Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls Ultimate Evil Edition

'We each are our own devil, and we make this world our hell.'.

When the initial news of Diablo 3 appeared, I was highly skeptical that Blizzard could deliver a product that would exceed the greatness of the previous 2 games.

Lets face it. Diablo 1 created a brand new genre that took the very best elements from some of the greatest games and fused it into an awesome success. The sequel didn't just take things a step further, it transcended all expectations and took the game to an entirely new level.

With all the improvements and innovations delivered in Diablo 2, it was exceedingly hard to imagine being able to top such a monster hit. And with the advent of so-called 'new gen' games which saw some of the worst titles ever released for more than a decade, one would be forgiven to pass judgement on Diablo 3 even before it hit the stores.

How wrong I was.

I was ashamed to make such a hasty call on a company that only had 3 franchises on their portfolio. And all three were immensely popular due to Blizzards minute attention to detail & creative innovations.

Diablo 3 was, in fact, a highly addictive romp through familiar plots and landscapes. The oldest story ever told, didn't seem to get gamey after all these years.

Reaper of Souls is a long anticipated expansion set that follows the grand tradition that started with Diablo 2. This expansion brings forth a slew of improvements, additions and tons of fun.

First is the addition of a whole new act which continues the story after the end of Diablo 3. Act 5 introduces brand new territory along with a new collection of demonic denizens.

Next is the introduction of a new playable character class, the Crusader. This holy warrior bears some resemblance to the Paladin class of old but is designed for medium and long ranged battle.

The voice acting for the Crusader is rather exceptional. Its skill tree a balance between aggression and buffs. The Crusader is a lone warrior who makes a fabulous addition to co-op game play as much as it can fend on its own. It also has a range of class specific weapons that are a thrill to play with.

New locations are strewn across all 5 stages in the new Act. There are no assets being reused from the vanilla edition. Overall, the graphics have been improved and everything simply looks better.

In addition to the awesome additions in this ultimately evil edition is the inclusion of a new mode of play. Adventure mode allows gamers to play in randomly selected maps with specific goals to meet. Some maps may require for players to defeat all enemies or fight with a special boss. The rewards are more than worthwhile but its best left for the players to find that out.

A new loot system has been included. Now players are awarded valuable class specific drops after defeating a certain number of enemies or boss fiends. New souped up monsters will make their appearance after certain conditions are met introducing a brand new element of surprise for the returning stalwarts.

The challenge has also been overhauled with the inclusion of new levels of difficulty that will tax even the most battle hardened veterans. The Paragon system has also been revamped with a new level cap to accommodate the new degree of challenges.

Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls is indeed a massive expansion that delivers more fun, action and an excuse to be whisked away to that old twisted,  menacing world once again.

I, for one, shall never again be so quick to pass judgement on Blizzard. They have truly outdone themselves.

Categories: blizzard, Diablo 3, reaper of souls, ultimate evil edition

WAGS : Shadowrun Returns

A return to Fallout's Turn-Based Tactical Combat 

Currently on a Midweek Madness Sale on Steam is Shadowrun Returns for only RM7.75* (around USD 2.39. Normal price RM31 or USD 9.56)! Originally I was going to post a review for another game, but this mad deal took precedence. Honestly, the things I do for you people even though I'm not getting paid.

If you've missed turn-based tactical combat simulators like the original Fallout series, or the much less gritty Final Fantasy Tactics, Shadowrun Returns is, well, a return to form. Quite a simplified one too, as it turns out.

Graphics and Sound

Shadowrun Returns is clean and simple from top to bottom, except for the maps which are appropriately gritty and generally unclean - you are, after all, in a dystopian setting. Neon bright colours are the norm and clear iconography makes it pretty clear what each button does. 

It's like Vegas out there

In-game, the information you need is laid out clearly for you to find, and all else is found by pressing the giant power button on the top-left or pressing the Escape key. In it, you'll find your character screen, inventory, and menu functions.

The background music is pretty standard stuff. It sets the mood appropriately with an unobtrusive synth and fade of dark rock. Most times you won't even notice it, and even if you do you could do your laundry or cook a meal with it playing in the background. You might even be more attentive and wary while doing so and not miss the piece of paper in the back pocket of your jeans that will eventually get shredded by the washing machine.


Character Creation

The game is honest enough about the fact that what you choose isn't set in stone, with a "meh, I'll pick my own skills" option. Each class is really a low-level preset that you can override later in the game anyway.

Character creation is almost purely cosmetic (except for race that gives you a small perk for each), and you'll even be given an option as to what sort of demeanour you portray. Letting you choose between options such as academic, cop, or gang member does next-to-nothing to your dialogue choices except for specific instances where it might be useful (helpfully greyed out so that you'd just wish you had chosen to go at it like a cop. As far as I can tell there aren't any side quests or missions that become intensely tricky without the right attitude, so go ahead and choose something you'd likely find useful once or twice in the game.

My choice of character stems from my desire for a glorious beard

Abilities are a lot more useful, and don't fret at the amount of Karma you get at the beginning, Karma is quite generously given to you as the game progresses. Contrary to it's name you do not get (much) more Karma from being nice as far as I can tell, so go ahead and do feel free to be a dick to the few NPC's that you meet.

Gameplay

Perhaps referring Fallout and Final Fantasy Tactics at the beginning was a little misleading, because Shadowrun Returns is not an open-world for you to explore, it's a story that you play out. As such there is no back tracking to previous stages or places so that you can fully explore the place or complete side quests, not that there are many. It's quite a shame because the maps are decently sized and full of graphical detail.

One day I too will open a bar called Tail and Ale

It's rare that you will find open lockers or random rooms where you find extra cash or sellables to pick up and hawk to the merchants you'll find along the way. In fact there is no sell function at all. Bought something you regret and there's nothing you can do but let it rot in your stash where it'll live out it's unfulfilling life till you visit it again (probably 2 minutes after never). Thankfully your stash is infinite. Most of the pickups you'll find come from the handful of pick up points (helpfully highlighted with an icon so that you can't miss it) or from wearing out dialogue options in things you'd need to look through anyway.

Turn-based combat is almost exactly as you'd expect it to work, except in general most actions cost 1 AP and most turns you get 2-3 AP. So firing a rifle and smacking someone in the head costs the exact same amount of AP. As such, I haven't found a reasonable advantage of having a handgun except to save on reloads (which, admittedly, is actually great tactical advice).

Perk - ammo is unlimited. The downside is that melee combat is effectively advantageless. It costs the same amount of AP and there is no minimum range for ranged weapons so you can unload your clip into an enemy right in front of you and not worry about losing accuracy.

Narrative

The main story is a film-noir crime solvency with guns and magic, a recipe for potential disaster and nerd-gasms alike.  Thankfully, the people who wrote it knew to tread lightly.

Unlike Fallout, there is no false-pretense for sex, because there isn't any, period.

The writing of the franchise is solid, especially so for this game. If you're not the reading type this game may not be worth the full price of admission to you, but if you are be prepared to be immersed. Characters are believable and somewhat endearing as much as they are sometimes stereotypical, but the melting pot of cultures is quite something to behold. It's not an epic thriller, but it's engaging.

Plot wise, however, it's somewhat simplistic. While I'm not suggesting that it's weak, it isn't anywhere close to the bone-chilling revelations of Andrew Ryan. It's not terrible, just linear enough that your cries of "I totally saw that coming" will be met with "everybody else did". The reveal is also quite lack lustre, but at least the story is believable and entertaining in it's own right.

Replayability
That being said, re-playability is not necessarily an issue with a thriving online community of modders and writers. The Steam Workshop and shadowrunners at large create downloadable content that seem to be of pretty good quality. It obviously takes a bit of time and an eye for these sorts of things, but considering that most, if not all, of these additional stories are free, I'd say Shadowrun Returns is definitely a very replayable medium that storytellers can make use of.

"How could you not like a girl like that?"

Verdict
If you're a fan of narratives as I am, Shadowrun Returns is certainly something you could use to pass more time than you could possibly imagine. Despite certain gameplay quirks and a lack of any real trade I could see this being a worthwhile purchase even if you miss the Midweek Madness sale.

4 Stars

Vinsant Huang is every bit your hardcore gamer, or at least he was until corporate life tied it's bitter noose around his neck. His highest achievement is attaining Ambassador in World of Warcraft, and it involved countless hours of grinding and coffee. To be honest, he's not that proud he did it.

* Steam recently introduced pricing in Ringgit Malaysia, and I've not been able to figure out how to change it back to see if they round up or down. It doesn't matter either way. In general  USD 5 hovers around the regions of RM15, so a little give or take doesn't and shouldn't mean too much.

Categories: 2013, fallout, Shadowrun, turn based, Vinsant

WAGS : Project Root on Steam

(Weekly Affordable Games on Steam)
A game of lasers, reflexes, and a story that you won't care about

I discovered Steam through their incessant sale pitches, indie games, and a wide plethora of cheap games from new and small developers to the big boys of the gaming business.

For this ultimate gaming exercise I will (try to) be buying and reviewing games on steam that are under 5 USD (about the price you'd pay for a pirated game DVD) so that you can figure out if you should buy it or spend it on a Grande frappucino at your local Starbucks.

And off we go!
We kick off with Project Root (was* on sale for USD 2.49, normal price USD 9.99 – which is still not a lot) a top-down, side to side scroller arcade shoot-em-up similar to Raiden and Skyforce, married to a freedom of mobility to explore and shoot up the available maps in each quest.

Graphics and Sound

Project Root is pretty. Graphics are neat, menus are spiffy and created clearly with consoles in mind. PC Gamers don't lose out much in the looks department, although the game will graphically show that you should press the ABXY buttons. Pressing these on your keyboard does nothing but make you question your life's choices.

Start the mission and the ugliest part of the game appears, the cutscenes that deliver the dialogue. At best it is the fuel and catalyst that inspires each of us to hit skip as many times as necessary to never have to read it again.

How do you fit those boobs in that outfit? Science.

Once you're in, though, the game rapidly fixes your perception of it's graphics. It's not gorgeously rendered, but it looks good and is smooth on my budget rig. Lasers, bullets, and missiles are colourful and pleasant to look at (until you remember that you're supposed to dodge them). The music doesn't change much and soon just gets lost in the heat of your dog fighting.

If you ever have quiet moments in the game, the repeating music will simply make you want to hunt down more enemies to kill, anything to take your mind off it - which may have been the point.

Have I mentioned the explosions? They're glorious. Even Arnie movies should take inspiration from these Bayesian wonders.

I don't even care that it's unrealistic. It's pretty!

Narrative Quality (or lack thereof)

To be honest, I still have no idea what the background of the game is. Remember the monologue? Well I don't. Something about a big corporation and you - the badly drawn man with vengeance on his mind. The story is given to you in the afore-mentioned flatly coloured story panels and unnatural facial expressions, and you're supposed to read the boring dialogue that comes up for a sense of it. I'm normally intrigued by narrative and will read to understand the characters. I gave up after the first mission to preserve my sense of self.

A lack of voice acting also means that you're given contextual dialogue in a small box in the lower right of the screen. Mostly comprising, "come back to base. No wait, go check out that odd reading on the radar", or "His death won't be in vain". Thing is, most of this dialogue happens in real time, which means you have to choose between reading the torrid dialogue and surviving (hint: It's not a hard choice, honestly).

"Not now, woman! Holy Fuuuuuu-"

You know what? All this doesn't matter, I assume, as your objectives are always clearly presented to you in the top right. Plus, story isn't why you're buying this game – action is.

Gameplay

Controlling your craft is a little bit of a science. Since it's a top-down shooter you have to master strafing and changing direction in a similar fashion with the old school game Asteroids to avoid the deluge of bullets that will be trying to murder you from all sides. This is confounded somewhat by the fact that you can't see what's behind you, which I don't have too much of an issue with considering that in an actual craft you can't really see behind you either.

Another realistic aspect is the difference between shooting down aerial foes and ground targets. The game assumes most enemies that are engaging you in the air are level with you, so accuracy isn't paramount. Once you've gotten the hang of aiming where the bullets should be vs where the enemy is, it's quite easy to just strafe and pray it eventually hits something.

Once you get to ground targets, that becomes a little more tricky. Since you're not level with your ground targets, accuracy becomes more important. Your bullets (missiles? lasers?) will hit only where you aim, and since you and your target could be moving at differing speeds, it becomes more challenging to nail them down. It adds a level of difficulty to the gameplay that you won't get in many other games.

I died at least twice to take this screen grab. The tank was fine. You're welcome.

This is further confounded by the fact that most of the special weapons you can pick up are Air only weapons. So you could clear the skies around you with a couple of charges, but unless you have the missiles that hit everything, ground enemies can still shred you to pieces.

So far, I've clocked 2 hours of game play and I've died more than my fair share. You get a set amount of lives each round and there are powerups that grant you extra lives, repairs, and energy shields to prolong your life just enough. A small annoyance is the insistence that you can only have one special weapon at a time, but it's negated by the fact that they appear fairly often.

Addictive Replays?

It's a little hard to be talking about replayability considering that I haven't even come close to finishing the game, but with increasing difficulty, repetitive movements (there really are only so many ways you can dodge bullets on a 2D plane) and very little by way of ship upgrades for you to choose from (there aren't any other ships you can buy, you can't buy different weapons, you can't even opt for a different paint job), I can't see this being a game you'd come back to on a daily basis if you have finished the game. Get your achievements, if you can**, and maybe you'll pop in once or twice a month for some gloriously exploding fun.

Verdict

Project Root is a decent game to pass time. It's visually attractive (except for the story panels), and very certainly a challenge you'll find yourself eager to power through, at least for the first few missions.

Rating

*Apologies. Due to this being my inaugural post, some delays were to be expected due to editorial constraints. At 2,.49 USD, this wasn't a bad purchase. For USD 9.99 there are better games out there.
**At the time of writing, Project Root has problems communicating your achievements to Steam. You'll earn them in game, but Steam won't know about it. I hope they fix that soon.

Vinsant Huang does Business Development from day to day when he's not being sucked into a narrative in some way or form.

Categories: Project, Root, Steam, Top Down, WAGS

Star Wars Commander: May you be Forced into a Rip Off

I have a deep fondness for Star Wars. As a kid, I loved it and even if Lucas was a dufus when it comes to making engaging games, I felt that he could have at least played some before licensing his name and universe to the highest bidder. Now that he's out of the business, makes you wonder what will Disney do to it.

Playdom, a mobile game developer, launched this game app to tap into the deep pockets of iOS users before it heads out to the Android platform but is it worth your time playing it?

It really depends on how you mean by playing. If you enjoy being ripped off by a Clash of the Clans clone then by all means, yes!

Let me digress. Many moons ago, a company named SuperCell thought of this medieval strategy game where people can battle one another all over the world. It was a freemium hit by some measure and loads of would be clones grew out of it. Playdom licensed the creative concept behind Star Wars and copied virtually everything about it in a aptly called strategy game called...you guesses it...Star Wars Commander.

In the game you get to play the rebel side or the Imperial side. No diff really except that you won't have any access to the heroes of the game which by far reside on the rebel side. If you side with the rebellion, you get Luke and Han Solo, Chewbacca and maybe even Obiwan. But the heroes from the dark side are some bold mechs, which are designed from the the Star Wars Imperial lore.

The game itself is based on the first installment of the series, which is on Tatooine. In it, you get to kick Tusken Raider ass and lay waste to anything remotely Imperial or Rebel.

Why Freemium is a Rip Off

There are three resources you need to complete the game...crystals, alloy metal and credits. Sounds like a plan but wait till you hit the paywall. Alloy and Credits can be easily harvested but not crystals. These you can only gain from the side missions. Crystals are useful for extending the length of protection on your ranch out in the desert and speed up deliveries of buildings and ordnance. The protection period is basically for you to ante up on should you fear some attack from a paying fool. To attack someone, you need to ante up with a payment of crystals so this in itself isn't free.

If you do get attacked, you will sustain minimum damage. However if you chose to revenge attack, then your protection is withdrawn and you can get hammered in the process. You could face a string of attacks, wave by wave but players so far are wary about paying those hard earned crystals for less than two minutes of mayhem.

There is also another caveat. If you attack someone to rob them, well they have a right to revenge attacks.

The crystals are costly to purchase. You can spend 100 bucks on it and that's way more I would pay for a game on a console. Worst of all, there is no completion level. The game soldiers on even if you stop paying to play. So your outpost in the desert will be a stark reminder of what sort of rancher you have been. To avoid being attacked, you can also choose to stay online busy building or doing something in the game screen. This will ward off any attacks. Such tricks mean that the attacker can never be revenge attacked.

There are periodic campaigns which offers you a chance to earn a different currency to redeem a different line of robots and troopers with a bazooka for the imperial army (god knows what you get on ther rebellion side, mini Yodas?). There are even more stuff along the way during the campaign, like the use of Hero characters to complete your campaign. This in itself becomes very murky because of a bug.

You can't select a hero for your squad all the time, and this hero is virtually useless in some of the side missions. The Hero can be used during attacks on another player but beyond that, it's uses are limited. Selecting a Hero character is a miss affair generally. If you have two Heroes on standby, the latest one made is offered up for battle without a choice.

What I don't like about the Game

You can't use the full resource of your army to attack. That's basically the one thing that disturbs me. I have a slew of forces but you don't get to choose the fighters you can use for an attack. Instead you have to 'manufacture' them for the mission and you need to plan ahead instead of just hitting the buy button.

The one thing that really stuck out was that when you get attacked, your own troops are busy wanking in the barracks and refuses to come out to fight. WTF? Instead you are encouraged to join a group of similar minded players. These players will donate troops to your outpost and you don't get to choose which troops either. Once you get attacked, these donated troops will do the defending. If they are 'pussy' ranked, they will get whipped. So you have been warned.

In any strategy game, you leave you worst troops behind and take the best one out to fight for you. Your poor quality troops are cannon fodder, with the outpost defences kicking in to destroy the enemy. This element is missing. So does it make sense to play a strategy game with your feet and hands tied behind your back?


What's more, your troop's AI are at the level of 'retard'. Instead of attacking buildings, they can be often seen shooting at barriers and taking a scenic route to their next target. You don't get to instruct them to attack which target at all. This makes for a difficult gameplay as the retards within your rank will rush out to get destroyed by cannon fire. The same goes for tanks and AT walkers, even though they are by AI program more attracted to certain types of buildings within an outpost and will not go after more valuable targets because that to them...does not 'compute'.

Lastly the game itself is riddled with bugs. There has been times when the revenge button doesn't even work, as it gives you Yoda like answers like....'Player cannot be found' alerts.

This is not a stable game to play with and you should not invest in anything more than your time on it. The bugs have caused Playdom to reset its servers and deliver a new update, which at this time is still bug ridden. I have had my own troops destroy my own tanks in a wonton act of rebellion...thanks to a bug in my system.

It might sound funny but I never thought a Star Wars remake of any kind would turn out to be a comedy. Make of that what you will.

rating:

Categories: Android, ios, mobile, star wars, strategy