a real map for planets, solar systems, or galaxy's is annoying, as navigating the universe is really hard because of it. Going back to places you've already been seems like a task that's far too difficult, instead you'll just end up lost in other star systems with the path to the centre, or atlas way points, as your only real guide or sense of direction.
STORY
The game is very immersive and at times easy to get lost in, at least on some planets and hovering in space, such as watching ships or frigates fly by or warp in. It can be ruined a bit by the lack of other intelligent life forms around though, which I mentioned earlier. The lack of any real story or even direction is probably off putting for some though. For people who found games like Skyrim to be too open ended this game would be a nightmare. Obviously a big story wasn't the main focus here though.
GRAPHICS
The game looks beautiful at so many different times with planets aligning in orbit, moons being gazed upon by worlds dominating the sky and islands sprawling beyond the horizon as you gaze down from space. The bright colours of many worlds only enhance some of the incredible, often alien feeling views you can get. Everything feels huge too, which is great for a game set in space.
While I personally didn't suffer from many issues on the PC version, there isn't much of an excuse for how poorly the game runs on some PC's, with some people not even being able to launch it. The main issue for me was textures popping in too late, leading to some planets looking rather messy, textures only loading in seconds before I flew over them in my ship, which even hindered exploration at times, as potential locations of interest didn't always load in before I'd already missed them. SOUND
65daysofstatics' soundtrack for No Man's Sky was released a few days before the actual game and listening to it certainly furthered my excitement for the incoming release, however as the music for No Man's Sky is, like its planets, procedurally generated, you often don't actually hear the full songs from the soundtrack. I remember hearing around one or two songs from the soundtrack in full, as I first took off from the starter planet and another when fighting some space pirates, apart from those I've only heard a few snippets.
The fact that the soundtrack seems to have been chopped up is a shame because I was really looking forward to swooping down and zooming across planets with the fast paced, action packed sound I'd heard off the soundtrack release, but instead you hardly get to hear the songs in full. If some of the songs had been around longer, rather than cutting back to soundscapes, I really think it would help improve the game.
VALUE FOR MONEY
The game is probably a bit on the expensive side at launch, but if you enjoy the game and its simple premise it'll most likely give you numerous hours of content before you get bored, as it is essentially endless.
Due to its open ended nature it certainly feels like a game you can pick up at any time, whether you want to go and explore for a few minutes or go on a journey across the universe lasting hours. If Hello Games keep their word and add plenty of content in the future, especially for free like they've teased, then this game could potentially become a certain investment.
OVERALL
To put it one way, calling No Man's Sky boring would be like calling a trek up a mountain boring, if you like exploring, you'll like this game. If you're looking for more than just visiting interesting planets, such as a cutting edge space simulator then that is not what this game is. Even with its sometimes beautiful and intriguing worlds, the game feels like it could use a bit more depth to it.
I came in expecting a game where I could go around and explore space. If you're expecting something similar I'd recommend the game. If you're someone who's expecting the potential to do anything in the universe then I'd advise to either wait for the game to go on sale, or at least hold off and see what may yet be added to the game, as in its current form it's bound to disappoint some.
Thanks for reading about my opinion on one of 2016's biggest releases.
Human: Fall Flat is a comedy puzzle game published by Curve Digital and developed by No Brakes Games and for the Playstation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC.
