Marvel Heroes 2017 Review

When you first begin Marvel Heroes, you can choose one of five free starting heroes, which are Thing, Storm, Hawkeye, Daredevil, and Scarlet Witch. All of the other heroes can only be obtained by either buying them or rarely find them dropped by a boss Villain. The selection of heroes available in Marvel Heroes is expansive, and their factions range from the Avengers to X-Men. Heroes are able to collect gear to equip making them stronger, and earning skill points from leveling up and doing quests. Each will also have attributes that further make them unique from each other, such as endurance that will reduce damage as it goes up, and intelligence that increases how much experience you will earn. Health is what every hero uses to determine when they will fall in battle, and Spirit is in place of mana that is used in other games.

Along with the large amount of heroes in the game, theres even a larger amount of powers available. They are all unique when compared to each other, and complement each hero’s style of play. Large heroes like Thing and Hulk will spend their time jumping around and slamming the ground, while longer ranged and weaker heroes like Storm will stay at ranging zapping her enemies. Not all powers are to deal damage, as there are passives that benefit heroes greatly as well as ones that can even benefit your whole team.

Even though there is a lot of combat involed in Marvel Heroes, there are almost no quests that require you to kill a certain amount of X enemy, unless of course its a boss. All quests are story driven and most just guide you through the story, often ending with the killing of a zone’s main boss. Rewards can range from increasing your maximum amount of spirit to giving you extra skill points.

While out in the open areas defeating enemies and completing quests, you will run into a multitude of locations that you can enter. If you enter one that has an orange portal for its entrance, it will be a small and short area designed for one person, with stronger than normal enemies and a treasure chest hidden inside. Blue portal areas are larger instances that generally require more than one person to easily complete, and also follow along with quests and the storyline. All instances appear to only reset after a certain amount of time, since even logging out and back in won’t do it. One option is to join another hero’s group that hasn’t it yet and you will enter their version of it.

There are a lot of bosses in Marvel Heroes, as well as the evil factions that they belong to. There is M.O.D.O.K, Magneto, Doom, and Doc Ock along with A.I.M, the Purifiers, Hydra, the Hand, and many more bosses and factions to excounter. All bosses have a unique combat strategy, and some will require you to be on your toes more than others. After defeating a boss, you are always guaranteed a medal specific to that boss that has special attributes related to the particular boss. They are also the only way to rarely get heroes and their costumes without having to pay real money for them.

Killing any enemy has a chance to drop loot that can range greatly. Money and restorative orbs are the most common ones, along with experience orbs that you should be sure to grab. Lots of gear of differing quality will drop all of the time as well, and luckily most of it will be usable by your current hero. Each piece will have a base stat a long with randomly placed bonuses, that can range from simply higher health to making your powers stronger. The rarest loot will come from bosses, who each will drop a special medal and even the rare chance of additional heroes and costumes.

One unique thing in Marvel Heroes is that you can opt to donate your junk loot to stores and the crafter to improve the services that they offer, instead of just selling for cash. Even then, the weapon and armor merchants are practically useless, since you can find much better equipment out playing. The crafter, however, is where you should donate all of your useless junk to since they will help you to keep current with better gear. They can turn weaker rare pieces of equipment into much better epic pieces for a small fee, and this will always add a ton of stats to each piece. This is also where you can apply special attributes to your costumes, and even crafting a useful item that will let you give gear to another hero.

While playing through the story, you will encounter cutscenes that are drawn and animated like a comic book, while also being voice acted. Any heroes that you own will also cause loading screens to show little factoids about them. Zones that you are in or traveling to will also have facts told about them at the loading screens. Dieing to a boss will sometimes gives you hints when reloading back into the area.

Although you see a lot of people playing and it is marketed somewhat as an MMO, there isn’t a whole lot of community present. You are able to chat to people, but you almost never see anyone type anything even out in the large open levels. There are however Supergroups that you can form which are a lot like guilds from other MMOs, letting you easily group up with other people that you know.

When you beat the main storyline, you will be able to continue on with daily missions, or try out the PvP which is in beta stage. Dailies revisit a bunch of the end locations from the story missions, being quick 5 minute instances with a boss at the end. Completing these once a day will reward you with Cube Shards which you can trade for Fortune Cards. You are able to do them more than once a day, but you won’t get additional Cube Shards or chance for special items. You can also reset the storyline, which is helpful when you want to level up other heroes.

Marvel Heroes shares a lot of gameplay with other games like Diablo and Torchlight. It also has some basic MMO elements in it such as open worlds that are always populated by other players, and entering instances will automatically put you into groups. Gaining rest experience is even present, meaning logging off will cause you to gain bonus experience the next time that you decide to play.

Options in general are lacking, there is only two sliders that affect the graphical quality of Marvel Heroes and the gameplay options are bare when it comes to this type of game. However, the game surprisingly looks better than you would first imagine, and it even runs amazingly well at max settings. Especially when you’re one of the larger heroes like Thing and the Hulk, footsteps can be heard when walking on metalic floors. Your currently selected hero will often make comments about the current story situation while also making comments about other heroes that they may come across.

Even though there is a wide selection of heroes that you can choose from, each have a small number of abilities and passives that you can put points into. Not only that, but you will unlock upgraded versions of already available skills that are completely better, further limiting the number of combat options available to you. To make matters even worse, there is a limited amount of space to put your abilities on the hotbar so you will have to be careful which ones you want to use. The game feels like it is designed around experience boosts being mandatory, since when you finally finish the game you will have been fighting enemies a lot stronger than you and when you start doing the dailies, you will be even more so under leveled to do anything useful apart from dieing. Storage space is very limited for the extra loot and crafting materials that you will procure while playing, and it costs 3 to 5 dollars to buy an extra slot that is specifically designed for certain items, costing well over 50 dollars if you want it all. Non boss enemies that you encounter are all very plain and don’t do much from simply attacking you, and even the stronger enhanced enemies rarely have special properties and are just simply stronger. With the amount of stats and equipment involved in Marvel Heroes, you actually don’t see numbers appear during combat, or even the levels of enemies. This makes it hard to determine whether you’re in the right spot or not, and whether your abilities are even doing any kind of damage.

Most of the game is very easy, until you get to the later areas when you start to level slower. The starter hero that you pick will also affect the difficulty of the game, long ranged power users will die a lot faster than the heavy melee users. Since other people will automatically join when you enter an instance, even if you’re weaker or under leveled they will take some of the weight off of your back. Everything from the wide open areas to the villain dungeons can be completed very quickly. The only thing that may possibly be too long for you is the final mission of the story, but even then it is fast and you should easily be able to plan for it. If you are short on time, it is easy to jump and accomplish anything that you are currently doing.

Until later in the game, you won’t run into any difficulty. Each hero playing differently will also affect your ability to find a challenge, since Thing can pretty much survive any onslaught when playing solo. The dailies after beating the story puts you against very strong enemies and will be challenging for you for a while until you get stronger. With tons of heroes to find and play through the game with, you will undoubtedly have a long lasting game on your hands. Even so, the fact that heroes are expensive and very rare to drop, anyone wanting a game to have a lot to accomplish in will spend more time and money unlocking that ability to do so rather than actually doing it.

Marvel Heroes is free to play along with an in game store with various items and three starter packs available through Steam. The in game store has a variety of heroes, costumes, and miscellaneous consumables to improve your game experience. Special currency called G is required to buy anything, at a rate of 1 dollar per 100 G’s. Heroes will range from 6 dollars to 20 dollars worth of G, while costumes are generally 10 or more dollars. The consumables are experience and loot drop boosts, as well as an item to reset your skill points. Steam packs range from 80 to 85 dollars. Each comes with a different set of 4 heroes, 8 costumes, and 10 Fortune Cards which can be consumed to turn into a variety of other consumable items.

Everything in Marvel Heroes feels VERY overpriced for what you get. Boosts only last an hour at a time and they even encourage you to use up to 5 at a time in order to double the effect. Wanting to collect the heroes will set you back hundreds of dollars, especially if you want the costumes as well. If anything, you should only plan on buying one hero and maybe a costume, and ignore everything else in the game.

If you don’t care about buying anything, Marvel Heroes is a worthy game to experience at least one time through if you enjoy classic super hero comics and stories.

Take On Mars Review

Take On Mars is a planet exploration simulation game developed by Bohemia Interactive. There are two types of vehicles in Take On Mars, rovers and landers. Landers are stationary platforms that have the most tools and instruments, while being able to completely spin their platform in a full circle. Rovers are very slow moving vehicles with six wheels, with less options for equipment but being able to move makes up for that. All vehicles come equipped with different types of surveying tools and cameras, night vision and lights, and solar panels to make sure that they don’t run out of power. It is possible to either edit already exisiting rovers and landers, or completely make one on your own where you can choose all the contraptions that will be on it.

Clicking on the Mars map will bring up locations where you can currently send vehicles to scout out and test the martian surface. When you click on a mission, you can select which vehicle you want to send down as well as seeing all of the objectives that need to be completed during it. Upon deployment, you will be watching your rover or lander descending through the atmosphere of Mars, which can take around 5 minutes if you are trying to land a rover. Completing missions will earn you money in which you can use to unlock new areas to deploy to, and being able to send down better and more effective landers and rovers.

There are only a few objectives that can be done during Take On Mars, and hopefully more get added or the game will get old quick. The simplest goal is to just simply go to a certain point, which is actually a starting point for the actual goals. Taking pictures is the most common task to complete, which just requires you to go into camera mode and take pictures of landmarks when the UI turns green. Taking samples is the other big main task, and there are different types and ways to do it. Landers will have probes that you lower from underneath them into the ground, allowing you to take samples of the ground around there. There will be atmosphere and radiation readings that you can take from the air, with sensors on top of your rover or lander. Driving up to certain rocks in your rover will also allow you to sample them.

It is easily noticeable that they made a realistic version of mars for you explore. If you select real time as an option, it will be dark on Mars the same time it is dark in real life. This can make the game hard since your rovers won’t be able to gain power from their solar panels if you play at night time.

There is an editor present in the game that allows you to create custom scenarios to play in. You can’t change the landscape of Mars for obvious reasons, but you can designate areas that need to be scanned or have pictures taken of. Hopefully this tool will eventually allow us to do more than just place a waypoint for a soil scan.

A large amount of options, and ones that you never see in other games, are available in Take On Mars. You can choose to use a joystick instead of the usual mouse and keyboard, and change the units of measurements from imperial and metric. All other types of options exist such as changing graphic settings, volume sliders, and the ability to rebind all of your keys. Graphics are simple but not ugly, and even if they were amazing graphics it wouldn’t add anything since all there is to see is the surface of Mars, which is just a lot of red rock to begin with. It isn’t very well optimized at max settings, since it runs very slow even though you don’t see much detail that would cause that to happen. There isn’t a whole lot of sound in the game other than your rover being deployed, cameras moving, and your rover moving around. Music is perfect, since it is the type that gives you the sense of being on a desolate planet.

Other than maybe figuring out what buttons do what, you won’t run into any kind of difficulty. Objectives in missions require no skill, they just need you to reach certain spots and take samples or pictures of certain objects. Other than a somewhat lengthy landing period for rovers and long distances between major goals, nothing in Take On Mars takes a long time to do. You can leave at any time and it will automatically save.

There is nothing that would make you say Take On Mars is only for hardcore players, though there are some elements that make the game somewhat hard. If you don’t time it correctly, you may be playing on mars while it is night time, causing your vehicles to not gain power from solar panels and will force you to play at a different time of day. Selecting the realistic time option will cause you to not be able to skip ahead in time to circumvent the night time issues. Other than basic mission progress and unlocking higher tech vehicles, there isn’t much currently to do aside from the main missions. There are a few optional missions to do that are near the major missions, but they aren’t anything special.

Take On Mars currently costs 13 dollars, but may increase in price as time goes on like most other early access games. Once again, compared to a lot of other early access games this one has actual content, and not 30 minutes of gameplay that a lot of them seem to have. If you are looking for a game that is more about exploration and simulation, and not actual gameplay mechanics, it is worth the money. Even if you are only somewhat interested and still not sure, simply supporting the game by buying it will ensure that better and more features will be added.

Space Engineers Review

Space engineers is a space sandbox game developed by Keen Software House. The engineer character that you play as in Space Engineers can’t die and can move around in different ways. He can turn on his jet pack that will let you move around in every direction to help you in building your contraptions. If you have a gravity system set up, you can turn the pack off and walk around on your creations.

Building your ships and stations is as simple as selecting the type of block of module of your choice and placing it on already existing blocks. There are simple cubes, curved ramps, catwalks, and doors when it comes to simply building an object. When it comes time to making an actual ship, there are lots of modules to add such as thrusters, reactors, lights, gyroscopes, cockpits, landing gear, guns, rockets, etc. It is also possible to change the color of everything that you build, instead of just having boring looking gray ships floating around everywhere.

Ships of all shapes and sizes are possible to make in Space Engineers. As long as you have thrusters, reactors, gyroscopes, landing gear, gravity generators, and a cockpit, doesn’t matter what additional shapes you add to your ship, it will fly as long as the required modules are present. Small and large ships are the current two sizes of ships that you can make, and each have slight differences in how the modules look on them, such as the small cockpit being an actual enclosure and the large cockpit simply being a chair and screen that you would expect to be inside of a starship.

Everything from chunks of rock floating out in space and the ships or stations that you build are all fully destructible. The only way to currently show off this destruction is by flying ships into another floating objects, since weapons are currently disabled until later. Objects won’t just simply explode and disappear, they can also crumple and become disfigured, and loose pieces of material will float off into space.

It is possible to share every ship that you create with other players in the Steam Workshop, as well as downloading what other players have also made. This will allow even the least creative players to have a great time with the game. There aren’t any current large plans for Space Engineers, but in general you can expect weapons to start working, multiplayer servers, more modes other than creative, and basic improvements on the game all around.

There are a fair amount of options that you can customize such as rebinding all keys, changing the field of view, and the basics such as volume and graphical quality. The graphics themselves are fairly good and they don’t need to be much better to enjoy the game. In terms of sound, there is so far just one song for you to listen to currently.

Space Engineers is 15 dollars with no other optional options to purchase, like bundles or founder packs. If you have enjoyed other sandbox games such as Minecraft or Starforge Alpha, Space Engineers is another game worth buying.

Kenshi Review

Kenshi is an open world sandbox strategy rpg game developed by Lo-Fi Games. Starting a new game lets you choose a beginning which will determine how you start out in the game. Each beginning will tell you the general difficulty of it, how much money you get, and a general description of what exactly your situation is. The easy beginnings can start you out with a bag full of trading goods that you can sell for good money, or a small squad with lots of building material that lets you build a colony right away. Hard beginnings will start you off with almost nothing such as being wounded and only having a shirt, or even starting with absolutely nothing.

When you choose a beginning you can design your character with a lot of options. You can select your gender, face, hair, and body. Instead of basic sliders that only give you a few options, this designer is very complex and you can edit a lot that you normally wouldn’t be able to.

Other than the main character that you create at the start of your game, it is possible to get additional people to control. Unless you choose the beginning that starts you off with more than just yourself, the only other way to get people to join you is by traveling to other cities and recruiting the people you find instead of pubs and taverns. Most are just basic people with no skills, but a few more expensive ones are specialized in certain areas like combat and labour. You can get up to twenty people in your group through the start and recruitment.

There are many skills for you and your squad to master in Kenshi. General body skills, weapon skills, fighting skills, and miscellaneous work and crafting skills exist for you to train and get better at. All skills are already known to people, they just have to do the certain tasks in order to gain experience in them. Most skills simply increase from being used, while others have special requirements about them like strength and athletics where the amount of weight you’re carrying will determine how fast they are learned.

Every character is able to carry a certain amount of items in their inventory. There is a weight system, but extra weight will simply slow people down instead of just stopping them in their tracks. The inventory also uses a block system instead of simply counting how many items you have, which means you cant carry a lot of big items even if they don’t weight much. It is possible to equip backpacks which will let you stack items and carry a lot more weight, but they will slow you down in combat and make you an easier target.

The most developed part of Kenshi is the ability to settle anywhere away from a city and create your own place to live. Unless you pick the beginning that starts you off with a small squad and lots of building material, it will take you a while before your ready to make your own place. You will be able to build resource gathering areas, houses and buildings, power generation, and lots of objects to put inside like beds and storage. Most stuff that you build must be operated by a person in order for it to function, though better versions will do all the work themselves such as the well.

Building anything is as easy as laying down a blueprint of something that you have researched, and anyone that you instruct to build will applying building materials if they have any on them. Each item takes a different amount of material, and the more it takes the longer it takes to build. Some objects through research can be upgraded instead of rebuilt, which just lets you apply extra material to upgrade it into the next tier.

After you build a research bench, you can start to put new technologies into a queue and have someone in your group research them. A lot of the technologies will be locked and will require better research areas and the previous piece of technology in the group. Most research projects are free, but going into the next overall tier of research will require a money payment.

Each person in your squad can be given permanent jobs so they don’t just idle when their current task has ended. Multiple jobs can be given where they have higher priorities over others. You can have someone create building materials and instantly go into constructing something when a blueprint has been placed.

The world that Kenshi takes place in is a very large and vast desert that takes a long time to travel across. While out traveling you can run into many different groups of people from patrols, bandits, and trading caravans. It is actually a persistent world that means all people will spawn at the creation of your game, so killing bandits or letting cities die means that they won’t come back.

Spread all over the vast desert landscape there are a bunch of cities and outposts that you can explore. Inside there are a bunch of shops that you buy stuff from, police stations to drop off bounties, and people to recruit. There are guards at all entrances to cities and will aggressively defend the city against bandits and other factions that they don’t like.

A variety of shops and stores exist in the cities around the land of Kenshi. While wandering around a city, some buildings will have a sign on them letting you know which kind of items they sell. Talking to the shop owner will let you see the items that they are currently selling and you can sell any items that you have as long as there’s enough room and they have enough money. Equipment has set prices that never change, but trade goods such as food, materials, and medical supplies can range in price a fair amount. This can allow you to become a trader who buys low and sells high between the different cities and outposts.

All of the major cities and bandit groups belong to their own factions that determines who they are hostile towards. You and your squad of people belong to your own faction which you can name and everything. It is easy to decrease your reputation with anyone just by attacking them, but it is rather hard to increase your reputation, such as healing people with medkits.

Unless you’re on the bad side of a bigger faction, most of the enemies that you run into will be dust and hungry bandits, as well as cannibals. Most of the time you will run into these groups when you’re traveling between cities or seeing them trying to attack a city. If you decide to settle down and make your own village, there will be different interactions with these groups. The dust bandits will try to extort “protection” money from you, hungry bandits will just simply attack and try to steal your goods, and cannibals will try to capture you and take you back to their camps. Some bandit leaders will actually have a bounty on them, so you can carry them to a local police station and you can get a good amount of money for them.

Currently in Kenshi combat is limited to melee combat only with different types of swords like sabres and katanas. Combat happens in real time and each participant will take turns with attacking and blocking attacks. Even if someone is surrounded by combatants, only one or two at a time will actually attack though the target will often change their focus often.

Instead of just a simple health bar, everyone has health for multiple body parts such as limbs, chest, and head. People will fight until one of their body parts takes too much damage which will then cause them to get knocked out. It is actually fairly hard for people to just die, as they will have to take a lot of damage and not get medical attention from anyone. Even if you. This will make it look odd when you see bandits stand up after a big battle and run away when you think you killed them.

The game is somewhat functional right now, but there is a ton more content and fixes that will be coming to the game in the future. Some of the bigger updates that you can expect to see are more interactions with the faction system, better nighttime, ranged combat, a much bigger map, food and water system, wildlife, and different races. Unfortunately, even though it would seem like a good idea for the game, multiplayer will most likely never be implemented into the game, officially at least.

There are a bunch of options for you to adjust, especially when it comes to how far away you want the graphics to render, as well as being able to rebind all keys. A very important option of importing your squad and buildings lets you reset the world that you are in, for when populations dwindle. The graphics aren’t the best at the moment, but it is still early and most of what is on your screen is just miles of empty desert. Most actions have sound effects and there is a song to listen to which fits the desert theme, but there isn’t any kind of voices currently in the game.

Kenshi is currently 20 dollars with no other bundles or optional purchases available. Even though the game is very bare and clearly has lots more work to be done, it is still a lot of fun if you plan of building your own settlement. Still though, it is most likely still too early in development for most people and is only worth buying if you think the settlement part of the game looks interesting to you, since everything else is still very basic.

Paranautical Activity Review

Before you can jump into Paranautical Activity, you must first choose a class to play as. Each class determines what weapon you will start out with, how many bombs you get, and your beginning stats. Health and movement speed are first determined by your class, and damage and fire rate are just the stats of your starting weapon. Finding different guns during gameplay and picking up upgrades can all completely change how your character will act as you progress through the floors. You might start out as the really fast sickle thrower, but later down the line you might become the slow moving rocket launcher guy.

Each class has its own starting weapon, as well as weapons only available by finding them from playing the game. You can find replacement guns from either defeating bosses or buying them in a gift shop. Most weapons are just guns that shoot projectiles in different ways, such as the crossbow, shotgun, and minigun. More unique weapons come in the form of a sickle that acts like a boomerang and can hit enemies multiple times. Explosive weapons such as a grenade and rocket launchers also exist. No matter what weapon or class you are, everyone can use bombs which are consumable items that can be thrown to cause tons of damage.

There are many different shapes and sizes of enemies in Paranautical Activity, each with their own unique qualities. Most enemies just differ in how much health they have and how they shoot projectiles at you, though there are some unique ones. Evil butterflies will float in the air while shooting two homing projectiles at you, and there are ninjas that will either melee you or throw stars at you, while even becoming invisible to attack you.

All enemies and bosses will drop basic loot when they are killed. Coins will be the most common item to acquire, and it will let you buy items in the gift shops. Health and armor drops will restore one point in their respective attribute. Bombs don’t drop very often and it is a good idea to conserve them.

Instead of just basic loot, you will sometimes acquire upgrades that will affect your stats in different ways. You will always get a guaranteed upgrade after defeating a boss, and gift shops located on every floor will allow you to buy them as well. Some upgrades only effect one stat, while others will cause many to get stronger while causing one additional one to actually become weaker, so you have to be careful.

You will always encounter two bosses on a floor, though only one is required to advance to the next floor. There are many different bosses in Paranautical Activity, and it is always random which ones you will run into. For the most part, all bosses are the same in the sense that they are a large monster that shoots projectiles at you, but some are more unique such as Hanz who will chase you with a chainsaw, summon chainsaws from the floor, and sometimes shoot at you as well.

There are a few different types of rooms that you will run across in Paranautical Activity. Normal rooms will have obstacles strewn through them with just spawn a random assortment of enemies in them and just require you to kill them all in order to unlock the doors to surrounding rooms. Gift Shop rooms allow you to purchase randomly chosen items with the money that you have collected. Boss and elevator rooms both require you to defeat a random boss, but the simple boss room just rewards you with a random item after being successful, and the elevator rooms will always reward you with an item specific to the boss you just defeated.

Each floor will always have the same guaranteed enemies and hazards, but the order that you encounter them in will always be random. Progressing to lower floors will cause you to fight different and stronger enemies, while making the rooms themselves more dangerous to be in, such as large pools of lava.

Other than the basic options being in place, such as volume sliders and some graphical choices, a very important option of changing the Field of View is available. The graphics themselves are so far just basic voxel models with some lighting. The menus have no music or sound at all currently, though when you’re playing the game you will be listening to some loud metal music.

Some classes are easier than others, but in general Paranautical Activity is most likely too hard of a game for anyone that wants to simply sit down and play a game for fun. There is no way to save your progress and if you are doing well, you can expect to have to sit down for up to an hour if you are wanting to get far into the game.

With the combined quickness of old school FPS games with rogue-like qualities, everyone that wants a fast and challenging game will love Paranautical Activity. There is currently nothing at all to collect and unlock in Paranautical Activity, and you have to completely start over every time that you want to play the game.

Paranautical Activity currently costs 10 dollars. It is in a playable state, though it is obvious that it still needs a lot of work done on it. If you don’t mind a rough game with FPS and rogue-like qualities, it is still worth trying out.

Kinetic Void Review

Kinetic Void is a sand box space simulator developed by Badland Studio. The ship customization is perhaps fairly polished. The possible shapes of your ship is virtually limitless, since it is more about making the shape and less about making it aerodynamic and all that. There are hundreds of modules that you can piece together to make your ship, each coming in 5 different sizes. After building your ship, you can customize each piece of it to determine its role, such as giving a cargo piece the ability to supply power for your ship, and engine pieces the ability to provide thrust. When you’re all done, you can hit the launch button to be sent out to space and test out how fast it goes and whether or not the engines even work. You can test out aligning to other space stations and warping there with your microwarp drive. Inside of stations you can customize your ship even further as well as buying additional parts to use. Other than that, there isn’t any other real gameplay currently available in Kinetic Void.

The universe that you play in is randomly generated, and you can choose how many sectors and factions are in it. You will start out neutral, and depending on how you play will determine who will like you down the road.

You and everyone else that plays Kinetic Void can upload their ship creations to the Steam Workshop to share them with everyone else. Even if you aren’t the most creative type, this will allow you to play with some very nice ships.

In the future, Kinetic Void plans to add interactions with other ships and factions such as trading and combat. You will be able to mine asteroids and salvage debris. Additional ship parts and weapons will of course be updated in. Kinetic Void looks like it could possibly be a deep game, since there is so much that you can customize on your ship, even including managing how many crew members you have. Basically, everything that you can imagine being in a space sand box will most likely get put in.

Kinetic Void currently costs 20 dollars on Steam or its official website. At this point, it is hard to justify the money because the current features are barely there and there are other games that have the same feeling that are already either complete or almost complete. Only buy Kinetic Void if you like supporting indie games or if you believe it will shape up to be a great title, otherwise it just isn’t really worth buying at this point.

Wasteland 2 Review

Wasteland 2 is a tactical role playing game developed by InXile Entertainment. You can choose exactly who will be in your party while playing the game and is possibly your most important decision that you make in the whole game. There are a bunch of premade characters that you can add and you can even edit these to your liking, but the best way to make your party is to custom make each character. When you decide to create someone, you can choose the attributes, skills, dossier, and their appearance. Attributes are passive bonuses that affect each character, such as strength letting you carry more and doing more damage in melee. Although you can only begin the game with a max party size of four people, it is possible through your travels to pick up additional people. The only downside to this is that optional party members won’t always let you control them in combat and will sometimes automatically take their turn for you.

There are many skills that you can teach to your party members in Wasteland 2, and there are three general categories that they belong to. Each character begins the game with a small amount of points that you can allocate, and you can earn more as your characters level up through experience. Weapon skills exist for each type of weapon that you can find, such as blades, hand guns, and energy weapons. Each skill does roughly the same thing, increasing the accuracy that the character has with that type of weapon. Usable skills can be learned to allow you to use them in the world, such as picking locks, healing others, and taking apart guns for parts. Passive skills will always affect the character that has learned them, such as bartering for lower prices and evading enemy attacks in battle.

When you are traveling from one location to another you will be moving across a world map. There will also be an actual map that you can look at at the same time, which will have all the areas that you have been told about marked on it. For the most part, nothing on the world map will be discovered for you yet and you must walk around for different areas to pop up. Traveling on the map will use up water in your canteens, which will need to get refilled at oases that you discover on the map or filled up at different settlements you enter. It is possible for random encounters to happen when traveling on the map, most of which are just raider encounters though you can sometimes run into friendly traders. Going from point to point is just linear traveling, as there will be mountains and hills that you can’t cross and there will be locations that are filled with radiation, which is dangerous unless you can get geared up with radiation suits.

Entering one of the areas on the map will put you into direct control of your party so you can explore the location. Within these settlements there will be people to talk to, enemies to fight, and items to loot. Most of the time you will be controlling your whole party at once, having them all run around together, though there are movement options that let you either run or walk and you can choose to control your whole party or just one person.

Within the levels that you will be playing in, it is a good idea to keep an eye on everything around you. There will be lots of areas for you to discover, and the levels are far from being linear. Doors will need lockpicking, safes will need cracking, and many other interactions that require the right skills. If you want to survive the wasteland, finding supplies in all the optional areas is very important.

Other than your party, you will encounter many types of people out on your journey that you can interact with. When you are talking to someone, their text will highlight a bunch of keywords and you are able to select those keywords to talk about something relevant to them. If your characters have the right skills leveled up, special choices in conversations can pop up and they can drastically change the outcome of the situation or get more information out of someone. Some people are vendors, and you can buy and sell items using scrap as a currency, which you can find out in the world.

Whether you’re deciding who to help first, talking to someone, or choosing whether or not to kill someone, there are many choices and outcomes that you will face in Wasteland 2. Very early on in the game you have the opportunity to help out two different locations, and it is only possible to save one of them per play through the game. When you go to visit the other location after saving the one you chose, it is unrecognizable and there is no one left to save. Depending on the skills that are on your party, there are choices you can make when talking to certain people which will determine what will happen, such as avoiding confrontation with a bunch of raiders, or getting more information out of someone. Even if someone is friendly, it is entirely possible to attack and kill any character that you run into, which can have a large impact on the game since what happens if you kill the only person with a cure to a disease that is affecting you?

There are explosives, one and two handed guns, and melee weapons to choose from to equip your party with. Each type of weapon has its own skill that goes along with it, which in general will increase your accuracy with it in combat. The distance from enemies, as well as the angle at which you attack them from, will all determine your accuracy and how much damage will be done. All ranged weapons will require you to find and equip the character with the right type of ammo. Each character can hold two weapons of any kind.

All combat is turn based on an isometric playing field. Unless you encounter raiders on the world map, combat takes place directly in the world where you are at, instead of being transported to a special combat only area. Your party and the enemies will all take turns moving around in and out of cover, and using their melee and ranged weapons. Each character has a certain amount of action points that they can use per turn, and unlike a lot of turn based games, you can still move even after attacking or doing another type of action. Combat experience earned will be given to your party after combat has ended, and if someone was unconscious at the end they won’t receive any from that battle. If you’re in a level, combat will only start when you are in the sight of an enemy, and because of this it is actually possible to kill enemies before combat even starts. When one of your party members lose all of their health, they will simply fall unconscious, but if they take a massive hit, they will fall and start to bleed out can possibly permanently die.

Most loot comes from defeating enemies, though a lot of it also comes from containers and safes that you find through exploration. The loot that you find on bodies is relative to what it is, such as finding guns and bullets on raiders, and different parts of insect body parts on mutated bugs. Locked and unlocked containers contain a lot of random items in them, such as medical blood packs and scrap that is used as money in the world.

They say that this early access build of Wasteland 2 is only 30% of the whole game, and even at that low amount there is a lot of content currently available. The basic mechanics are already in place so future updates will mainly just be about additional levels, NPCs, items, and choices to make.

There is a good amount of options for you to customize your experience of Wasteland 2. All keys are completely rebindable, there are graphical and volume sliders, as well as a bunch of gameplay options such as difficulty and combat speed. Graphical quality in terms of the world are fairly good, though when it comes to character models they look like they were made a decade ago. There is a lot of music that you will run into depending on where you are and whether you’re in combat or not, and sound effects can be heard from everything that you and the world does.

It gives you lots of choices to choose from in terms of skills that you can have in your party, but half of the skills are fairly useless early on in the game and can make your start of the game harder. Even after ten hours of play, not one area has been encountered that needed the alarm disable skill, which means anyone who started with that skill would have wasted their points. They need to include more options and encounters to use skills of all types if they don’t want people to feel like they are gimped for the first 20 hours of game play.

Except for possibly the combat, everything else in Wasteland 2 is easy since it just requires exploration and having the correct skills. There is a difficulty setting for when combat gets tough, but it currently doesn’t seem to actually affect anything as of right now. Unless you’re in the middle of combat, you can save the game at any time, allowing you to play the game however long you want at intervals.

There is a difficulty setting, but so far it doesn’t seem to actually affect much if anything, especially combat. Whether or not the game feels hardcore is more about what skills you choose to have present on your characters, since they will all determine what you can do while playing. There is a lot of content in Wasteland 2 for you to complete, and the fact that you can easily play the game over many times without playing it the same way will give anyone a long lasting game to enjoy.

Wasteland currently costs 60 dollars. If you do buy the game you will also get a copy of the first wasteland, digital music, digital art, and digital novellas. Even though the game is mostly feature-complete in terms of gameplay and areas to explore, it would still be hard to say that the game is worth 60 dollars in its current form, especially since the complete version will have a lot more polish and at a lower price. If you are a big fan of the game and the type of gameplay and have been following its development for some time, then it might be worth buying. Whatever the case, whether you buy the game at 30 or 60 dollars, you can easily expect to get lots of enjoyment out of it.

Panzar Review

There are eight classes for you to choose from in Panzar and every two classes belongs to a race as well. Each class is different not in the abilities that they have available, but also their attributes such as health and mana, attack and movement speed, and damage. The orcs will be playing as the berserker and tank, which both are sturdy classes wielding large weapons. Demonic men play the paladin and inquistor classes, where one will be doing all the healing and the other tries to assassinate others while invisible. Crafty little dwarves will play as the sapper and gunner, who will use their inventions and gadgets to turn the tides of battle in their favor. Female elves play as the spell casters of frost witch and sister of flame, and they can either freeze their enemies solid or burn them to a crisp.

While you are not currently involved in a match, there are a few things you can look at to make you stronger for the next battle. The shop and forge will allow you to acquire items for your character whether you want to buy them with money or craft them from the resources you earn from battle. Altar is where you can use the skill points you have acquired from battle to unlock more abilities, or spend crystals to reset your skills. In the fitting room you can change the appearance of your equipment or character, by either applying dyes to your clothes or changing your facial features such as beards.

Each class has access to melee and ranged basic attacks, as well as special abilities only available to them. You will be able to use more abilities in battle each time you level up, which gives you a skill point to unlock a skill that you want. Abilities require mana to be used most of the time, which prevents you from using them continuously over and over.

All game modes of Panzar revolve around control points of some kind. Most of the time you are just required to stand on and capture a single point while preventing the other team from doing the same thing. Another time you will be either defending or attack a single point for the entire round, depending on which team you are on.

The basic options exist for you to change, such as graphical quality, volume, and control settings. Graphics seem a little outdated, though the animation quality is rather good, especially when the dwarves are doing their attacks. Sound could have been better, music and everything exists in the game but sound effects from fighting especially is non existent at times, and it is hard to tell if people are actually hitting each other with their weapons or not.

It is not possible to choose the game mode or map that you want to play on, as it is completely random. This can get tiresome when you get unlucky and have to play the same maps over and over. The game just has an overall unpolished and even unbalanced feeling to it. One moment you are in the middle of a fight, and the next they just chug a potion and they are already fully healed.

Other than simply learning to play the class that your character is, there isn’t much complexity to Panzar for you to worry about learning. Most matches will last around 10 minutes, but some modes can possibly last 20 minutes, so you should be able to enjoy the game if you aren’t wanting to sit for long periods of time.

There aren’t many advanced strategies for you to learn, though when you learn more abilities through skill points, the amount of options at your disposal during combat increases. Other than simply leveling up every class, there isn’t much in the way of unlocking stuff. Panzar can last any amount of time for you really, since it just depends on how long you are willing to play the game.

Panzar is free to play with optional ways to pay real money for in game perks. The first thing you need to do is purchase crystals, which cost about a dollar for twenty of them. With these crystals, you can rename your characters, level up your characters, purchase equipment, and convert them into gold. There is also a premium membership that you can purchase that will double everything that you earn when you complete a match. With how everything works, it is possible to completely level up a character and outfit with with the best possible gear if you have enough money, but this just isn’t worth it.

Even though Panzar isn’t the best or most polished arena game out there, the fact that it is free means that it wouldn’t hurt to try it is you are interested. If you are looking to spend money on anything and plan on playing for a while, the premium membership is the best course of action if you’re wanting to spend real money.

Prime World Review

Prime World is a free to play MOBA developed by Nival. There are a total of 32 heroes for you to choose from, along with 5 roles that they all correspond to. Supports aren’t very strong but have very powerful abilities that can help their team. Protectors have a lot of health and defense and will try to get the enemy to attack them instead of their own team. Vanguards are also very sturdy, but they focus more so on shutting down key targets while staying alive. Slayers are very strong offensively but have to be smart when they go in for the kill. Fighters can easily stay in combat and will be doing the most damage to the other team.

Two factions exist within Prime World, the Imperium and Keepers. The heroes available on each side are exactly the same except for what they are called and what they look like, though there are one or two on each side that actually do slightly differ from one another. They will always play on the same side of the map and will always be matched against each other.

There is a single player aspect to Prime World that lets you manage your castle. You can build different buildings and establishments in your castle that will let you gather resources, rest your heroes from battle, and earn you silver over time. The castle is also where you manage all of your heroes and lets you set up battles or randomly join other people in one. There will also be quests that you can complete while you are at your castle, and these generally just require you to either build certain buildings or win a certain number of games, but sometimes they will also send you to solo maps that have a story line in them.

Every hero has a talent area that lets you customize many aspects of them. Their default abilities that define their role can’t be changed, but everything else from passive stats to additional abilities can be. Earning Prime during battle, which is your currency and experience, lets you apply it to your talent window to grant you these talents to your hero. Talents also have a power level, which will increase all your stats according to how much power the talent is worth. In a way, you can think of the talents as the items you would buy your hero in other MOBAs, since they passive stats and extra abilities.

Other than the basic 5V5 map that you see in most MOBA games, there are a few other modes that you can play as well. Dragonwald involves a dragon in the middle of the map that you must defeat and bring the item that it drops to your enemy’s base. Native land is a lot like the standard mode, except the territory that you own will become even more beneficial to you when you are on it.

The main mode that you will be playing is borderlands, which incorporates the three lane map with 5 players on each side. Each lane will have towers in them with an important building behind the last one which will make the creeps stronger when destroyed. Jungles exist on each side of the river which have enemies in them for you to kill when they are either the best option or you play a hero that can tackle them from the beginning. The river will have two runes available in it at times that you can pick up, boosting you in different ways such as faster movement or stronger attacks. Winning in this mode just requires you to destroy the main building in the other team’s base.

In the standard 5V5 map, there is a minigame that you can play that will allow you to create a variety of scrolls that you can send out to your team, such as a healing one. This minigame is very similar to the ZUMA game where you shoot colored balls onto a conveyor belt of colored balls while trying to match colors to get rid of them. Every time you create a scroll, the game becomes harder and you will start to get special abilities to help you with beating them.

Throughout the maps there will be flags to capture that will grant you territory for your team that will come up to that flag. Both teams will have their own territory and there will also be a neutral zone between them. In normal games, territory will cause some of your abilities to be stronger or act differently, and your teleport ability can only transport you to areas that you own. One game mode focuses heavily on territory, where you will gain general stats from simply being on your own land.

Compared to League of Legends and Dota 2, Prime World is a whole lot simpler than both in many ways. There is no need to worry about buying large items in stores, since this is covered through the talent system.

The options menu is very basic, and the graphical settings are just simply low, medium, and high. There is a way to change key settings though, which is always one of the most important settings. Graphics themselves are basic and seem kind of dated, but this type of game isn’t hindered by that fact. There are a few songs in the game and each hero has their own lines to say at times, but they aren’t varied enough and you will hear the same ones a fair amount.

The whole matchmaking system in general could be a whole lot better. Since you choose your hero before even going in to battle, it makes it impossible to coordinate with your team with who is going to play what heroes, and the fact that multiples of the same hero can be on the same team can make for some odd team combinations.

Since you have to choose a faction to play as at the beginning, this in a way divides the community in half and causes a fair amount of problems. There is a way to play against your own faction if there is an oversupply of them, but this requires players to have this option enabled in their settings. Each faction will always play on the same side of the map, and since these maps and camera angles aren’t created equally, this will always mean one faction has the same advantages and disadvantages every round.

If you love the general idea behind MOBAs but have never liked the amount of information you need to learn, Prime World is a good alternative for you. It is a lot simpler than the majority of MOBAs out there. The length of games in Prime World generally last 20-30 minutes, with the few that can be a lot shorter or longer.

Compared to other MOBAs, Prime World has almost no advanced tactics that you can pull off other than simply using your hero correctly. It is a lot simpler in general in all areas, so any hardcore players might want to look elsewhere. There are individual hero levels, your overall levels, and many different types of talents available that will keep you occupied with the game for a long time.

Prime World is free to play with real money purchases in game. You will need to first buy gold for money, which costs about a dollar for 25 gold, and if you buy larger amounts you will receive extra gold as a bonus. Most of everything can be bought for silver that is earned in game, but convenience and outfit items will always require gold to be bought.

The early heroes that you can unlock can’t be bought with gold since they have a cheap silver price tag, but later heroes can range from 4 to 20 dollars. Costumes that you can acquire for heroes can range from just over a dollar to 12 dollars.

Golden age is somewhat of a subscription package that you can buy that will double everything that you earn and you will no longer obtain common talents after being victorious in battle. You can buy 3 days worth for 2 dollars, a week’s worth for 4 dollars, and a whole month’s worth for 12 dollars worth of gold.

There are other miscellaneous purchases that can be made, such as pets that can be put into your castle that will give bonuses permanently all around, and to quickly recharge your heroes so you can get them back into battle.

Warframe Review

Warframe is a free to play third person shooter online 4 player co-op that is currently in open beta available on Steam. You and 3 others will help each other on randomly generated levels by killing enemies and completing the objectives, which range from collecting or destroying things, rescuing or capturing people, or assassinating important npcs as well as ongoing defense missions. Completing levels earn you experience for your equipment, money to buy stuff, and shows you all the mods that you collected throughout the level, as well as any special items that you might have earned.

There are no classes in Warframe, just the different Warframes that you can equip. By owning more than one Warframe, you can switch between them whenever you want when out of levels. This means that you can eventually own every Warframe, and not be limited to the first one you pick at the beginning, unlike most games that involve classes. The same thing applies to weapons, there are tons of guns and melee items. Just like Warframes, you level up each individual weapon to make them stronger. Warframes have a wide variety of abilities, such as being able to turn invincible for a set amount of time to fully healing your entire team! You can equip 3 weapons, which are your rifle, pistol, and melee.

Mods will drop on levels and with them you can customize all of your equipment the way that you want. Each level that you have earned on a piece of equipment gives you a point, which you can use to equip a mod on it. If you have a level 5 mod, your equipment needs to be at least level 5 to put it on. Mods range from increasing damage, increasing health, increasing other stats, etc… all the way to allowing your Warframes to use their 4 abilities during games. Over time you will accumulate tons of mods, and luckily you are able to combine them through fusion to make them stronger, which in turn increases the amount of equipment points they use up.

There isn’t too much of an endgame, other than trying to get all the different kinds of Warframes and Weapons. Level wise, the last area has fairly strong enemies and the randomly generated alert missions can sometimes let you fight against the earlier bosses at max level.

Warframe has a surprisingly small install size of around 1.5 GB, most likely thanks to the fact that all levels are randomly generated. Graphics are fairly nice and runs well on lower end computers, as long as you turn some settings down. Just be sure to lower or disable bloom and other similar effects since they tend to make you go blind when in the heat of battle. The options menu has everything thing that you would want in a computer game, from graphical options to volume sliders, to FOV slider to fully rebindable keys, there isn’t much of anything to complain about.

Overall, the only negatives that the game has are that it can take a LONG time to collect everything that is available in the game without buying anything with real money, and even if you did want to buy stuff that simply makes the game shorter. The female announcer that you hear all the time during games can get annoying at times, since she repeats and says things that you’ve already heard a million times already, though for the most part the info that she relays to you can help you survive especially when a big enemy force is on their way to counter you.

For the most part, if you are with 3 other people every level is pretty easy. Even if it ever feels like the game is getting too hard, you can always return to older levels to get experience and additional mods to make yourself stronger. Warframe levels generally last 10 to 20 minutes, so anyone that wants to jump in and do a few quick games easily can. Defense missions are probably the only levels that could last longer because they technically can’t end.

Warframe can be played alone easily, as well as using weaker equipment, for people that like a challenge. You will be the only target for the enemies and defense missions are easy to get overwhelmed on if you are alone. There are also a few bosses in the game that require more than just pointing and shooting, which will give some people the most enjoyment. There are a fair amount of things in Warframe to unlock and collect, but it all pretty much just comes down to farming and grinding. You can collect all the warframes from the different bosses but you only get the blueprints and you will have to make them yourself later on. Unless you’re rich, anyone with a lot of time can easily collect every item in the game.

Warframe is free, although there are a number of items that you can buy with real money to enhance your playing experience. It is by no means a pay to win game because there isn’t any PVP involved, and even the worst weapons can get a lot of kills with the correct mods . They range from money and experience boosts, colors to customize your characters and weapons with, weapons and different warframes. Sadly, nothing is really worth buying since the weapons and Warframes can cost between 10 and 20 dollars each, and every item that you do buy actually decreases the enjoyment of the game, since the goal of the game is to kill stuff and collect all the different types of equipment. Buying everything just means there is nothing to play towards and getting.