Spoiler Alert Review

A game based on a single gimmick can remain entertaining for only so long. Spoiler Alert, a 2D platformer from indie developer Megafuzz Games, flips the usual script by running each of its 100 levels filled with patterned enemies and scalable cliffs in reverse. The hand-drawn hero shuffles his feet backward as he un-jumps on enemies, sucks fireballs back into his gullet, and coughs up the coins collected when the level was originally conquered. It's a clever twist on a genre everyone is familiar with, but unfortunately, Spoiler Alert shows off its best and only trick almost immediately, and fails to introduce anything beyond it.

For reasons beyond understanding, you play as a spicy chili pepper who uses his stubby legs to moonwalk all the way to the "start" of the game. Since he has already conquered each level, the character simply walks backward as you control when and where he jumps. You revive crumpled enemies by reenacting well-timed jumps, while power-ups that give you the ability to breathe fire or throw hammers have to be collected and returned to their original positions before a world can be considered complete. The actions in which the character originally collected coins, dealt with enemies, and scaled obstacles must be re-created, giving you little wiggle room from level to level.

Character design is about as wacky as it gets.

The timing of it all can be frustrating early on: anticipating the arc of your jump to land on the lifeless body of a colorful gnome takes a few tries to get right. However, after you catch your groove, you can rush through an entire world packed with 30 unique stages in 10 to 15 minutes. Besting screen after screen of challenges is rewarding, but once you understand the mechanics and see the clear patterns, the one-note design becomes apparent and the flow continues uninterrupted. Spoiler Alert concludes not long after you defeat the first--or technically final--boss. You'd expect 100 levels to lead to hours of action, but since the majority of stages might last fewer than 10 seconds, you can easily see all of the provided content in under an hour's time. There's a certain satisfaction to mastering the game's timing and besting level after level without a hitch, but there's not enough content to back up the design. Spoiler Alert feels less like a full release and more like a paid trial. There's a speed run feature where you're asked to un-play the entire game from finish to start, but after you've un-beaten the game once, it's difficult to find motivation to trudge your way through it all again.

Take away the feature attraction of undoing stage after stage of activities, and you're left with a colorful yet monotonous runner devoid of challenge and inspiration in which the only substantial change between locations is the scenery. If you're unsatisfied with the suite of content provided, there's a level editor included with the Steam-exclusive Collector's Edition that allows you to flex the muscles of your imagination. All of the in-game assets are easily dragged and dropped into your own unique levels, and the simplicity and scope of Spoiler Alert's stages make creating your own reverse runner more straightforward and appealing than the typical suite of such tools.

This is the type of scenery you'd expect when the hero is a chili pepper.

The accessible creation options notwithstanding, the glitz covering this stunted platformer isn't enough to glamorize its one-note concept. Spoiler Alert fails to remain interesting over the course of its brief runtime, and while I found myself interested in seeing what would be thrown my way early on, a lack of imagination keeps the entire package from feeling complete. A unique concept needs a supporting cast of good ideas to flourish, and Spoiler Alert's lone conceit doesn't have the charms to carry the weight of an entire game on its shoulders.

View the original article here

[Other Take] Child of Light Review

Fairy tales may be works of escapism, but no fairy tale worth its salt is purely a work of frivolous fantasy. No, the best fairy tales simultaneously let children escape from the frightening realities of life, while also helping them confront those realities, teaching them that even though life is difficult and scary sometimes, they are capable of overcoming adversity and coping with loss. Child of Light is a fine fairy tale in this tradition, a fantasy that deals with the reality of what it means to grow up. It's also a gorgeous game with an engaging turn-based battle system and wondrous realms that are a joy to discover and explore. After coming to consoles and PC earlier this year, the game has made its way to the Vita, and it's as excellent as ever.

Child of Light tells the story of Aurora, daughter of an Austrian duke in the late 1800s who finds herself transported to the land of Lemuria. Here, she learns that it is her destiny to recover the sun, moon, and stars from the evil queen who has stolen the light from the land. At first, she is understandably reluctant and even petulant about having this responsibility thrust upon her shoulders when all she wants to do is wake up back in Austria and hurry to her heartsick father's side. It's the way that she grows over the course of the game that makes her journey meaningful. She befriends a diverse group of characters who all have struggles of their own and who find their strength in each other, and her journey is empowering, but not altogether joyous. Child of Light is a richer game for the ways in which it acknowledges the hard decisions and the inevitable sadness that are part and parcel of leaving childhood behind.

Lemuria, like Child of Light, is sad and beautiful and full of wonder.

Unfortunately, the game's writing sometimes distracts from the emotion of its story. Characters speak in rhyme, and at times, the words they use are clumsy and forced, chosen to fit into the rhyming structure rather than to effectively communicate what the characters are thinking or feeling. At least the game has some fun with its own convention via the character of Rubella, an aspiring circus jester who goofs up every exchange, using a word that doesn't rhyme with what came before ("vocalist") when a perfectly common and obvious word ("singer") would have worked just fine.

But if the writing sometimes keeps you at arms length, the visuals pull you in completely. The distinctive realms of Lemuria are more reminiscent of the off-kilter fantasy lands of films like The Neverending Story and The Dark Crystal than of the Tolkienesque high fantasy that informs so many games. Your quest takes you high and low, to platforms held in the sky by massive balloons and into crystal caverns under the surface of the land. and everywhere you go, their melancholy beauty makes them a pleasure to behold, and their imaginative design creates the feeling that you don't know what other strange wonders Lemuria might have for you to discover.

You travel through Lemuria from a two-dimensional side-view perspective, and though you're bound to the ground like an ordinary girl when the game begins, early on you gain the power of flight. There are plenty of treasure chests for you to discover and optional side quests to complete, giving you an incentive to venture off the beaten path, soar up into the skies and explore every nook and cranny of these lands. Many areas also have environmental hazards and traps for you to avoid, and though these never pose too much of a challenge, they make navigating the world a bit trickier and more involving than it would be if it didn't have any dangers.

The real danger of Lemuria is in its monsters. You can see them in the environment which typically makes avoiding them easy, but more often than not, you'll want to fly into them, both because Child of Light's combat is enjoyable and because you'll want to level up your characters to prepare them for the challenges ahead. Battles are built on a foundation of traditional turn-based role-playing game combat, but there are enough wrinkles here to give you plenty to think about. You can rarely just spam standard attacks endlessly on your way to victory.

You can only have two characters in combat at any one time, but you can swap out one character for another instantly when his or her turn comes along, and switching between characters with the offensive muscle you want and those with the healing abilities you need to stay alive is one concern. And you can use the glow of Aurora's firefly friend Igniculus to slow down enemies' progress along the timeline. Your goal with this is typically to have your attacks strike enemies just before they would have attack you, which interrupts their attacks and knocks them backwards on the timeline, effectively denying them a chance to act. It's particularly satisfying to get into a rhythm where you keep knocking enemies back, using Igniculus to slow them down just enough so that they're right where you want them and then using your characters' own attacks to interrupt them again and again.

Battles are also rewarding because of the steady clip at which your characters level up. After almost every battle, at least one of your characters advances, getting boosts to stats as well as earning skill points that you can use to unlock additional stat boosts or more powerful skills. Of course, it's fun to see your characters become stronger over the course of the game, but what gives makes Child of Light meaningful is the way that Aurora grows emotionally stronger. Eventually we have to leave the realms of fairy tales behind and face the challenges of reality once more, but Lemuria is the kind of fantasy realm that stays with you as long as you remain a child somewhere in your heart.

View the original article here

Xenonauts Review

Let's be honest. If aliens were to invade right now, chances are pretty good humanity would have a tough time of it, but we might have a chance. In 1979, though? Before we had stealth fighters, before we had directed energy weapons, before supercomputers or the Internet as we know it today? We'd be crushed. Xenonauts places the future of Cold War-era humankind on your shoulders, and it's about as punishingly difficult as it should be given the setting. If the brain-melting strategy doesn't scare you away, you'll find a beautifully atmospheric game that evokes the purest dread and desperation.

Any discussion of Xenonauts must make a nod to its clear inspiration, X-COM. While I'd like to say that this is a spiritual sequel to 1994's X-COM: UFO Defense, it's a lot more accurate to say that it's more of a remake than even Firaxis' XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Xenonauts strikes a balance between large-scale, real-time global logistics and small-scale personnel tactics. You must capture and research alien technology in the dire hope that humanity can reverse-engineer weapons to match and ultimately exceed those of the invaders before it's too late. You may also name your squads after friends and family to make ckear the human costs of war. With these parallels, Xenonauts struggles to establish its own identity. There are only a handful of substantive differences between it and the games that preceded it, and while each difference adds a lot to the game, it's also impossible to shake the feeling that you've done this all before.

As you capture alien technology and pass it off to your research team, you learn more about your foes and move closer to discerning their true intentions.

The war for Earth is pretty slow at first. The aliens you face hail from a planet with an extremely thin atmosphere, and they have to modify their ships before they can land. This minor narrative touch may seem insignificant, but it gives the early hours coherence by explaining the slow ramp-up in the enemy offensive. It's apparent that you're living on borrowed time. These visitors aren't friendly, and they have Earth surrounded.

Your main goal is to construct and maintain bases that monitor and guard as much of the world's airspace as possible, as well as to launch ground missions to recover alien technology or capture one alien leaders. And thus rises the multilayered strategy that links everything together. You need cash to run your bases, supply your troops, and keep the aliens from wiping out humanity. Missions help keep the international community happy, which keeps the money flowing. Every mechanic feeds into another, and a weak plan on one front can have a lot of critical repercussions. When starting up Xenonauts for the first time, I attempted to build two bases right off the bat. I wanted to secure a decent chunk of the planet and steadily expand from there. Unfortunately, founding and supplying two facilities rapidly drains your cash and keeps you from being able to carefully invest in the development of new, efficient weapons and tech for your soldiers and fighter jets. That doesn't mean it's impossible, but poorly conceived plans lead to humanity's doom.

It's immediately apparent that you're living on borrowed time.

Failing to protect some regions causes your program to steadily lose funding as those regions lose faith in the Xenonauts project. Because humanity as a whole is on the defensive, downing enemy aircraft is your bread and butter. You need to keep UFOs from bombing cities, abducting citizens, or straight-up attacking your bases. Initially, that's not a tall order. At first, only small craft like probes and corvettes can be modified to enter Earth's atmosphere. Intercepting them carries virtually no risk. You can have battles auto-resolve, with the game using basic aircraft statistics to determine the victor. If you prefer more direct interaction, you can play out the dogfights with a system that very closely resembles Cold War-era radar screens. Ships and planes are represented by green 2D sprites, and their firing arcs and weapon ranges are clearly displayed. If you're careful, manual dogfights can assist you in your path to victory. About midway through the game, I was lagging behind my fighter upgrades and couldn't keep up with the stronger, faster alien vessels, but I could still survive thanks to smart maneuvering. With a few careful clicks and some liberal use of my afterburners, I kept two of my jets in the aliens' blind spots and downed the ships before they could reach Dublin and initiate a wholesale slaughter.

When you can successfully scrap a UFO over land, you have a narrow window in which you can launch an automated airstrike to clear out all of the alien troops and pick up a moderate amount of cash, or you can choose to launch a ground mission. These have you organize landing squads to scavenge what alien tech you can and bring it back for future research. They also give your soldiers an opportunity to accumulate valuable battlefield experience, dramatically improving their stats over time. The surviving extraterrestrial troops and robots attempt to fight you off, making these missions dangerous propositions. The technological superiority of your foes makes itself readily apparent here; the extraterrestrial soldiers can immediately kill one of your soldiers if you're not extremely careful. Your weapons, and later your cheap imitations of the alien weapons, just aren't as effective. These ground missions help distinguish Xenonauts from its influences. Whereas XCOM: Enemy Unknown had small, tight levels that helped clearly identify threats, Xenonauts has sprawling levels with extremely limited visibility. Cover is also of limited use; in almost every case it can be destroyed with a few shots or a stray grenade. During night missions, your soldiers have severely limited visibility. The aliens, once again, have an advantage, with infrared vision. The result is an extremely lethal set of missions that help drive home the overwhelming danger posed by Earth's visitors.

I might be a little paranoid about what's on the other side of this door. But my fear is not unwarranted.

During one excursion, with a squad of battle-hardened veterans, I caught myself screaming at my computer screen, begging them to stop succumbing to a previously unknown line of alien androids for just a few more turns. After the anger and panic subsided, I realized I had no one else to blame but myself for the loss. Yes, Xenonauts is lethal, but never unfairly so. The environments are almost completely destructible with the right gear, and once you've cleared an area of civilians, wanton destruction comes with almost no penalty. Xenonauts necessitates a metered ruthlessness, a barely contained thirst for devastation that you periodically release to ensure absolute dominance. This is ultimately the game's single best design decision. Xenonaut's gameplay ably complements its narrative. You aren't just told to feel desperate; you must take desperate measures to have any hope of victory.

Unfortunately, while Xenonauts creates a network of mutually reinforcing sections, it borrows too heavily from the 1994 X-COM in some not-so-flattering ways. The user interface can be obnoxious and obtuse. Even with an internal game manual, I didn't figure out that right-clicking and dragging would change which direction a soldier was facing until a few too many hours into my first run. Outfitting your squads with the gear and equipment they need can also be a pain. In addition, the game's uninspired visuals lack the panache of its more recent competitor, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which magnified powerful attacks with its cinematic, over-the-shoulder camera. A similar brand of drama could have made Xenonauts' battles all the more thrilling, but the distant camera keeps the action at arm's length.

Completing missions yields experience and war medals for your soldiers, which sets them apart from new recruits and further encourages you to protect them.

Xenonauts is an unlikely success, a challenging clone of a beloved classic with enough tweaks to entice fans and newcomers alike. It might look rather cheap at first glance, but underneath that rough exterior lies something special. Breaking the game down and looking at all of its pieces in isolation would do the game a disservice, because every facet helps focus the true luster of the whole.

View the original article here

Richard & Alice Review

Nuclear war. Pandemic. Meteors. Zombies. With all the death and devastation in syndication these days it's become harder to discern the older, less ruinous meaning of the word apocalypse--that of simply "uncovering" or "revealing." But even as our media comes up with ever more creative ways to destroy civilization (wait, we're doing the monkey one again?), it's offered us simpler revelations. One post-apocalyptic priest in Richard & Alice offers a characteristically concise one: "We're all just trying to exist for another day. See the sun rise in the morning, then see it set once more."

That's a lot to ask for the eponymous duo, as it turns out. Richard & Alice occupy opposing prison cells, and though they're actually pretty cushy, as cells go, neither comes with a view. Not that there'd be much to see, what with the bulk of the outside world brought to its knees by crippling snowfall and cold. This point & click drama by Lewis Denby and Ashton Raze doesn't dwell on the particulars of that nasty bit of climate change, and that omission tells us a good bit about where its storytelling priorities lie. Richard is neurotic from his mostly solitary confinement, and preoccupied with the elaborate maintenance claims he files with his computer (they really are cushy cells). Alice is prone to bouts of dark sarcasm, and through a series of playable flashbacks we're shown that she's also a devoted mother of a five year old named Barney. As the stage shifts between Richard's point of view in the present and Alice's in the past, we're gradually brought up to speed on how each arrived at such bleak circumstance.

Well, it certainly doesn't feel like the end of the world.

Advancing the narrative requires solving rudimentary item-based puzzles of the "use rust remover on rusty ladder" ilk. It is the apocalypse, so crowbars and lighters fill the ad hoc roles that keycards and cryptexes play in less grimdark puzzle games. I'm all for the miracle of mundane things--anyone who's played The Last of Us can testify to the life-saving properties of a good pair of scissors--but sometimes their contrivance in Richard & Alice beggars belief.

But then, the end of the world itself feels a little suspect here, from the limited scope of devastation that Alice and Barney witness, right on down to the high school mascot-style name of the gang that waylays the survivors: the Polar Bears. Alice's game efforts to shield Barney from the horrors of their world seem to have proven too effective: the child doesn't seem to have the faintest comprehension of them. It's a dynamic that's played to good effect during a few tense early moments, as Alice struggles to convey a sense of urgency to her son without tipping him off to imminent dangers. But over the broader course of the game, Barney's saccharine naiveté pushes on past the point of plausibility.

As the stage shifts between Richard's point of view in the present and Alice's in the past, we're gradually brought up to speed on how each arrived at such bleak circumstance.

Both Richard and Alice are well written.

But it's the art that ultimately fails to sell this version of the apocalypse. Not the stubby, monochromatic trees, or the bizarre, bowlegged stance that makes Alice look like a Matryoshka doll in mom jeans. It's the snow--or rather, the lack thereof. The white, pixel-sized snowflakes don't register on the white field that covers the ground, so it's hard to even tell that it's snowing in the first place. It certainly doesn't bury anything, or even pile into drifts. It doesn't change the landscape or otherwise disrupt the hard horizontal lines of the man-made environment. This snow wouldn't get you out of a school day anywhere above the 35-degree latitude line. Ditto for the cold, which the characters seem to be selectively aware of. So when Alice and Barney rest for a spell near a frozen lake, the scene's so free of danger that you can imagine the Peanuts gang cutting figures in the ice to "Christmas Time is Here."

An apocalypse can't reveal something if it hasn't been covered over in the first place. There's some strong writing in Richard & Alice, and a little bit of intrigue in the way the story's various threads wind their way back together. But when the game fails to convince us of its own high stakes, its Cormac McCarthyism loses its gloomy appeal. People will do terrible things to others to survive. Innocence should be treasured. Surely we don't have to destroy the world one more time to find those things out?

View the original article here

The Wolf Among Us, Episode 5: Cry Wolf

"So what if it wasn't the truth? It was true enough."

This line came in the final moments of The Wolf Among Us' concluding episode, called Cry Wolf, and it was an appropriate proclamation given the episode's murky end. The mystery had been--well, I don't know if "solved" is the proper word, but the case was now closed and it was time to move on. It was time to reflect on what Bigby Wolf had learned, what his decisions had meant for Fabletown and its residents, whose fairy tale lives of the past had been torn apart by murder, prostitution, and social upheaval. It was time to consider that I might have done the right thing for the wrong reasons, or perhaps the wrong thing for the right reasons. I am still not sure which it was, and the game certainly isn't telling me.

I didn't feel all that hopeful. Instead, I was struck by a pervading nihilism as I learned even more information after already making life-changing decisions that affected multiple Fables. Had I done the right thing? Was there a "right" thing at all? It didn't seem so. The truth was now defined by its sliding scale. There was such a thing as "true enough." It was this nihilism that had Bigby--this loyal, gruff, impatient Bigby I'd created through the choices I'd made over the course of the series--lowering his head in shame. "It doesn't matter what I do," he said. "In the end, it's all the same shit it always was."

It's a good thing Fables are so hard to kill; Bigby's smoking habit can't be healthy! In many ways, this nihilism is fitting for a series that clearly would have no happy ending. I'd confronted Ichabod Crane's lecherous ways in previous installments. I had torn a Fable's arm off, a decision I had to confront every time I glimpsed him out of the corner of my eye. And as it turns out, many Fables had turned to the Crooked Man for assistance when they felt their own leaders had let them down. I don't know that even a government led by Snow could turn this place around, a suspicion verified by a Cry Wolf scene that mirrored one from Episode 1, demonstrating the inhumanity of government bureaucracy. Fables weren't making good choices because there was no good choice to make, no path leading to freedom and happiness. No--I should never have entertained the notion that The Wolf Among Us would come to an easy conclusion.

Nevertheless, I had hoped for a finale that offered a bit more clarity and focus than Cry Wolf does. The episode's climax came to me not by way of a heart-pounding action sequence but rather a roomful of Fables yelling over each other, trying to sway me to make one choice over another. The scene plays out for more time than seems necessary, and is more focused on reminding you of various choices you'd made over the course of the series than it is on revealing anything new or important. "Hey, remember that thing you did two episodes ago? We're going to refer to it now," Cry Wolf seems to say, pointing out that all those choices were just switches you flipped and variables you gave values to. "Hey, remember that character? He doesn't seem to really belong in this scene, but we wanted to remind you he existed."

More smoking. The action still heats up, however, particularly in an excellent sequence that has you taking on a multitude of attackers. You must keep your eyes glued to the screen, lest you miss a single button prompt and cause Bigby to take a painful blow to the head. In Cry Wolf, there is no turning away from the violence Fabletown has become steeped in--and certainly no turning away from the wolf that has always howled out from within Bigby, hoping one day to exact vengeance. Another action scene, one similar to Episode 1's chase scene, is equally exciting, but doesn't make total sense from a plot perspective, depending on your choices. If they wanted to escape, why would the Fables you chase have chosen the obvious destination?

I'm so glad to have spent time in the Fables world. I'm so glad to have gotten to mold Bigby Wolf into a redeemable hero rather than a seething mass of lupine rage. I'm disappointed by Cry Wolf, not because it suggests that Fabletown is destined to remain troubled, or that it doesn't overtly answer a vital nagging question, but because a few too many events are overtly manufactured to fit the plot's needs, rather than making each event feel like it progressed from those that came before. But there's no denying the episode's emotional impact, even in the midst of some questionable plotting. One goodbye in particular had me close to tears as one of Fabletown's few innocents asked me to pass on a gift to the only Fables who had ever shown him kindness. The road this Fable was soon to take was paved with Bigby's good intentions, but as The Wolf Among Us reminded me in its final episode, such paths may still lead to hell.

View the original article here

Ace Combat Infinity Review

I am tired of being a mercenary. Tired of the coldness we like to imagine they espouse: the dispassionate remove from warfare, the apathy toward allegiance and ideology. Doubtless it's those very qualities that make mercenarism so appealing to the big wigs of video game publishing. The mercenary neatly lampshades the globetrotting and casual mass murder that serve as cornerstones of all the best-selling war games, and he is compensated in a currency gamers accept: the means for newer, more efficient tools of a violent trade. But those easy associations belie a vital loss, because when a series goes mercenary, it sacrifices its heart.

It's hard to look at an entry like Ace Combat Infinity and not see the ways it's diminished by that cynicism. You play as a pilot, of course, engaged in battle against a frightfully well-armed terrorist organization operating out of Central Asia. But you're also a mercenary, so any emotions that premise might elicit get a stiff-arm before they can drag the action down. Why question warfare, when there are kill count competitions to chuckle over on the comms? Why dwell on consequence, when there are battles to be had over skylines from Dubai to Tokyo? Once upon a time, Ace Combat drew its own borders, around names like Ustio and Strangereal. It has since found it more efficient, perhaps, to outsource that effort, and lean on the mental connections we make on our own when we hear mention of foreign countries or words like "terrorist."

But lazy expectations should be challenged, as Infinity's own antecedents once showed. Flight simulation is a niche genre, even when it's given an arcade slant that eschews realistic limitations--as Ace Combat traditionally does--on a plane's maneuverability and payload. We expect such genre games to serve genre fare and little more. A racing game should render unto us prettier cars; a sports game could pursue nothing more noble than a reasonable facsimile of its chosen sport. But Ace Combat once chased its Top Gun guitars with Agustin Barrios Mangore. It interlaced vignettes about the personal lives of rival squadrons in among its screeching dogfights.

Those old games were idealistic and enthusiastic (occasionally embarrassingly so), full of operatic flourishes and moments of pathos that few video games can claim--let alone ones about planes. These were games that knew that when engagements take place over the span of miles, between pilots who never see each other's face, it's the little personal touches that keep the whole affair from feeling like a training exercise. The melancholy cutscenes. The frantic radio chatter. The call signs and emblems and the way enemies sauntered onto the field of battle like WWE wrestlers...that was what made Ace Combat human.

Once upon a time, Ace Combat drew its own borders, around names like Ustio and Strangereal.

You can still find vestiges of those features in Ace Combat Infinity, but they've been shuffled up in what's essentially a remix of the series' greatest hits. Asteroids shower Earth, decimating the population. Monolithic flying fortresses take to the skies over Tokyo. The vaunted Stonehenge cannonade from Ace Combat 4 now fires over canyons in Turkey. This all takes place over the course of five brief missions, with three more planned but nevertheless absent. The first two tastes are free--the rest must be unlocked either through weeks of workmanlike commitment, or a $20 instant access payment that feels wildly out of proportion. I find it hard to confront the commodification of those old memories. Seeing how sausage is valuated is only slightly more fun than seeing how it's made, as it turns out.

If we're to adopt the mercenary's Spartan sense of appraisal, I'd put the real value on Ace Combat Infinity's cooperative multiplayer. Sorties there are paid for with a per diem of "fuel," or an alternative that's depletable and restocked with cold hard cash. But a generous stream of fuel-giving challenges, gifts, and randomized bonuses ensures a thrifty player can take to battle with little in the way of personal commitment.

Therein, it's a four-on-four scramble to see which side can bag the most targets, while still maintaining enough semblance of alliance to score a strong combined rating. It's a unique system, and the light competition provides an impetus to perform without ever becoming overbearing. The feeling of being chased is conspicuous in its absence, though. In, say, Strike Vector, there's a give and take--a constant, whirling fear, where a sudden burst of gunfire sends you into the most convincing approximation of Brownian motion you can conjure up on the spot. Infinity's mostly inert enemies, by comparison, can feel like shooting gallery fodder.

Ace Combat has returned. So has its unchanging heads-up display. Click above for more Ace Combat Infinity images.

The classic refinement of Ace Combat's gameplay can still shine through. And when your squadron is thrust into a pop-up battle against one of the game's white whale superweapons, it blazes. You get flickering glimpses of the underlying attraction, that passionate artistry that once allowed the series to liken the dogfight to flamenco, and not seem crazy for doing so. It's an impression that can still intermittently catch me when I watch Infinity's abstracted replays, and see my predatory arrow tracing contrails around bogeys, tying bows over enemy ground positions until the besieged markers disappear.

But that damned cynicism, again. It's pervasive. Maybe that's the consequence of life lived as a virtual mercenary: a joylessness that poisons the nostalgia well. The soaring bird that has long served as the metaphor for the Ace Combat pilot becomes a vulture fighting over highway carrion, looping away incautiously when the odd car passes a little too close, before returning again for a final few scraps of flesh.

View the original article here

Anomaly Defenders Review

With so many tower defense games flooding the market, the fact that the first two Anomaly games aimed for something wildly different made them far more exciting to dig into. In both of those games you played the role of the attackers, controlling a free-roaming human commander who laid power-ups and issued commands for your rolling armored convoy to obey as it snaked its way through the alien-infested battlefield. It offered brilliant little twists to spice up a genre that has grown stale. For all its sci-fi splendor and pulse-pounding challenge, Anomaly Defenders marks a big step backward from the innovation that made its predecessors so memorable. That's not quite enough to ruin the experience altogether, but it does wind down the series on a weak note.

Defenders takes the ongoing conflict to the alien homeworld, where the human forces are launching a massive counterattack. That means your role in battle is flip-flopped, however, placing you in the metallic skin of the aliens as you make a frantic attempt to hold back the human assault so your escape pods can launch to safety. The story-driven character interactions and surprises that drove the narrative between missions in the previous games have been stripped out, leaving a 24-mission campaign that plays more like a series of stand-alone war puzzles than the cohesive plot-centric encounters we've seen before. Changing things up yet again might have been a welcome move, if the shift didn't push the series into predictable territory.

As it turns out, being on the defensive in this new chapter of the human-alien war is a lot less interesting once you've had a taste of the series' alternative approach to the genre. Plunking down a variety of upgradable alien towers and turrets, you must defend your base's launchpad from the waves of well-armed human convoys that roll in to wreak havoc. Defensive towers can be plugged into pre-laid nodes littered around each map, and you often have to juggle attacks from different directions. Meanwhile, you rely on resource harvesters to amass funds to bolster your forces and to lure enemies to specific areas of the map.

I'll admit that there's a certain thrill that comes from going hands-on with the sweet alien tech that obliterated your human forces in the previous games. Watching the devastating power of the behemoth in action is a treat, and the laser-spewing scorchers are equally satisfying additions to your arsenal. Unfortunately, much of this excitement fades as it becomes clear that Defenders' gameplay largely embraces many of the classic tower defense genre traditions that the series first sought to push away from. Despite the return to the status quo, it does put a few neat ideas into play that keep this final encounter from being a total disappointment.

The puzzle-like stage designs feature lots of branching pathways for enemy convoys to use, and they're often drawn toward your harvesters. This makes the strategic deployment of both your defensive towers and your resource-gathering bunkers a huge component of Defenders' gameplay. It's not just about dropping towers willy-nilly and upgrading them until they shred the oncoming parade of tanks, robots, and fighters.

Rerouting enemy forces into your thickest defense groupings whenever possible is as important as varying your strategy to account for dynamic shifts on the battlefield. You have finite resources and lots of fluctuating variables to consider at any given moment in battle. Some stages drop meteors on your head or unleash lighting strikes that temporarily jam your towers. Other areas send foes marching from multiple directions at the same time or involve bombing runs that don't follow the map's network of roadways. Which units you use, how and when you upgrade them, and where you place them can make a huge difference in whether you win a match or get crushed.

Tower abilities also play a critical role in every match. Defenders sports a robust tech tree with unlockable units and abilities you can put in play, and the latter in particular add another welcome layer of depth to battlefield strategizing. Defeated foes drop energy points that can be amassed and spent at any moment to trigger any of your towers to use specific support abilities you've unlocked on the tech tree. Simple things like shielding and repairs help prolong your units' life spans when under fire, but other cool effects, such as EMP blasts that disable enemy shields, sniper shots that boost your firing range, and self-destruct sequences, round out your tactical options.

Some of the game's more important nuances, like the distinct advantages of using specific towers against certain enemy types, easily get lost in the chaos. There's often so much going on at any given moment that absorbing the bombardment of info about which enemies are approaching and how to best thwart their attacks with the limited resources you can lay down is a dizzying task. The ability to pause the battle to zoom in and queue up tower placement and upgrades is certainly helpful, but it doesn't fully stave off the overwhelming deluge that strikes in the heat of battle.

Even with its few unique facets and puzzle-like focus, Defenders' bursts of stress-tinged fun stretch only so far. Remove the offensive hook of playing as the human commander in the two previous Anomaly games, and you're left with a serviceable tower defense game that doesn't shine as brightly as it predecessors. Earlier Anomaly games proved that a little innovation can go a long way, but you just don't see as much of that approach in action here, which results in an underwhelming and familiar return to the norm.

View the original article here

Shovel Knight Review

Calling Shovel Knight "old-fashioned" isn't derogatory. Rather, its brazen re-creation of established conventions only proves that some ideas, no matter how dusty they may appear, are engaging no matter what era we're in. There's no expiration date on immediate combat in which smart positioning is as important as deft attacks, or branching stages that hide secret passageways for those anxious to quench their inquisitive flames. Shovel Knight doesn't add anything novel over what we've seen in countless older games; it doesn't reinvent its core concepts into a decidedly new experience. Rather, it shows just how exciting a traditional adventure can still be, making technological innovations seem superfluous when pure fun is all you crave.

Everything in Shovel Knight can be classified as old in one way or another. The story, in which two fearsome knights are separated by a malevolent force and one (the man) must rescue the other (the woman), belongs to a bygone era. Simple aesthetics owe much to the visual design and musical scores from when sprites and MIDI were still the dominant forms of artistic expression. And beyond those surface details lie references to the progenitors of Shovel Knight's exploits. The knights who serve as bosses borrow heavily from the robot masters of the Mega Man series, complete with their own descriptive quirks that dictate not only their attacks, but the traps populating their stages. Towns that you duck into could have been pulled from Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (though there is thankfully no one named Error present). And you'd be forgiven for mistaking your pogo attack for Scrooge McDuck's from DuckTales.

Rather than relying on conjuring pleasant memories from a simpler time, however, Shovel Knight is fun because its many components are well realized. Take the combat as an example of where Shovel Knight proves its worth based on its own merits. Combat is position-based because knockbacks are so prevalent. Not only can enemies shove you into bottomless pits with a timely attack, but striking baddies with your shovel also nudges you toward the void. It's a system that demands careful planning even though your repertoire is limited. Attack too soon or late, and you're liable to meet an untimely end, so the precision needed to survive unscathed pulls you in to the life-or-death showdowns.

Some ideas, no matter how dusty they may appear, are engaging no matter what era we're in.

Pits are the number one danger you face. Mistiming a jump is a common occurrence, especially when there are enemies waiting for you to make a mistake, so the majority of my failures came from careless stumbling. Generous checkpoints ensure backtracking is kept to a minimum, and though this eliminated frustration, the prevalence of safety nets meant I was rarely forced to alter my strategy. Mere competence is enough to get from one checkpoint to the next, which was disheartening considering how punishing similar games have been. It's difficult to strike that balance between challenge and accessibility, and Shovel Knight leans a little too far to the latter side.

Whining that Shovel Knight is slightly too easy doesn't seem fair considering how much I enjoyed venturing through every stage. However, because I so rarely feared for my life, I never felt the need to master every item that I unlocked. Sure, I could have made clever use of my invincibility cloak, or figured out a way to use a thunderous punch mid-battle, but there was no need to delve deeper into my tactics. I relied on my standard strike, pogo attack, and fireball for much of the adventure, so though puzzling out how best to defeat each foe was still enjoyable, any variety was my own doing rather than the game's demand. That sadly remained unchanged even in New Game Plus. Patience and precision are enough to vanquish any stage, so much of my inventory remained unused, and my strategy never wavered.

These problems didn't become apparent until I revisited stages. Games cut from a retro cloth tend to hold my attention for dozens of hours as I hunt down every secret and master the many confrontations. But there was no such draw here. Still, during my first time through, the stages were fluid and dynamic, presenting so many architectural and adversarial changes that I was continually enraptured. Seeing disinterested hamsters attached to propellers made me laugh with joy, and matching wits against shield-bearing knights provided many humbling outcomes. Braving the darkness of one level and the wind of another demanded different skills, and never knowing what awaited me in the next screen kept me slightly unhinged. What madness would be expected of me? Would I have to eliminate the spirits haunting a house? Or navigate platforms while magma poured from above? Shovel Knight's bountiful charms are so immediate and satisfying that I couldn't stop myself from forging ahead to see what else lay before me.

The branching level design also beckoned. Shovel Knight is strictly linear, except if you have an inquisitive nature. False walls give way to myriad places where bountiful treasure is stored. A sharp-eyed individual should find half of what's out there the first time through, but even after visiting each stage multiple times, there were still a handful of tricky items that I couldn't locate. The reward for uncovering a secret is mostly intangible--the money from treasure chests doesn't matter once there's nothing else to buy--and though I drew great joy from trying to secure every bit of treasure initially, my interest waned as time elapsed. The core action wasn't as exciting on repeat visits. With so few surprises waiting for me, and no need to vary my strategies, I was lulled by predictability.

So, Shovel Knight doesn't hold up upon a second and third playthrough. That's a black mark if you're keen on starting fresh after the credits role, but there's no shame in lessened impact on repeat visits. There is one element that remained gripping no matter how often I played it, though: boss fights. These are pattern-based affairs that test your reaction time, punish your recklessness, and make you feel incredibly powerful once you come out on top. These encounters are the one situation that I had to make use of my expansive inventory as I searched for an item that would give me the upper hand. I would toss deadly balls to deal massive damage, use a magic sword to glide through the air unscathed, and turn invincible when I needed a breather. And when the difficulty ramped up in New Game Plus, I was brought to my knees more often than I’d like to admit.

No matter which era it had been released in, Shovel Knight would have been embraced. Its inherent charms are timeless. Shovel Knight is a good reminder that game design does age but can never die and that simple mechanics can still be immensely satisfying. But this is not another classic. History echoes forth in everything that Shovel Knight does, but while its inspirations offer compelling moments decades after they were first released, this adventure loses its impact all too quickly. Much of what draws me to games of this ilk are repeatedly playing through them, differing my tactics to become more efficient at whatever challenges lie before me. Without that aspect present in Shovel Knight, I was left with an "is that all?" feeling when the well ran dry. Shovel Knight is a memorable re-imagining of what I grew up with, but doesn't have the longevity or inventiveness to be great in its own right.

View the original article here

Hegemony Rome: The Rise of Caesar Review

Hegemony Gold: Wars of Ancient Greece was easily one of my favorite real-time strategy games. It was rough, but it captivated me with some of the freshest ideas I'd seen in a while. Hegemony Rome drops almost all of the cleverness of its predecessor and replaces it with a lackluster facsimile poorly concealing an almost hollow frame.

Hegemony Rome: The Rise of Caesar follows one of history's most prolific conquerors through his Gallic campaign and the political aftermath. The game's story mode captures only a few of the really big historical moments, but it helps serve as a primer for the sandbox mode, which gives you all of Gaul and Southern Britain to play with. From there, you build up cities, gather resources, and expand--all typical of an average RTS game.

The strategic view shows the relative strength of garrisoned forces as well as supply lines and basic troop movements.

What makes the Hegemony series different from most is its attention to historical accuracy. It plays as somewhat of a cross between Europa Universalis and the Total War series. You spend a lot of time managing the minute details of your cities and forts, but you can also seamlessly zoom back out to a wide-area view that shows where all of the key points of interest are. In that sense, it's a lot smoother than Total War, which basically plays out as two games, one strategic and one tactical. In Hegemony Rome, you have one big map with two ways of looking at it. Unfortunately, while that system is great for quickly navigating from one battle to another across the map, it can be a bit unwieldy. As you pull the camera back, the texture of the large-scale paper map begins to replace the trees, mountains, and fields a bit too quickly, cutting off indicators for troop morale and circumstantial bonuses (such as flanking and charging). Because neither view offers up all of the information you need at any given point, a system that should be a boon often comes off as an annoyance.

The big draws of Hegemony Gold were troop management and logistics, and in these areas, it can be defined as a counterexample to other games of its type. In Starcraft, you didn't really need to manage supplies for your troops. You had a big pool, and every unit you built took from that pool. No additional management was required. Hegemony Gold was quite different. Not only did you have global resource totals that represented the theoretical maximum of your empire, but you also had to move those resources from city to city. If you were building up a big force to capture a new city, wherever you stationed your soldiers needed to have enough resources to keep them fed and happy, or you'd see them dissolve within a few minutes. That mechanic was reinforced by an entire system of troop formations, stances, and tactics that not only raised the stakes of proper administration but also felt cohesive and sturdy.

Conquering anything less than a fully upgraded city rarely requires more than four regular units.

Hegemony Rome keeps a few of those concepts, but also waters them down to the point of near irrelevance. The emphasis here is on the supply lines themselves and making sure you have an efficient network of resource nodes to transport food, wood, and gold. Large forces still drain local resources pretty quickly, but that's rarely a problem. Hegemony Gold, however, limited the total number of resources that could move through any given area, unless upgraded. Each upgrade cost a lot to construct and maintain and forced you to make careful decisions about the best way to move resources around. Each city and resource node could also support only two or three supply lines, making your decisions that much more significant.

Hegemony Rome has almost none of these subtleties. All of your supplies can support an enormous resource flow, and only the foolishly long routes incur high penalties. They cost a fixed amount to maintain and cannot be upgraded, and you can make as many of them as you'd like. Their role is to support a fairly simple system of city and fort upgrades, but the mechanics behind this upgrade system are no longer robust enough to be compelling or interesting. Instead, the system encourages you to build up complex webs of short, cheap supply lines that minimize global losses. That makes the game extremely tedious, however, because forts, bridges, and cities need to be linked and bunched really close together. Tactics and big strategy take a backseat to tedium and rote patterns.

Every city is captured in more or less the same way. With a scout or two, you can get an eye for how strong the defenses are, and if the defense rating is below a certain number, you can be reasonably sure that you can capture the city in one go. If it's above a certain number, you simply have to starve the citizens out by blocking their supply lines and waiting. Once that's done, you get the new acquisition connected to your trade network, get a few upgrades in, leave a garrison, recruit a few new units, and keep the push going. Occasionally, you encounter a unique situation where the city is nestled in a cliff and you can use only a few units to attack versus your standard five or so. Outside of that, though, there's very little to mix up the combat.

The super-zoomed-out version of the map sits on a desk, presumably belonging to Julius Caesar himself. It's a neat visual and conceptual touch, but that doesn't make Hegemony Rome any less banal.

Part of the problem is that there are no longer troop formation options. Instead of forming a chevron pattern or having your units stand in a circle with spears facing outward for defense, you typically choose one of two stances. Now, these offer similar bonuses to battle formations, but with only two options, there isn't enough variance to do much of anything. In the first Hegemony, I could have troops stationed in the wilderness and have them constantly gathering a little bit of food. If enemies approached, they assumed a defensive battle formation and stood their ground. If the opposing force was too much, playing defensively would at least buy me enough time to move cavalry in a wedge formation to break enemy ranks and cause them to scatter. When I would siege enemy cities, I would often find that they had kept some extra units nearby to ambush and flank attackers. These were complex, emergent battle tactics that were facilitated by the game's mechanics. That kind of complexity doesn't happen anymore. Too much has been cut out, and not enough added back in to compensate. The only thing that is more robust in Hegemony Rome is the expansion of unit upgrades. As your soldiers fight and earn experience, they can gain skills that improve their maximum morale, or they can add more soldiers to their ranks. These upgrades are nice, but they're not enough to help fill out such a large game.

At this point, I've put more than 24 hours into Hegemony Rome, but I feel like it's waging some kind of psychological warfare on me. Outside of the first couple of hours, I've gone through the exact same process: expand, fortify, hold, lather, rinse, repeat. It's remarkably addictive, but in a cheap, Skinner box way. There's nothing to improve upon, so I'm not compelled to try harder. I just keep capturing things.

I went back a few times recently to play the first Hegemony to see if I just had huge nostalgia glasses for the series. I didn't. Hegemony Gold really is that much better. Everything from the user interface to the unit AI was and still is superior. To be fair, not every game needs to live up to its predecessor, but Rise of Caesar can't even stand on its own. Almost everything here is mediocre, and that's really a shame given the promise of Wars of Ancient Greece.

View the original article here

Nether Review

The popularity of postapocalyptic survival games has been explosive, and it has become increasingly critical to offer a fresh take or risk being lost in the bedlam. Nether, however, is a first-person online survival shooter that doesn't strive to reinvent the wheel. It approaches the challenge by introducing tried-and-true ideas, mashing them together in hopes that the sum of its acclimated parts results in a bright entry in the well-trodden genre. What emerges is a concoction that vacillates between amusement and listlessness. Nether employs many ideas that, alone, could have produced enjoyable gameplay, but what ultimately surfaces is a game whose fun, interesting moments are undermined by frustration.

Nether exhibits influences from popular postapocalyptic television shows and films. The Chicago-inspired urban sprawl of the city portions of the game are home to cracked, ruined skyscrapers and flooded streets. Vehicles, covered in rust and abandoned by their owners, litter enormous freeways in a scene that could have been plucked from early advertisements for The Walking Dead. Scattered throughout the world are safe zones, hastily erected out of metal barriers or standing high on platforms. Final bastions of humankind, safe zones are places similar to the cobbled structures seen in films like The Day of the Dead. Here, you are safe from harm (mostly, but more on that later) and can buy and sell gear, craft weapons, and complete courier missions.

The dilapidated world of Nether is beautiful and dangerous.

Despite the familiar world in which Nether exists, I found the varied urban environments the highlight of my forlorn adventures. As is the custom of survival games, you are released into the desolate world of Nether, where you're greeted by ruined buildings and charred skeletons. No explanation behind the tragedy is freely offered, only a large kitchen knife and a lime-green backpack, the latter of which does little to assist you in blending into the brown and gray of the decayed urban landscape. Scattered throughout the broken concrete world are signs of the desperation that soon followed whatever unearthly disaster occurred years prior. Emergency vehicles sit dormant, their flashing lights cutting through the dust and fog.

Elsewhere lay signs that people had attempted to carve out an existence, either in peaceful solitude or in ruthless, violent gangs--both of which ultimately met a macabre and bloody demise. The world is bleak, dark, often gorgeous, and well realized. I embraced the excitement and apprehension as I darted into buildings or sprinted over dangerous, empty streets while scrounging for food or gear locked away in various objects such as vending machines or abandoned vehicles. Some minor gripes include buildings that are clearly copied and pasted, and structures that cannot be entered.

Shops located in safe zones sell gear and accessories.

But those issues don't hamper the entertainment much. Adding to the interest is the ambient weather system, which can influence how you approach situations. More than once, I would scout an area I needed to visit. I noted pathways to keep me hidden, along with enemies to avoid. But suddenly a cloud of rust-colored dust would roll in, and the loss of vision would force me to drastically alter my advancement. Nether's fluctuating world feels like a living entity, always plotting against you.

It's unfortunate that the immersion is so often broken by nagging issues, coupled with the reality of Nether's clearly unfinished state. Oddly placed invisible walls stop you short mid-sprint, which makes pacing anything but fluid. Piles of rubble and trash are commonplace, which is not strange considering the game's motif. What is odd, however, are the invisible barriers surrounding the debris. Walking over the piles is possible, though doing so positions you several feet in the air. Your movement speed is also drastically slowed in these situations, turning you into an easy target for predators. It is also possible to clip completely into certain objects, such as cabinets, computer desks, or rubble, as well as some knee-high gates, as if they weren't even there. The fields west of the city may seem like a respite from such urban difficulties, but they are nearly barren and devoid of food and resources--save for the military grain silo, a popular site for random weapon spawns. There are towers to capture if you're part of a clan, as well as safe zones to which you can transport packages. I found myself avoiding the area completely and sticking to the more interesting urban locations.

Scattered throughout the broken concrete world are signs of the desperation that soon followed whatever unearthly disaster occurred years prior.

The creatures that populate the world following the collapse of society are the titular nethers. These mutated abominations come in many forms and charge with sharp claws, blunt fists, or blinding toxic sludge. Running is not always an option, because the monsters possess the ability to dive into a portal, exiting just behind your back and slashing away at you. These abilities make nethers more threatening than the average shuffling zombie. But some of the danger they pose also comes from their hypersensitive threat detection.

Nethers have the uncanny ability to "sense" you through stone, asphalt, and metal. You might believe you're alone as you move through an empty building, but suddenly a deafening screech informs you that a nether is on your tail. It can get frustrating, especially if you're being careful not to get spotted while you go about your current goal, whether it's traveling to a location or searching around for loot. Killing the creatures makes them drop organic parts such as blood or claws, which can then be sold or traded at the Order of the Cull, a mysterious group that exchanges nether viscera for gear. The order can also craft weapons from nether bones, once you gather enough severed parts.

Tough enough to take out the nether reaper? Get ready for a fight.

More dangerous than the nethers are the human players who populate the world with you. Encounters with players are rarely analogous to those in other survival games such as DayZ, where you can consider teaming up with people, or tie them up and force-feed them any noxious chemicals in the area if you're feeling especially sadistic. But there is still a chance for a budding friendship in that harsh world. Not once, however, in my entire 30-hour run in Nether did I experience a confrontation that did not result in one player trying to immediately kill another; the game is the epitome of the "kill or be killed" axiom. Especially frustrating are times when snipers camp just outside the protective sphere surrounding safe zones and pick off players just as their protection timer reaches zero. Shouting "friendly," the multiplayer-game-wide attempt at offering an olive branch of peace, is generally rewarded with a hail of gunfire. Camaraderie is rarely experienced, even during in-game missions.

On occasion, Nether starts a timed mission and places you randomly on the map. You receive periodic warnings of a nether surge in need of clearing or an escort package to deliver. The game's version of a boss, the nether reaper, a massive and shockingly fast beast, also appears at times, providing a challenge for veteran players or groups. If you join a clan, you can take out one of many strategically placed clan strongholds in a mode that mimic's Battlefield 4's Conquest mode. These missions can put Nether experts through their paces, and the game suggests grouping up to complete them. Unless you play with friends, or manage to band a small team together, however, players' general proclivity toward violence in Nether makes working collectively to complete missions difficult.

It's unfortunate that the immersion is so often broken by nagging issues, coupled with the reality of Nether's clearly unfinished state.

Worst of all are the times defenses in safe zones drop and you must reactivate pieces of machinery to get them back up. The game, it seems, expects players to work together in this dire time of need. But with defenses gone, people are free to shoot each other indiscriminately. So you can get where this is leading. Only once in several instances did I witness players working together with the goal of reviving the safe zone. Every other time was a massacre, and only the smartest (or fastest) players were able to get out before being gunned down.

I found that having enough people in a server was necessary for enjoyment, however. Sure, a fellow player who offers a friendly wave in a safe zone might later greet you with that hand tightly wrapped around the grip of a gun. But without the tension that can only be delivered by random encounters with actual living players, the game devolves into a long and uneventful trek through austere scenery. I enjoyed exploring the game's environments, but I eventually got bored and went on the hunt for populated servers when the one I inhabited began to droop.

Band together to take on missions, and hope you don't get betrayed.

To survive in the hostile world of Nether, you must equip yourself with the proper tools. Guns and melee weapons are not in short supply, though the former requires you to collect parts. Weapon parts, such as grips, barrels, and scopes, are found in containers located in the environment. When the parts are gathered, you can take them to a weapon crafter in any of the safe zones, where your brand-new gun will be assembled for free. Nether sports a wide variety of guns, from the always reliable 9mm Smith & Risley pistol, to a diverse selection of rifles and shotguns.

You start out with a basic knife, but to face tougher enemies, a stronger melee weapon is crucial. Melee weapons are sometimes found intact in some containers, but I was partial to purchasing them for a reasonable fee. Close-range combat is enjoyable, and you can feel the weight behind each swing of a machete or baseball bat. But guns are on the opposite end of the spectrum. They are powerful, but far too accurate, and they demonstrate next to nothing in the way of recoil. The guns bear more resemblance to weapons found in arena shooters, and fired bullets can be dodged by jumping around like a rabbit--a tactic adopted by veteran Nether players.

Completing missions and delivering packages awards you with cash and experience points. The experience points are used to bolster specific skills, such as stamina, accuracy, or melee damage. The game also awards you with a cash and experience point booster for every half an hour you're alive. And as is par for the course, rising in level is another joy that Nether likes to snatch away. Dying takes you back down to zero, which adds a lot of pressure the higher your level climbs. Going from level 25 back down to zero is frustrating, but luckily leveling up doesn't take much time. However, the constant sting of progression loss begins to have a numbing effect, and earning levels is quickly deprived of any gratification. You also have an account level, which isn't lost at death, but it advances far more slowly; I managed about one level per two hours. The account level adds permanent status boosters, and offers cash bonuses.

Only once in several instances did I witness players working together with the goal of reviving the safe zone.

Money can be spent on gear or food, or on cosmetic items such as masks, some of which pay homage to pop culture icons. Nether also includes a system in which you can exchange real-world money for nether gold, and you can buy special game packages from the Steam store that include this special currency. The gold does not go toward weapons, however, only cosmetic items; it's included for those who are too impatient to save up money to cosplay as Deadpool or the Master Chief.

Nether plays host to a number of glitches and irritating hang-ups. The game's engine isn't well optimized, and even if your computer is used to high-tier games, it will still struggle to render Nether's world. You can't swim, at least not in any traditional sense. Trying to tread water found in the western fields can get you hopelessly stuck, and drowning is an agonizingly slow process. If you need to bypass channels, you must hit the water while jumping to mimic the act of swimming. If you emerge alive, the water blurs your vision with a blue filter that lasts for around five seconds. Worse than that are sticking keys, which once caused me to accidentally walk out of a hole on the side of a multistory sky scraper. If you're up to the task, you can seek out Nether's infamous dune buggy, which has, uh, a few kinks that need to be ironed out. One you find it, the warning "USE AT YOUR OWN RISK" pops up onscreen. Some players have dubbed it the "buggy buggy," because driving it is a glitch-infused nightmare.

Safe zones offer brief sanctuary against nethers and enemy players.

Regardless of everything that drags the game down, Nether provides some compelling moments and creates stories to share. Some of my favorite tales are composed of times I felt the desire to leave the streets and travel to my destination using the often underused subway system. The silence in the tunnels was therapeutic after the tension on the surface, for a time. In the subway, flickering lights supplement the lonely sound of your footsteps, which is abruptly broken by noise from the surface. Just above your head comes the sound of screeching demons, followed by the sharp crack of gunfire and then silence. The reality of the situation is enough to snap you back into focus, as it must, because soon the tunnel ends, and you once again have to face the light.

Such moments are fleeting, however, and dissipate just as you get accustomed to their sudden, yet welcome, company. Nether is noticeably unfinished, and has a lot of work ahead before it resembles a solid game. But it has a discernible spark of life. There is potential for it to become a game worthy of attention. The environment it presents is huge, and the grayed-out portions of the map serve to tease you with even more areas to explore, and stories to create, in its bleak, abysmal, yet interesting world. If only it can learn to stop tripping over its own feet.

View the original article here

GRID Autosport Review

The tone has changed with Grid Autosport. Gone is the raucous, obtrusive, personality-sapping hullabaloo of the poorly conceived and painfully stereotypical "dude bro" aesthetic that characterised Grid 2, replaced by something altogether more subtle. Here's a game that simply asks: what kind of racing driver do you want to be? There's no overarching narrative here, no attempt to coat Career mode in the kind of shallow, scrawny narrative that even the writers of Jack Reacher would be embarrassed to publish. Autosport is about the cars, the tracks, and the opponents.

To that end, variety and choice are placed front and centre right from the off. As with previous Grid games' Career modes, Autosport's brings together a disparate mix of event types under a single umbrella, giving you plenty of options for reaching professional racing stardom. Touring car events, street races, nighttime endurance slogs, time trial runs, and showboating drift sessions are all here and waiting to be conquered; the frequency with which you partake in any given event comes down to how you're feeling at the time.

These event types are split into five distinct categories that are progressed through independently of one another. The touring discipline is defined by wheel-to-wheel racing, with cars bumping into each other regularly as they attempt to race three abreast around a corner. Endurance sees you racing at night in longer races that force you to look after your tyres. Open-wheel places you in what are essentially underpowered Formula One cars (think Formula Three and Formula Renault). Tuner focuses on high-powered Japanese imports and American muscle, while street events take place on fictional circuits around famous cities.

At the start of each season within Career mode, you're asked to pick a discipline. Once you've completed that season, you can move on to a new discipline or stick with the same one. The promise is that once you've experienced each of the different categories, you can specialise in a single one and dedicate yourself to fully mastering it. However, doing so restricts your ability to partake in the game's most prestigious competitions.

Gone is the raucous, obtrusive, personality-sapping hullabaloo of the poorly conceived and painfully stereotypical "dude bro" aesthetic that characterised Grid 2.

You gain experience points for each discipline independently, but only once you've hit a certain level in all of them can you enter the Grid Championship Series events. Unfortunately, this means that in Career mode, you can't opt to play Autosport as just a street racing game or a touring car game--you must indulge in all of the career's facets at some point in order to beat it. The championship events themselves cover all of the included disciplines, so not being suitably practiced in each is a major disadvantage.

This represents a problem. With so many different car and race types on offer, there are sure to be one or two that you don't enjoy. Personally, I'm not a fan of the fiddly drift events or the awkward handling of the American muscle cars, but there's no way to avoid engaging with them if I want to enter and win the championship races. Portions of play, therefore, become a grind. You undertake seasons that you actually want to play, followed by working out the fastest way to level up in the events you don't like in order to unlock new content as quickly as possible.

Open-wheel races require more patience on the throttle and more discipline in sticking to the racing line.

As a general rule, the fastest way to earn experience points is to increase the difficulty. Setting the AI on hard, removing the racing line from the track, turning off traction control and forcing yourself to play using only the in-car cockpit cameras sees your level rise rapidly. Conversely, if you're new to racing games, then you'll want to play with assists on full (in particular, I recommended cosmetic car damage) in order to finish in a respectable position. Finishing first on the easiest difficulty settings earns you more points than finishing last using the most testing, after all.

No matter the difficulty setting, however, you must be open to learning how cars operate within the different disciplines. Touring cars tend to be extremely forgiving, reasonably withstanding knocks with opponents and barriers, and they let you brake late into corners and even perform small drifts without losing too much speed. In contrast, open-wheeled vehicles require more precision, because it's far easier to lose control by applying too much power too early when exiting a corner, while their more fragile chassis often mean bumps are terminal.

You undertake seasons that you actually want to play, followed by working out the fastest way to level up in the events you don't like in order to unlock new content as quickly as possible.

Make no mistake about it, though: Autosport is not a simulation racer. None of the disciplines require an enormous amount of work to get to grips with, making the game genuinely accessible and fairly simple for veteran racing game players to surmount. In particular, braking and handling are more responsive than you would expect from a real car.

The AI drivers feel human and diverse. Drivers have different personalities; some are daring and liable to attempt risky overtaking moves, while others drive in a more conservative manner until they've got open road in front of them. Resultantly, Autosport never suffers from a lack of drama. Almost every race sees cars hitting one another and reacting to unpredictable maneuvers, adding a sense of exaggerated tension, because you never quite know when and from where the next danger might come.

For touring car and street races, the AI's approach works great, making the two disciplines the most endearing and memorable of the bunch since cars are usually tightly grouped and tussling for position from start to finish. Unfortunately, for open-wheeled and endurance events, the AI is less impressive. The AI doesn't react differently across the disciplines, making races requiring finesse and precision instead feel messy. In one instance, I had to restart the same open-wheel race eight times (no exaggeration) because there was, without fail, a multiple-car pileup on the first corner thanks to one or more drivers acting too aggressively.

In order to master drift events, you must get to grips with cars that are extremely twitchy, the backend flying out wildly at the slightest opportunity.

In the end, I decided that the only option was to hang back and drive across the grass to avoid trouble, losing time on the leaders but keeping my car intact. Stronger AI could have provided a more realistic front for the technical disciplines, and would have helped make each event feel more unique, limiting the instances such as this in which it's almost impossible to continue to suspend your disbelief.

This failing is possibly a byproduct of Autosport's exhaustive approach. There are a number of nice extra features that similar games have shied away from: split-screen multiplayer, for example, and an online component that is entirely separate from the single-player, which means there are essentially two games to progress through. Play it for a few hours, and the cracks begin to show, though. They're not game-breaking, but they are abrasive, and they dull the shine of the early portions of the game. If you're up for some casual racing, Autosport is a decent option, but when you go deep, the experience is soured by the finer details.

View the original article here