The Red Solstice (Early Access)

On Mars, everyone can hear you scream - regardless of distance. When you die anyway.

And you will die a LOT in this cooperative, top down shooter. There are currently only three maps, but they are huge and the missions (and secondary missions if you choose to activate them) pop up in semi-random spots for your team of space marines to hunt down. There are different suits you can use as you level up, and again proficiency in each suit lets you use more abilities from it.

There's a long list of abilities but you can only bring four with you each time. Fortunately you can assign and unassign points to each of those "components" as you like during the game. For example I like the Assault suits "knife" ability but if I need to be shooting stuff I can remove points from there and put it into something gun related. It's a bit messy but useful. Also messy but useful is the inventory. While you can only bring two weapons each player can carry up to six items that you find while scavenging on the field.

There's quite a large variation of "stuff" out there from medkits, bandages, and ammo to flares and a variety of explosives which all behave differently. There's also no tool tips on how any of those work in game so it comes down to trial and error and the occasional friendly fire incident.

Oops. Didn't mean to nuke the team. Soz guys.

That aside, while running the missions (which are easy enough on their own) the main enemy comes in the form of monsters originating from somewhere beneath the surface. They come in ever increasing waves from clearly marked spawn points but there are some that just can spawn out of the ground any where, much to the ire of people that like to establish strong defensible spots. Kinda pointless if enemy units can freely skip all your turrets, sandbags and mines.

I quite like that "darkness" is a thing in this game. Shooting enemies in the dark makes half your shots from already hard to find ammo miss, making lighted areas and flares of great importance. This is on top of the huge monsters later on that you simply will not have enough fire power to deal with (unless you brought 7 allies with you).

What I don't like is the player respawn system. If you die, you have to wait 2 minutes before re-appearing. There's currently a bug where sometimes you instantly die when you try to respawn making you wait another 2 minutes. Oh, and you can only respawn twice. Die a third time and you might be spending up to an hour just watching your team mates instead of playing with them. That is bad design in my book.  Currently I give this game two out of five bullets.

Dead Island: Epidemic (Beta)

I knew Cinnamon lived through the events of the first game! Now he's on the island of Amaia spreading more disease!

I'm... not sure what happened to the Dead Island franchise here. This isn't a first person shooter like the previous games were, instead it has some top down, cartoony view where the zombies are no longer even scary. I suppose they embraced this silliness given that my chosen character has an "ultimate skill" where he shoots ducks from the air which crash down and explode in a circle, dealing massive damage to enemies. I was going to say undead, but this seems to be designed as a PvP 6 vs 6 machine which sees opposing scavenger teams fight each other for food, medicines and toilet paper.

Since I dislike PvP my opinion is obviously slanted against that, but it this was gifted to me so I thought I'd go ahead and try out the "Prototype" PvE missions which (after the single player tutorial ones) seem to be based on one map with a safety caravan in the middle guarded by solar powered turrets and one dude who sends the team to each of the four corners to do some random objective, often involving retrieving supplies (or less frequently, NPC people).

Completing said tasks awards you with various scraps and blueprints of things you can make with those scraps. Your character can only take 2 weapons with him per mission and can't switch during its course - (un)fortunately this means they don't ever break. What this really feels like though is a shop - not a game. The pay to win is strong in this one where you can buy more characters, gear, so on an so forth making what I'd think would be a pretty big gap in PvP but hey, people must like it. Maybe the curb stomp between a free player and a paid up to his eyeballs player isn't as bad as I think? I'll never know.

Cheapest prices in all of Amaia! Tell all your friends!

Keep in mind this is still in Beta as I type this though. Plenty of opportunity for it to improve, the question is when? I give Dead Island: Epidemic half a zombie hit by a duck out of five. In its current state I also can't recommend it to anyone as I'm sure there are better games that do what it offers out there.

Update: As of 23 July 2015, there are more characters for people to spend money on but not much else. Coop game is still in "Prototype" and the entire thing is still labelled as "Beta". Seems to me this game is as dead as the zombies it features.

Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno

The fight scenes are fricking awesome. Let's get that out of the way at the start! :P

Continuing on from his encounter with Jin-E, Kenshin continues to reside at the Kamiya Dojo with the Kenshin-Gumi but just like the anime is soon asked to go stop one Shishio Makoto and his "Ten Swords" from doing terrorist activities as payback for that time the government literally back stabbed him and tried to burn him. In this version though, the Saitou vs Kenshin fight doesn't happen since that sort of occurred in the previous movie and they are now allies.

Did you miss me?

Aoshi appears instead, but is always one step behind Kenshin who he is hunting for similar yet different reasons from the anime. He is somewhat more of a douchebag in this reincarnation. Yes, I didn't think it was possible either. :P Also missing is the "fire flies" scene which has been altered and doesn't have as much of an impact as it did in the anime. To be fair, also missing are the gazillion fillers in the anime that took the time to build the whole Kenshin and Kaoru thing up before that point. Acting wise my only problems are with Cho (over acting) and the wailing child extra. I ... guess he's a good wailer?

There are quite a few minor changes in the story but for the most part it goes how one expects, up until the end that is - where there's a major plot shift to open into the next movie. I didn't find this one as good as the previous movie (only because of the "to be continued" thing) but it's pretty close and very enjoyable - especially to Kenshin fans. You may want to watch the first movie first though if you haven't already, as this is more "The Empire Strikes Back" part of the trilogy. Personally, I can't wait to see the next one! ^_^

Shadow Warrior (2013)

There is a demon apocalypse and only one man can stop it! Erm... and the Space Marine from Doom is not available... *cough*

This remake of the original Shadow Warrior game is, in a word - fantastic. The graphics are beautiful (which is weird for a FPS), the action is fast paced, the controls easily mastered, the plot better than decent and the comedy top notch. Well, for low brow comedy that is. I mean the hero is named Lo Wang after all. Throughout the game you can power him and his many weapons up however you like - I played on Insane and didn't get enough to unlock everything so that means it all comes down to your preferred style of play.

There are two features that really sucked me in this game, the first of which is the sword. I -LOVE- melee, and the way they have done it here is awesome as the katana can become uber powerful if you put your skill points in that area. There is less, hide behind cover and shoot, and more crazy hectic evading that keeps your heart rate up. The second one is that your left hand can be controlled independently of your right. Using a rocket launcher? That's cool, you can still swing your sword with your other hand. Or you can akimbo some uzis. Or you can be using a healing spell while hacking stuff with your sword (that was me, most of the game).

Blood and Gore is a plus!

As expected the game play is quite linear but there is ample opportunity to explore to find secret areas but the main problems come from two spots which turns the game into a chore instead of an exciting experience. The first is ALL THE BOSS FIGHTS. They are damage sponges, who face you in spots where ammo spawns freely because the creators knew this and thought it was a good idea. End result is repetitive dullness. People need to learn that bosses need not be damage sponges. A fast fight where you die or they die in a few hits is WAY more effective (like the final zone in Mission 16, where you fight waves of demons - that is challenging but fun).

The other spot I didn't like is Mission 13. In previous levels I was averaging around 30 minutes to clear but slowly this timer kept increasing after every stage. Mission 13 is the culmination of "lets make a long level for no reason other than making it long". 2 hours to clear for me. It's not even because there are hard fights, it was simply because the level design is so expansive, like someone didn't get the memo of keeping things short and to the point. The fights themselves didn't help since it was the same configuration of bad guys just in different rooms - Them in a circle room. Them in a hall way. Them in a lobby with stair well. Really? In MMOs the term for that is GRINDY.

Lo Wang, you are an improvement over your predecessor but failed to reach total enlightenment - I give you 4 out of 5 demon hearts.

Thomas Was Alone

Can a square think outside the box? Thomas definitely tries!

At its heart, this game is a rather tame puzzle platformer (at least compared to Super Meat Boy) that has taken the odd but graphically less taxing path of using squares and rectangles of different colors as the main characters. Art wise I like that despite this, there is still dynamic lighting and most of the levels are tilted slightly. There is also decent piano music and very good narration that helps the player understand what is going on from the otherwise featureless world.

Can you feel the excitement?

While this does help it stand out there are many times that flow just doesn't make sense. That sort of breaks the deal for me as its almost like the Narrator is blatantly lying to the audience at parts, or is just as lost as to why people... *ahem* blocks... keep getting separated story wise and not just because the next stage is designed for so and so. For me, this game was a good idea that didn't get seen through to the end. I give it 2 out of 5 angles, and cannot really give it my recommendation to anyone.

Zombicide Season 2: Prison Outbreak

I got this cooperative board game as an early Christmas present and so far, I am having a blast trying to survive in the exciting (and terrifying) zombie apocalypse theme it creates. With nine double sided, interchangeable boards, around 80 good quality figurines, and 11 grueling missions that come with the game I can see that it will be keeping us busy for quite some time. The ever increasing and mostly shambling zombie horde also handle themselves, which is a big plus - meaning no one is stuck as an antagonistic game master.

You just get stuck with antagonistic zombies. :P

Players have a choice from 6 characters who have differing abilities from each other and from their "Zombivor" version - what you turn into if you get wounded twice by any zombie. You are still on the same team, but your character has traits that lead them to be more violent instead of traits that let them move around more for example.

While maps offer a suggested playtime length, I suggest you ignore those because I've clocked my current games of 4 and 5 people going as long as a game of Eldritch Horror, especially on maps with many tiles. Setup time is slightly shorter though. Also, having scenarios spelled out in the book is great as it has gives an overall story as you play through the vastly different missions. As fun as it is, there are two big flaws in the game for me and I will go into both of them right now:

Player Elimination

If you take five wounds while in Zombivor mode you are out of the game. While we have come really close to it, this hasn't happened in any of our play throughs yet. However, I can see that if it does that whoever is eliminated is not going to hang around for x hours while the rest of the mission plays on. Even Eldritch Horror with its high mortality rate lets you respawn as someone else (unless you run out of characters) to keep all players really invested and often only in the end game does it kill people off permanently.

Ranged Combat

The above might have been an oversight but this here is plain stupidity. Say I am shooting into a tile that has a friendly character and zombies. I roll the dice and discover I hit six times. Each hit will hit the friendly character(s) first until they are dead before I start hitting zombies. Doesn't matter if there's one zombie or 70 zombies, you will hit your allies first (unless you have the sniper perk). I wouldn't mind if it was a chance to hit friendlies like if your rolls had 1 or 2's or something but a guaranteed 100% to hit your allies regardless of which direction you are shooting from, or elevation (shoot from towers) is just stupid. The result is guns being almost useless in tight quarters.

Other than that this is a really fun game and one that will make the hours fly by as you and your team work out how to complete each objective while minimizing casualties. I give it 4 chainsaws out of 5!

Score after re-review: 3 chainsaws out of 5.

As an aside: Finally won a game of Forbidden Desert starting on Elite level! Not sure how we pulled that off but it sure felt great! :D

Vindictus: Reapers of the Twilight Desert

[This is part of my Vindictus tutorials.]
 
More tips today but these are more for a Kai/ranged type.

If you haven't felt the grind in this game so far, you are certainly going to feel it now with the amount of times you are going to be sent into this otherwise pretty place. If only it wasn't full of undead! For a solo Kai, all the reaper bosses (anything wearing a hood) are easy prey. They move slow, use attacks you've seen many times before, and shooting them in the face does a lot of damage.

I do have to give special mention to the ones that summon other spirits or hell gates which spawn more spirits. Kill the adds (or hell gates themselves) to make it easier. Also the one that summons hell gates has an over hand scythe chop followed by a 360 degree "magic laser". Evade the scythe then evade left as the laser nears you. You can dodge right too, but you'll need to dodge the laser twice that way.

I keep losing my shoes. :/

The crab at the oasis is exactly the same one at the Ship Graveyard. This time you have a huge oasis to run around too, and since the crab gets confused if lured to the South end of it you can dance with it (walk forward, shoot, back off, repeat) or simply magnum it when it gets stuck until it dies.

The circle marks the spot.

The other guardian guys (apart from the rather stout and easy Judge Vakram) pose a harder challenge though, as they can all sprint into melee range quickly and have a range of combos to hack you up with. Fortunately they are all mostly skipable.

Unfortunately the worst of them, Commander Ikrium, is the subject of many quests including the main story. This guy can be annoying with his seemingly undodgable giant seeking ball and equally bad sword combos. Strafe backwards and around to avoid his trinity slash (it's like the pirate captain's one but bigger, faster and more painful),  and dodge FORWARD to avoid his magic missile orb. He also puts sand mines that detonate after awhile - just get distance from them and dodge the blast as it comes. You'll have to use best judgement when it comes to the rest of his melee sword skills.