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.

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.

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.

Dead Rising 4 to add fan requested improvements on December 5

The fans have always been an important part of the Dead Rising series. From video Let’s Plays, to cosplayers becoming Frank West, to the players who share all of their feedback, our fans are a big part of what makes working on the series so much fun. All fans have things they’d like to see improved in their favorite games and we’ve been listening to our loyal Dead Rising fan base and have been making improvements to Dead Rising 4 that will result in the game being even better than before.

One important example was with the difficulty level of the game. The Dead Rising series is associated with a high degree of difficulty and many players felt that we let up on that a little too much in Dead Rising 4. Listening to that feedback, the development team at Capcom Vancouver added two harder difficulty modes as a free update to the game the month after launch.

As we began work on the upcoming release of Dead Rising 4: Frank’s Big Package for the PlayStation 4, our team took a look at some of the other reoccurring feedback from our players and got to work. We’re happy to share many of the new improvements that Dead Rising 4 players can look forward to.

Maniacs are human enemies that Frank encounters during the course of his investigation into what’s happening in Willamette. The development team has spent time making these encounters feel more meaningful and rewarding. Maniacs will have new weapons that suit their character and Frank’s reward for defeating a Maniac will be wielding the new weapon. The AI that drives the Maniacs is also being improved to provide players with an even greater challenge.

Some of the Maniacs will also have new Maniac Minions who will attack Frank, making these fights more difficult. Human enemy AI is being improved for all types, making them better at using cover, blocking attacks with shields, and countering players who might rely on a single attack.

While Dead Rising 4 always had human survivors in need of Frank West’s help, the development team is adding six memorable side missions that we’re calling Distress Calls. During Frank’s time in Willamette, he will have the opportunity to answer these Distress Calls and aid a survivor in a newly scripted mission, carrying out a quest for the survivor. Once he’s accomplished the assigned task, Frank will have to protect the survivor from the zombie hordes as they make their way to a safe location.

Each of these six all-new Distress Call missions will give players a unique variation on one of Frank’s outfits as a reward.

The team is also looking at additional ways to improve the overall gameplay experience. These include improved controller responsiveness, faster attack speed, faster zombie horde awareness, more aggressive pursuit, rebalanced weapon distribution, improved zombie AI, mission tuning and more.

All owners of Dead Rising 4 will be receiving these gameplay improvements for free on December 5th along with the new game mode, Capcom Heroes. Dead Rising 4: Frank’s Big Package will be coming to the PlayStation 4 on December 5th and will be including these updates, Capcom Heroes and all previously released game content. It’s an update that’s not only going to give you something new to play in Dead Rising 4, but will also improve your experience playing it.

StarForge Review

Starforge is a multiplayer FPS block building and defense game developed by Codehatch. So far, the main thing that is available to do in Starforge is to defend a structure from enemies, and you are given supplies and guns to make that possible. You will be spending time between waves collecting different types of materials to build walls and turrets, or opening crates to find newer and more powerful guns to use on your enemies.

All of this can also be done in multiplayer with other people, which requires someone to set a server up on their side and everyone else connecting to their IP address, since there currently aren’t any official servers to play on. In general, you could loosely say that the game plays like Minecraft, except for the whole idea of being able to shoot with guns and driving cars. A recent update to the alpha includes a day and night cycle, vehicles, grenades and flashlight, as well as optimizing the game a ton so it will run better even at the highest settings, since before it felt as if it suffered from a major memory leak. Another update has come out, this time introducing the infinite terrain map which will generate a new map that goes on forever every time that you start it up. There are also currently weather effects on this new map.

There isn’t a whole lot in the way of options, and the main ones that you will be able to change are graphics and key bindings through the Unity engine launcher. Even so, you can’t greatly customize the graphics, since you can only select the screen resolution and the actual graphical quality ranges from settings like “fast” and “fantastic”. You are able to select whether you want to play in windowed or full screen mode though.

Eventually StarForge will allow you to mine and transform the terrain, ride in vehicles of different kinds, build and play in space above the planet without loading screens, and a survival mode where you have to explore to gather resources while building a base of operations all the while enemies are trying to kill you. This is just all that is hinted to come, there is sure to be more as the development process goes on.

Starforge is very much in alpha stage, so if you decide to buy it don’t expect there to be a lot of content. It is currently 20 dollars on Steam or the main Starforge website, but when the game is finally released it’s price will double to 40 so it is best to buy now. There is also an option to pay 75 dollars to join the founders club, which comes with a fair amount of exclusive cosmetic options only available to founders, such as unique tilesets, helmet and tools, and your name added into the founder list. So if the game sounds interesting with the few features that are currently available, or if you just want to support the development so all features can eventually be implemented, it is worth buying StarForge.

Gearbox is winding down work on Battleborn, shifting devs to unannounced project

The following statement was released by Gearbox and 2K:

Hello Friends

It’s been a while since I’ve communicated with you directly, so I wanted to take the opportunity to write to you as Battleborn rounds another milestone in its life.

As of this week, there will be no more Battleplans and there is currently no planned content after the Fall Update. Details of any future changes or news will be made on our forums or through social media, so keep your radars on.

Never fear! Battleborn is here to stay. Nothing is changing with Battleborn, and the servers will be up and active for the foreseeable future. We announced the Fall Update for the game at PAX including some new skins, themed around some of your favorite Borderlands characters! That update will also include some updated title art (more full bar titles!) for the more significant challenges in the game, as well as some additional Finisher Boosts and Taunts. Also, there are minor balance changes in that patch.

If you’ve been paying attention to recent news from the Gearbox Panel at PAX West, you’ll have heard that many folks at Gearbox are working on a highly anticipated project. Although I’m sad my time on Battleborn is coming to a close, I’m happy to announce that I will play a significant role on this highly anticipated but unannounced game, and I’m sure you’ll be hearing some from me again in the future regarding Gearbox games.

I’ve been working on Battleborn nearly exclusively since 2012, and in some ways, that work stretches back to 2009 for me. It’s been a long labor of love with many of my good friends at Gearbox, and I’m proud to have shared that journey with you, our community. Your spirit and loyalty have been a constant inspiration to the team at Gearbox.

Also, I want to personally thank you for giving Battleborn a chance, and dipping down into a new universe with us. We make games for you. And many of you have shared with us how much Battleborn has meant to you personally.

It’s always a bittersweet time when transitioning from one project to another, but also offers the opportunity to step back and enjoy the game we created. Keep an eye out for me in game!

For now, Commander Jythri is signing off and taking the first transport back to a wonderful box of surprises.

You are awesome.

For Solus.

Call of Duty: WWII Private Beta Trailer and Details

We’re thrilled to finally share the Call of Duty: WWII Private Multiplayer Beta with you beginning August 25th on PS4. While this Beta is only a small part of the feature-rich Multiplayer experience coming in November, it is a critical test of our core gameplay, our game systems, as well as a stress test of our online infrastructure at scale.

We love the active dialog we have with the Call of Duty community, and value the exchange of ideas and constructive feedback we have with fans. Your feedback will help us finalize features, optimize gameplay balance, and refine the remaining development roadmap to launch. So please explore, rank up, and have fun. Share as much feedback as you can – everything helps. The development team will be playing non-stop, and we’ll be monitoring performance and collecting valuable data around the clock.

As you can imagine, we receive a lot of feedback internally from the development team playing the game, but it’s a different experience when fans around the world play together for the first time. Two of our biggest announcements at E3, Divisions and War Mode, will be live for the first time and we look forward to sharing them with you during the Private Multiplayer Beta.

First, Divisions replaces the Pick 10 Create-a-Class system, and delivers the fantasy of enlisting in one of five iconic fighting groups in the world’s most brutal conflict. This test of the Private Multiplayer Beta will feature an introduction to a portion of the player’s soldier progression and the underlying foundation of Divisions, and we can’t wait to hear your thoughts on it. The final design of this new feature will continue to be fine-tuned as development continues from now through launch.

Also, we’re excited to hear from you after you’ve played Operation Breakout, our first War Mode experience. War, developed in partnership with our friends at Raven Software, is a new way to play Call of Duty Multiplayer in an immersive Allied vs. Axis fight across the war-torn village of St. Lo, France.

Legend of Dungeon Review

Legend of Dungeon is a rogue-like developed by Kitty Loves Robot. There is nothing special about your character that you play, and dying will always cause you to start over as a fresh character. You can choose whether or not you play as male or female, but that is the only thing you can edit other than what is already in the options menu. Gathering experience from defeated enemies will cause you to gain levels, which increases your max health and damage that you do.

There are 26 levels in Legend of Dungeon, each having randomly generated rooms, a set type of enemies, and the chance of treasure and boss enemies. A requirement is not needed to progress onto the next level, you just have to find the staircase that leads down. It is highly recommended to completely finish a level before continuing on as the enemies and everything else does get harder.

Each level will have a random number of rooms that you can explore. They are all randomly generated and can either be completely empty of have lots of treasure and enemies present in them. There will be a number of doors in them that connect to other rooms on the same level, though it isn’t possible to know where they will take you. The room that you just came from will cause its door to have a red glow to it, so there is at least some kind of navigation help at your disposal.

Other than the basic layouts of rooms, you will experience a lot of environment changes and hazards in many of the rooms. There will be lava pits that can have important items on a small island inside of them, switches and floor panels will cause certain things in the rooms to move and open, and there will always be items in alcoves that are impossible to reach, as no switches were created to allow you to reach them.

As you progress though Legend of Dungeon and reach lower levels, you will encounter many different types of stronger enemies. At first you will just run into simple snakes and bats, but then you will come across tons of undead and demonic creatures. There aren’t necessarily bosses in the game, but sometimes a boss like enemy will spawn somewhere in a level and you can definitely tell that it is a lot stronger than everything else around you. All enemies have a chance to drop basic items and special equipment that is specific to them, such as skeleton masks from skeletons.

Killing enemies and opening boxes, as well as just being scattered on the ground, will cause a wide variety of items to appear. Gold coins, experience, and apples are the most common things you will find and they are all over. Potions with varying effects can be beneficial or detrimental to you, though their effects are never specified. Weapons and armor can also be found, though you generally can only equip one piece of armor at a time and the weapons aren’t always better than your sword. Both types of equipment have random stats, since two skeleton masks won’t always have the same armor stats.

You will start the game with a basic sword, which is stays fairly strong but eventually you will want to eventually find a replacement for it somewhere. Your strength goes up every time that you level so even if you have a weak weapon it will always get stronger. There are odd and unique weapons to find, such as a scythe with really long length and high damage, or a spell book that can spawn skeletons under your command.

Other than the basic mode that you start out with, there are a few other modes you can play on when you want to do something new. Impossible mode basically causes much stronger enemies to appear earlier than they normally would, which will be quite a challenge for you. You can generate dungeon seeds, which will cause the dungeon to look roughly the same each time you play them.

It is possible to play Legend of Dungeon with up to four people, which basically allows four characters to traverse the dungeon. This mode is only available locally which means there is no way to play with others online (currently). It doesn’t become harder to play with more people, and it almost feels like a requirement if you want to get very far into the game. Your screen isn’t split into multiple parts, and will just zoom out if each player moves too far from each other. The biggest difference between multi player and single player is that if one character dies, it will wander around as a ghost and if you collect enough spirit orbs you will be able to resurrect.

The options menu is basic but has everything that you need, such as resolution, volume sliders, and the ability to rebind every button. The graphics are simple, but the way that the game handles lighting is fantastic and causes some rooms to look amazing. There is only one song in the game, but it changes every time that you play the game which is a unique feature.

Gold determining where you are placed on the high scores list doesn’t seem like it is the most accurate way to determine how well a player does. You can easily find 500 gold before going past the third level, and some people don’t even find 1000 by time they reach the 10th level. The inventory system could be a lot better, as it can get very clunky when you start to collect a lot of different items.

The gameplay and everything is fairly basic, but that fact that you lose everything when you die and the luck factor might deter people if you want an easy game to play. You will lose all progress of your current game if you decide to quit the game, but you can return to the main menu and return back to where you were if you need to get up to do something. In general though, it isn’t the type of game that you can play in short periods of time.

Anyone that likes a challenge and doesn’t mind lots of luck involved in their gaming, Legend of Dungeon is a good choice. Since you lose everything when you die, there isn’t much to accomplish other than trying to reach the lowest level.

Legend of Dungeon costs 10 dollars and if you are interested in the sound track you can also buy it for 5 dollars. If you enjoy rogue-likes and have friends that like them as well, Legend of Dungeon is worth buying for the low cost.

Agents of Mayhem ‘Carnage a Trois’ Trailer

Ex US Army Drill Sergeant and master tactician Braddock comes from a long line of military lifers. Nobody knows the LEGION grunts better than Braddock – she trained most of them before they were recruited by LEGION. This discovery led Braddock to leave her beloved Corps and join MAYHEM where she uses her trademark cigar to mark the target for laser attacks that obliterate her enemies. Next up is Yeti, an elite Russian soldier who took part in a super-secret “cold-warrior” program designed to create super soldiers to fight the threat of LEGION. Most were driven mad, Yeti survived, escaped and joined MAYHEM. Saints Row fans will recognise Yeti’s stature and intelligence, he was formerly Oleg.

Our final Carnage A Trois member is everyone’s favourite roller derby girl, Daisy. Bold and brash with no filter, Daisy is one of the best heavy weapons experts around. Daisy is a tough anchor for any squad, with quick movements thanks to her derby moves and powered skates she uses her massive minigun to spray the battlefield killing everything in sight.

Welcome the Carnage A Trois, Sadistic, Brutal and completely destructive.

Agents of Mayhem is a single-player, open-world, third-person action game for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC gaming systems releasing on August 15th in USA / August 18th in all other territories.

Space Hulk Review

All types of combat within Space Hulk comes down to dice rolls, no matter how well equipped your terminators are. In general, close combat is all about whoever gets the highest dice roll, while shooting guns require you to get a certain number for it to actually kill. Genestealers are generally allowed to roll three dice each time that they get into close combat with one of your terminators. The number of rolls that they are allowed to do can be decreased by certain conditions, such as putting the game on easy or if they are going against a terminator equipped with a shield. All sergeant terminators will always add +1 to their best rolls while in combat, and weapons like the hammer can add an additional bonus point. The different types of guns and equipment, and the librarian psychic abilities all incorporate their own ways of rolling dice.

The units that you will be controlling during the course of Space Hulk are the terminators. There are basic terminators, sergeants that get a slight bonus in combat and allow you to reroll your CP, and librarians that have a few psychic abilities at their disposal. All terminators can perform 4 actions every turn. If you still have left over action points, you can order them to go into defensive mode which will let them reroll their close combat rolls when attacked if they lose the first roll, or overwatch mode which will cause them to automatically fire when enemies move in front of them. Each turn will randomly give you 1-6 CP, or command points, that you are able to use between any of your terminators. Having at least one sergeant still alive on the level will allow you to reroll your CP, such as when you only get one.

There are a variety of weapons that your terminators can have equipped on them, differing in how their dice rolls work. The storm bolter and assault cannon roll either two or three times, and require a certain number for kills to be registered. A bunch of melee weapons exist, such as the power fist that doesn’t do anything special and comes equipped on most terminators, to the hammer and claws that either add bonus points to their roll or can do additional rolls. Special weapons such as the heavy flamer allow you to cover large areas with flame killing everything inside, or the force axe that allows your librarian to cast psychic abilities such as increasing your CP or puting down an area of effect to kill genestealers.

There is only one type of enemy in Space Hulk, along with a stronger variation of it. Genestealers are simple melee only aliens that can do two more actions than your terminators. Broodlords are stronger than their genestealer counterpart, from being able to get bonus points on their rolls and being immune to fire and psychic abilities. They are all very weak if you can manage to shoot them from afar, but are very dangerous when they get close because they are able to roll the dice a lot of times in just one attack.

Most levels in Space Hulk are relatively the same. They incorporate a spawn location, narrow hallways, and small rooms at times. The objective on each level is generally just reaching a specific area and you’re done, while others require multiple objectives. Genestealers enter the level through areas on the outer edges, while you are usually teleported into the middle of them.

Multiplayer in Space Hulk Works by letting one person be the terminators, and the other person the genestealers. This can be done over the internet, or locally with other people on the same computer. Other than someone being able to control the genestealers, there isn’t anything else special about multiplayer.

The available options in Space Hulk involve volume sliders, very basic graphical options, options that affect gameplay elements, and sadly no way to rebind your keys. Even if you max out the graphic options, they aren’t pretty compared to modern games. The anti-aliasing feature doesn’t seem to even work, since everything is still all jagged. There appears to only be one song in all of Space Hulk, and it will only play while you are in the main menu. This means that you get to listen to nothing but terminator foot steps and guns going off the whole time during combat. Your goals for a mission will be spoken to you when you first look at the overview of it, while also explaining the important areas of the level. Your terminators will make combats while moving or engaging in combat, but there aren’t very many variations of them and you may end up hearing the same ones over and over.

Pretty much everything that exists within Space Hulk feels unfinished. Graphical options don’t appear to currently affect the graphics, and there’s only one song in the game which is the main menu. Gameplay feels very sluggish and your clicks don’t always register. Even if everything in the game felt polished, the actual combat and gameplay still needs a lot of improvements. When you only have one type of enemy that does nothing but gets close and melees, the various weapons at your disposal seems pointless when a simple gun does just as much good when you set overwatch. The difficulty settings need a rework, since no matter how hard or easy you make the game, it is still all about dice rolls. Simply putting the difficulty on easy won’t prevent your assault cannon terminator from being destroyed on his first move. The fact that terminators die any time that they lose a roll makes the fact that they wear heavy armor almost pointless, especially with how slow they move. If they were in normal soldier armor, they could easily run to the exit on each level while being able to shoot the genestealers before they ever get into close combat.

It is based on an old board game of the same name, but that is no excuse for a video game years later to abide by the same rules. This fact wouldn’t be so bad if everything else not regarding dice rolls was better from graphics to slowness of the game. With that logic, releasing 30 year old games that got perfect scores in the past would mean they would automatically get perfect scores again, when they shouldn’t.

Even if you put the game on the easy difficulty setting, you will still have to deal with a lot of luck with dice rolls. Just make sure you turn the timer off, or else you will only be allowed to spend 2 minutes deciding to do on each turn. So in essence, the game itself isn’t hard, you just have to know how to get the best dice rolls to stay alive. As you progress into the campaign, the levels will take longer to complete. You can expect most levels to take 10-30 minutes, depending on how quickly you can order the terminators around. The slow movement of your units doesn’t help the long level situation by any means.

Putting the game into hard mode does add a few layers of difficulty, but just like on the easy setting most of what happens in the game still comes down to what numbers are rolled. Less CP, the chance to jam, and a forced marine timer are what you can expect on the harder settings. The only current thing in Space Hulk that you can complete and collect are various banner customization options that you unlock from simply completing the main missions. There are also achievements that are specific to each level that you can try to accomplish, such as not letting any terminators die.

Space Hulk costs 30 dollars along with a 2 dollar piece of DLC which adds different colors to the genestealers. In its current state, it is hard to justify 30 dollars for Space Hulk. You should only buy the game if you are a big fan of anything Warhammer 40,000 related. It is actually based exactly on an old board game called the same thing, but it just doesn’t translate well into a modern video game.