Best OG: Hearthstone

Wizards of the Coast may have begun the trading card revolution, but Blizzard was the first to successfully digitalize it in a free-to-play format with Hearthstone. Blizzard boasts of over 100 million players as of November 2018, raking in over $40 million a year (earnings from 2017).

Hearthstone uses constructed decks consisting of 30 cards, as players tap into their powers, summoning creatures to destroy their opponents. The digital FTP format offers regular and ranked matches, expansion packs, arena battles, and single-play adventures.

Worst: Artifact

Artifact, developed by Valve Corporation, launched the first of December 2018 and was pounded with over 1500 negative reviews on Steam by the following day. Designed by MTG creator Richard Garfield, expectations were high upon Artifact’s launch.

Unlike other popular digital trading card games, Artifact is pay-to-win, creating a hostile flood of negative reviews. Using elements found in Valve’s battle arena game Dota 2, gamers and critics aren’t thrilled about the mechanics or the complexity of the game.

Best: MTG Arena

Taking a page from Blizzard’s handbook and customizing it towards their target audience, Wizards of the Coast is currently running a free-to-play digital trading card format for newbies and veterans in beta called MTG Arena. It’s simple to play, provides an abundance of rewards and opportunities for FTP players, beautifully designed, and hasn’t even officially launched yet (currently PC only).

Set to release in 2019, the beta version is open to all and is nothing like its predecessor Magic Online. Developers are consistently listening to fans and tweaking while Wizards enlists top streamers to develop their own arena style tournament play for short-term events.

Classic Trading Card Game With Issues: Pokémon TCG Online

Not many digital trading card games can boast of financial and pop-cultural success like Pokémon can. Launched in 2011 and arriving on Android devices in 2016 Pokémon TCG Online remains a classic amongst a sea of other digital and real-life trading card games.

Players can choose from a variety of modes, fighting either AI or other gamers with pre-constructed decks or originally designed ones. Pokémon TCG online is beloved mostly because of its name and loyal fans but has issues too, which aren’t getting resolved. From old cards becoming worthless to newbies having no idea how to play, Pokémon lives on in name only.

Best: Gwent

Officially released in fall of 2018, Gwent: The Witcher Card Game is a free-to-play digital card game developed and published by CD Projekt and is available on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Instead of using mana abilities like other digital card games, players must throw a card down each turn from a minimum deck of 25 cards.

Why is EA And Battlefront II Tanking?

Gwent uses Factions with “leaders” who have their own special abilities, separating themselves from the pack of mana-based strategies.

Best: The Elder Scrolls: Legends

Available on PC and Android, The Elder Scrolls: Legends is a free-to-play digital card game worth checking out. Playing with decks (50-100 cards) each player uses a variety of cards and runes to defeat their opponents.

Five play modes exist of which four are always available, allowing players to compete in casual modes, AI, or against friends. There is a campaign mode as well as Gauntlet events which run during limited times.

25 years later, MTG still dominates trading card sales while other companies attempt to replicate its success.

Why Magic The Gathering Is Still Relevant 

Riding off the lessons learned from Magic: The Gathering Online (2017), MTG Arena (open beta launch September 2018) is taking the online trading card experience to a whole new level. Available only on PC for the moment, MTG Arena is an FTP (free-to-play) game without the usual cash grabs and poorly designed mechanics gamers are used to dealing with.

Those who have never played Magic, or are returning after a couple decade hiatus, will find the systems easy to understand and the visuals stunning. Even the gameplay mechanics are smooth and adaptable, helping newbies play complicated symbiotic decks without having to memorize steps.

MTG Arena also makes sure new players have an abundance of pre-made mono and dual color decks to play with, allowing them to compete with others immediately. Five recent sets make up these pre-made decks (and booster pack purchases) which include Ixalan, Rivals of Ixalan, Dominaria, M19 Core Set, and the most recently released Guilds of Ravnica.

Patch Update To MTG Arena Open Beta  

Wizards released an updated patch for MTG Arena on November 15, allowing for players to challenge their friends to an online match for the first time. While far from perfect (needing to coordinate with friend IRL first), developers are hoping to smooth out the kinks prior to its official 2019 release.

Other additions to MTG Arena beta online include links to an event calendar, video tutorials, along with articles on deck building and basic gameplay.  Events include draft competitions and pre-constructed deck competitions, rewarding players with plenty of gold/gems, booster packs, and a variety of single cards (common, uncommon, and rare). Players can even unlock cards they don’t own through special wildcards awarded through booster packs, allowing for precise customization of decks.

MTG For A New Generation 

MTG Arena is the flagship trading card game that’ll take Wizards of the Coast into the digital age, allowing for a whole new generation of gamers to experience what many have been for over two decades. It’s also for old guys like me, allowing for intense gameplay (without tapping into my retirement fund) after displacing my cards many moons ago. Grant it, there are a few minor bugs which need to be tweaked, but overall the entire experience is — dare I say, equal to playing IRL — making it relevant to everyone, no matter age, financial status, or skill.

The open beta of MTG Arena is currently available for PC. It’s free to download and free-to-play, with the option of spending money (but not necessary).

War of the Roses is a third-person multiplayer action-RPG. Though originally released in October of last year the game had a bumpy start and poor timing due to the other medieval theme title Chivalry:Medieval Warfare launching shortly afterwards. Personally I think War of the Roses deserves a little more press than it receives so here is a brief look at Paradox and Fatshark’s War of the Roses.

If you have ever played the ever popular PC game Mount & Blade, then the general control scheme for War of the Roses (WotR) will be fairly easy for you to understand. For everybody else, the main idea is that you control where your weapon goes through a combination of the direction you move your mouse and clicking your mouse. You can strike from the left, right, overhand, or underhand and block from these same directions. Differences in gameplay between Mount & Blade and WotR become more striking from there on out as Armor and weapon types mean a lot more than they do in any other game I have played. Wearing Plate Armor will make most light cutting attacks bounce right off of you forcing your opponents to charge a heavy blow leaving themselves temporarily open. So the downside to plate is your movement speed right? Well not exactly….you see WotR tries to balance historical reality with gameplay and because of that plate armor does not really slow you down very much at all when the man wearing it has been training in it most of his life. However there are more noticeable slowdowns when it comes to charging an attack as though you have a full range of motion, overlapping plates do not much help your ability to swing your arms around. On top of that is the ever so much fun “Visor Vision” where your helmet greatly restricts your field of view even though you play from a third-person perspective.

Before using the Visor

After using the Visor

It may sound like a good idea to just avoid using your helmet’s visor since you can see so much better without it, but,well, that is probably the worst thing you could do. If there is one thing that WotR exceeds at it is hit detection. Face, eye slits on a helmet, armpits, elbows, behind the knees, neck, groin, EVERYTHING has its own hitbox that different weapons react to differently depending on the type of armor being worn. Being protected is a wonderful thing, but being able to strike first can be better. So while plate can protect you from an otherwise deadly blow, an experience player is going to stab you right between the plates and ruin that otherwise impenetrable armor. That is of course unless one of your enemies has a crossbow, blunt arrow tips, hammers, polearms, or just about anything that could crush someone to death, in which case plate only delays your death. Footwork and blocking will determine how long you survive in WotR and at first you will not be surviving very long at all, plate armor or not.

So the game is deadly but what else can distinguish it from the crowd? How about some of the deepest class customization available in a multiplayer game, as well as one of the largest medieval arsenals? After playing for about an hour or so even the worst players should have accumulated enough kills and assists to be rewarded with a good amount of experience and gold (used for unlocking new weapons/traits/cosmetic upgrades) to get their own custom class. A custom class (of which there are 8 slots available) allows you to change everything about your medieval soldier. You can change between different perks in the game, which either define what your character can do (archer or melee, infantry or cavalry) or that will specialize your character even further (fire your bow faster or get more range out of it, make melee attacks more likely to break shields or to hamper enemy movement speed). There are nearly a dozen different sets of armor separated into three different classes and over 50 or so different melee weapons, each allowing the player to choose the type of steel used, the wood for the shaft/handle, the type of edge on the blade, and fighting style for that particular weapon. All of these allow a degree of fine tuning that can turn a slow axe into a faster weapon or a hard hitting hammer into an even harder hitting one.

The number of variables you can change is impressive to say the least.

And the sheer amount of customization keeps getting crazier.

A common worry I hear when describing this system is a fear that veteran players will easily outclass newcomers. The vast majority of changes in the game may improve one stat but will almost always hamper another. Customization allows you to fine-tune something to your liking, not make it superior to everything else. Also rest assured that though the game launched with some balance issues the developers have brought things into line where they have been for months now. The game constantly releases free updates that add new maps, new modes, and even more equipment. At first the developers were worried about simply adding more, but, after the community cried out, Fatshark has since taken a step back, rebalanced all existing gear, and taken their time before releasing any new content patches (which have so far all stayed free).

New players needn’t fear others getting a-HEAD of them….I’m sorry.

If you still are not convinced to shell out the $20 for the game then how about this. WotR has a full multiplayer demo that allows you to play for an unlimited amount of time with other players. All of the kills and other actions you take during the game will earn you experience and gold that you can use when you buy the full game but should you choose not to do so you can still play for as long as you want. What is the catch? You cannot access the customization window without first buying the game which is one of the games strong suits. So while the default character classes you have to start with are on par with everyone else’s custom classes you will never be able to tweak them to your liking or experiment with new setups. Still, unlimited playtime that transfers your progress over if you purchase the full game? I don’t really see how you can argue with that system. I hope to see you on the battlefield, my new halberd could use a few test subjects.

War of the Roses

October 2, 2012

Developer: Fatshark

Publisher: Paradox Interactive

Available now on Windows PC

The magic of the 8-bit era is about to return with authority this fall. On March 14^th, Yacht Club Games announced its Kickstarter campaign to fund its debut classic-style sidescroller, Shovel Knight, which the company describes as “a groundbreaking love letter to 8 bits!” You take control of the Shovel Knight, whose weapon for killing doubles as his weapon of everyday survival. Wielding the ShovelBlade, he uses it as both his offense and defense, able to slay colossal bad guys and deflect their attacks with equal finesse. Not to mention it digs quite well.

 All the NES love you can handle rolled up into this one screen.

The story sees the title character setting out on a quest to vanquish his mortal nemesis, The Enchantress, who employs a robust rogue’s gallery of enemy boss characters called The Order of No Quarter to seize control of the sprawling kingdom. Of particular danger to the Shovel Knight his is archenemy the Polar Knight, a hulking brute of a warrior who carries a large snow pusher across his back ready to take a swing at his old foe’s head. Yacht Club Games describes the character as “Sabertooth to Shovel Knight’s Wolverine.”

 If the map screens of Castlevania III and Mega Man married and had the perfect child.

Shovel Knight is a nostalgic mash-up of different 2d action tropes thrown into what appears to be a perfectly blended schema with a few new tricks up its sleeve. Taking cues from beloved classics such as Castlevania, DuckTales, and Mega Man, you deflect, bounce, slash, and dig your way through a number of beautiful levels that feature elements that require those techniques to overcome. The bouncing mechanic is wonderfully reminiscent of Uncle Scrooge’s ability to use his cane as a weapon and pogo stick in DuckTales. Digging with the shovel allows you to break apart walls, shift objects into place, and dig up helpful items ala Castlevania, though no word yet on whether we will be finding any roast chicken waiting in a dirt pile (please may it be so). The level design and rich color palette, coupled with a fat bag of obstacles and diverse layouts give us a hearty hello from the eighties courtesy of Mega Man’s time-tested gameplay features.

 Purchase item upgrades to give your Knight the edge. Yeah, I really just said that…

Continuing to mash the nostalgia button for us full force, one of the backer rewards offered by Yacht Club is an authentically styled instruction booklet straight from the days of the NES. With all the legacy goodness wrapped up in such a wonderful childhood package, it would appear that Yacht Club’s love of the 8-bit dream is their goal for a new generation of gamers. Other rewards offered in their Kickstarter campaign are the standard free copy for $15, a copy of the instruction booklet and PDF coffee table book for $50, the opportunity to sit in on design meetings in Google Hangouts for $75, and if you’re a true believer in the Shovel Knight, for $5,000 you can have a real Yacht Party with the Yacht Party Games crew plus all previous rewards.

 Admit it. This was your favorite part of the ride home.

Looking to dig its way into our hearts this September on the PC, 3DS, and Wii, Shovel Knight will undoubtedly be etched into the hearts of gamers old and new alike. Stay tuned to Gameverse for more coverage as it develops. Until that time, as the Shovel Knight would say, Slash Mercilessly and Dig Tirelessly!

It isn’t too often that Blizzard is beaten at its own art, but Torchlight 2 takes the spotlight in the top down, hack and slash, dungeon-loot genre. To clarify, I am not saying that Diablo 3 was a bad game, nor am I going to compare the two in this article. Speaking specifically for the genre, Torchlight 2 does a great job in story presentation, extra content, and gameplay diversity. Building upon its predecessor’s success, Torchlight 2 expanded the series in all the right areas.

Built upon the same engine used in Torchlight 1, Runic Games improves the successor in a multitude of ways. Most notably is the ability to play with friends cooperatively online on Runic’s servers or through a LAN connection. It is great to see some companies still using this functionality since most of the industry seems to be going away from this style of cooperative play. In my opinion, it is a much different experience playing side by side with your friends, than through the internet.

The most obvious factor about multiplayer is playing with friends. There is no better way to enjoy a game than with a friend. And if you don’t like playing with your friends, at least you get more access to loot through loot trading/sharing. Also, you can explore any area in any act without affecting other players. This luxury means that you don’t have to move through different areas which in turn moves all the players. In games like Borderlands 2, moving all the players to different zones can get annoying quickly when one player wants to speed through everything.

Quests in multiplayer are unique because each player needs to complete their own objectives. If player 2 isn’t present when killing the boss for the quest, he’ll need to enter the cave, and fight his own boss. This concept is a little tricky to do because player 1 will have needed to leave the area containing the objective for it to respawn correctly for player 2. However, should this concept not work, player 2 could complete the objective in their own game.

For the purposes of farming a boss or the like, the ability to reroll the world is a great feature for internet games. It resets the world as if you were entering it for the first time allowing you to find some of the randomly generated dungeons.

Torchlight 2’s story takes off where the first game ended, the hero known as “the alchemist,” is corrupted by Ordrak’s Heart, which he received from killing Ordrak in the first game. Powered by siphoning the essences of the Guardians of the world, he attempts to open the clockwork core and release the Netherim, which will end all life on Ember.

The story’s narration moves along smoothly throughout the game. Between major acts there are cut-scenes that help progress the major events taking place, while story quests are narrated by the NPC’s. The story of Torchlight 2 isn’t long, but there are plenty of side-quests to keep an adventurer occupied. Side-quests aren’t voiced like story quests, but some humor can be found for those who enjoy reading the personal stories of random NPC’s.

One of the things I personally enjoyed about Torchlight 2 is the difficulties. Difficulties are only there to create a challenging experience for the player. The reward you get for beating the game on Casual, Normal, Veteran, or Elite is purely for the satisfaction of the challenge. You don’t get better loot or experience, and you don’t see more named creatures with ridiculous “powers.” No, they are stronger and harder to kill, making an obvious difference for the player and his or her play-style. If they are bored because the game is too easy, they can bump the difficulty up. Vice versa, if it is too hard, they can then bump it back down. Even in elite mode, skilled players won’t find the game impossible. If you know what you are doing, there’ll be time to run away shrieking as you spam your health potion hotkeys.

Making use of waypoint portals is crucial, especially in harder difficulties and end game content. By placing portals frequently, should you die, it will be cheaper to go to town for free, rather than paying a percentage of your total gold to go back to the start of the current level or resurrecting on the spot. It should be an easy decision to invest in the 400g scroll, rather than resurrecting for easily 10 times that.

Finishing Torchlight 2 offers some fantastic options for the player. The “New Game +” feature is something that I think should be included in every game, no matter its content. The ability to start fresh with your skills, level, and weapons makes for an obvious replay-ability factor. What’s great about Torchlight 2’s New Game + is that it starts at a scaled level dependent upon your character, meaning that new items and the game’s difficulty scales with the strength of your character.

The other option you have in the New Game + is the Map Works. Similar to Torchlight 1, you can play through randomly generated maps that have different bonuses and penalties. The bonuses may be increased loot drops, and the penalties might be that enemies are much more resistant to a specific kind of damage. These maps are set to level ranges such as, 96-100, so you can guess how difficult something would be for your character. Maps are obtained through a vendor, allowing you to peruse their various pros and cons.

The last feature of Torchlight 2 is the skill and stat system. For fans of this genre, it can be a bit misleading. Each stat is helpful to every character, no matter the stat; however, some stats are more helpful than others. Yes, strength helps the Embermage, but not nearly as much as Focus. You can play your character however you like, but the primary of your four stats should be your priority.

The skills are a different story, and require some finesse. You can sort of respec your choices by taking back the last three points you’ve spent. What I found to be the best method is to start with passive skills, and always making my most recent stat an active spell for extra damage attacks. Before spending new points, I would remove that active spell point so that I could place a new point into another passive skill. You prevent yourself from wasting points in lower level skills through this manner. Some of the beginning spells might stay with you for end game, but with this method of trading skill points, you can replace those spells with powerful end-game spells.

Overall, the game was a blast. If you enjoy this style of game, you’ll really enjoy Torchlight 2. Whether you are like my friend who just wants to run through the game and “kill things,” or if you are like me who likes to read everything, you’ll have fun both solo, and cooperative. Most surprising about this game is its $20 price tag. Seriously, if you and a friend in mind haven’t played this, but enjoy co-op games, you can buy two copies for less than most new games on the market.

“Hey…Hey, guess what?  You’ve been DISHONORED!”.  A line you just can’t help but say as you start up Dishonored for the first time, and I guarantee it won’t be the last time you say it either.

I’ve been looking for a good original game lately and it’s difficult to find one of “triple A” quality with all of these sequels coming out; however, I think I finally found one. One of the shortest games I’ve played, but probably one of the best in the year for me at least was Dishonored. I do have a soft spot for stealth based games and I think this one did small game linearity very well. Being from Bethesda, the game initially felt very similar to Fallout 3, however the different developer, Arkane Studios, quickly distinguished itself.
In this steam punk based world running on whale oil, you play Corvo Attano, a recently “dishonored” bodyguard for the Queen and her daughter. After some really bad luck, you find yourself being accused of a murder you didn’t commit and before you know it you’re fleeing for your life and trying to get back at the people who framed you. Grab a dagger and your least squeaky boots because it’s time to start taking down the entire military branch of a government single handedly in any way you see fit.

I started to see this type of game mechanic with the latest Deus Ex: Human Revolution, however this takes it up a few levels. In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, you could take down enemies lethally or non-lethally, choose to traverse the level through air vents, or even knock out/kill every person in the room. All of this is available to the player in Dishonored, but on a far grander scale. Each level is large and the objective can be approached from any angle of the map, which was difficult to get used to, though extremely enjoyable once I got used to it. On your way you can take down the guards however you want, lethally, non-lethally, sneakily, or gun blazing. Of course, that’d be your limit if you hadn’t been visited by a mysterious demi-god figure known as The Outsider. With his help your options are expanded significantly: teleport yourself to the roofs, distract the guards with a rat infestation, knock them all out of the way with a gust of hurricane force wind, or even possess a small animal and scurry through a crack in the wall. Just be careful not to get stepped on. Once you’re inside and past the front gates, the main objective isn’t even a one way street. Poison your target, knock him out, humiliate him in public, brand him for life with a hot iron, or just kill him. By JUST kill him I mean you could shoot him, stab him, stick him with a crossbow bolt, blow him out a window, knock him out and drown him in a toilet, whatever.

There are so many options and that’s just one level, and because of that, you can play the game over and over again getting a different experience every time.
The fact that the whole world revolves around whale oil is as clever as it is morbid. The journals you pick up throughout gameplay get fairly graphic about taking the blubber from the whales while they’re still alive. Other journals lie around and allude to hidden treats for the player if they go out of the way to find them such as Granny Rags voiced by Susan Sarandon who is the source of several side missions and one of your few chances to actually interact with someone else who has the abilities of The Outsider.
While the steam punk art style is fantastic, the textures and lighting together created a slightly washed out appearance to the whole game that probably could have been avoided. Many times I looked at the old rusty metal and turned away from it because if I thought about it too much it would pull me from my immersion, which, besides the textures, was excellent. The game was a breath of fresh air for me and I can’t wait to keep playing it for all of its replay value.

Alright, two things before I go into my review of CAPCOM’s latest game.  One, I read somewhere that the 6 on the cover of the game looked like a giraffe enjoying some quality time with a manatee and now I can never unsee it.  For two, this is my first Resident Evil game so I have no fan bias one way or another about the game except for maybe the fact that I normally enjoy a good shooting game where brainless zombies try to eat my face.  That being said, the term “zombies” was rarely used in the game, and they certainly weren’t brainless if you play any other campaign other than the Leon-Helena one. In fact, this game’s got arguably better/clever enemies than Battlefield’s or Call of Duty’s AI depending on which campaign you play. The game consists of three initial paths and a hidden fourth one if you beat the others. Now, the game doesn’t qualify it this way, but each of the campaigns has a distinctly different feel to it as well as slightly different play styles.

The tutorial/prelude has you play Leon. So, naturally, I picked his story as my first experience. What I think CAPCOM was going for here was the “traditional” zombie experience with a couple of disgusting mutations to satisfy the level of gross that I presume the fanbase has come to expect. Before I continue, I want to mention that playing this campaign made me want to put the game down and never play it again, let alone try the other storylines, though I discovered later they were worth it. Leon and Helena share some of the most wooden dialogue together and, after a few chapters, I finally understood that the two of them together form one intelligent human being. People will be in the process of becoming a zombie buffet and Leon will announce to Helena that they need to go save them, which just makes no sense because he just watched them get their limbs torn off. Helena, thankfully plays Captain Obvious for a moment and reigns him back in to the task at hand. A few zombie attacks later and Helena spends an entire boss fight refusing to shoot an actively mutating monstrosity because she’s too busy crying. It takes like ten active trigger events with Leon yelling the entire time for Helena to get over herself and shoot to reel her back in. Speaking of active triggers, this is also the button mash campaign.
Sadly, this is also the most predictable horror game I’ve played. Ever. It’s almost completely the fault of the game mechanics too. The game will decide to just take over certain aspects of your character at any given time which gives away too much and allows the player to ready themselves for a possible scary encounter. They might’ve thought that this would build suspense, but the level of irritation I got when I am randomly unable to run or move in any other way other than a slow walk with my gun down by my waist completely breaks the illusion of immersion. It goes as far as to even disallow the firing of the character’s gun for sections of story at a time. The game tries SO hard to forcibly immerse you in the plot that it physically hurts you in the process. Irritation and frustration build instead of suspense and adrenaline and before you know it you just want to throw the controller.
The game does have some very satisfactory melee takedowns and finishing moves that actually do distract from the awful gameplay mechanics for some time. This lasts until you realize that the death animations for the zombie you just roundhouse kicked in the teeth has the head free floating in place as the body falls to the floor with a giant pulled texture of skin still linking the two. This is particularly frustrating when the body just jumped up off the floor and your only choice was to kick it in the face leaving this giant flap of skin obscuring your vision allowing for even more zombies to get the drop on you.
When you get tired of being jumped constantly, you may decide you want to try playing with a little precaution. What do you do if you see a body lying on its side or sitting in a chair with blood all over it? Shoot it, right? Nope. You can’t shoot bodies preemptively in Resident Evil 6. Not allowed. So, whether you see it coming or not, you have no choice but to trigger the zombie’s predictable lunge at your knees. Eventually you’ll get tired and, out of shear boredom, you’ll end up holding the B button ( Xbox360 controller), or you’ll be lucky enough to have a tip show up on a loading screen that informs you that you can actually interact with Helena. By “interact” I mean you can “Praise” her, “Thank” her, tell her to follow (which she does anyway), tell her to stay (good dog!), or tell her to move up. This doesn’t really work though because any time you tell your partner to move up or take the lead they give you the professional F— you. Helena will say, “Not right now”, because “right now” is just not the time to listen to orders in the apocalypse. My favorite is, “Can’t it wait?“, because you clearly didn’t tell her that for any reason. You’re just wasting her time, right? I’m really not even sure why it was made into a button because the only function it serves is to distract you while a zombie eats your brains.
On that line of thought though, let’s talk about buttons that should exist. In the zombie apocalypse, one might think it an intelligent idea to be able to jump. But wait! The game didn’t say it was ok to jump over THAT table, only the one next to it. You also cannot jump over dead bodies lying on the floor. You CAN trip over them, however. Yes, CAPCOM has seen fit to include a trip animation, and not a jump button. The end of the world is also clearly not the time to open a door any other way than gently caressing the door with one hand and leaning face first into the dark unexplored room. Never mind locking the door behind you or barricading it to prevent attacks from behind.

You have no choice but to experience EXACTLY what the game wants you to, and if you had other plans, too bad because this train is going nowhere but where the railway track tells it to at exactly the predetermined speed coded in. The level design in Leon and Helena’s campaign is utterly unimaginative, linear, predictable, boring, and lazy. There’s even a part where you’re looking down at a foggy road and they just flat out left the road black thinking that some heavy fog would cover it up.

The first time I died in this game was via an ambulance crashing through a pile of cars and splatters you against the side of a gas station while you’re paralyzed by a zombie whose sole job is to scream loudly in your face. I’m sorry CAPCOM for standing where your linearly designed map tells me to go to as you freeze me in position just so that an ambulance can run me over. It’s not even a scripted injury. It’s an actual death that counts against you in your final score after the Chapter is over. Oh, yeah, by the way the game’s been scoring you this whole time, which nobody decided to tell the player. What exactly are you getting scored on? Accuracy, deaths, kills, etc. Hopefully you didn’t decide to test fire any new guns you picked up along the way, because it will prevent you from picking up anything useful when it comes time to buy some skills. Yes, the game has been dropping random chess pieces all over the place with “point” values assigned to them, so I don’t really know how I possibly could have misunderstood. Clearly the currency of the survivors of the apocalypse is…gem encrusted chess pieces? I really have no idea where that came from. Perhaps it was something from a previous game I didn’t play and it was explained there, but I felt pretty dumb cramming studded pawns and knights in my pockets while I ran from hordes of screaming zombies.

Once I was finished nursing my wrist from all the hardcore hand holding going on in the Leon-Helena campaign, I ventured a trial run of the other two campaigns and found very different experiences. The Jake-Sherry campaign was heavy on the maze and environmental mechanics (explosive barrels, etc.), while the Chris-Piers combo focused on what added up to be super-human modern warfare against bio-weapons. What confused me with this campaign was that you get an entirely new graphic user interface. Both of the other storylines had basic GUI, but now that you’ve joined the BSAA you get perks.

You are also thrown into open combat with seriously intelligent “BOWs” as they’re called. I never quite heard what the acronym stands for. Anyway, these Infected are creative, intelligent, and utilize better team tactics than Veteran mode Call of Duty AI. I really can’t even call them zombies anymore. These guys use machine guns, snipers, camouflage, group tactics, and more. The time I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore was when someone in my squad said, “They’re rolling up a tiger tank”, and, as a hint, my reaction involved a LOT of profanity. If you ignore the mutations, the game is honestly a fun modern warfare experience, but that’s hard when the enemies turn into human-scorpion hybrids which carry uninfected civilians on their backs as cover. Finally I could give the game some credit for innovation. Playing through the entire Leon-Helena campaign, I’d come to think that the only innovation CAPCOM was going to come up with was the trip animation and the fact that you can click down your joystick to choose whether or not you want to make your character left or right handed. The game still wasn’t scary by any means, but at least the Chris-Piers campaign wasn’t anywhere as linear as the Leon-Helena one. Jake and Sherry even had some clever and funny dialogue going back and forth for a while. For the first time in thirty hours I actually enjoyed the gameplay and even dared to immerse myself in the story. Yeah, the same texture pulling glitches were there, there still wasn’t a jump button, and my steroid pumping main character still looked like a damn fool tripping over bodies left and right, but it was enjoyable. I really just think CAPCOM tried too hard to add too much content and it backfired on them. If they had just stuck with one storyline, really ironed out the glitches in the art department, and spiced up the Design aspects of the game, I think everyone would have been a lot happier, but they didn’t and I’m forced to say that this game is really just not worth the play.

The game itself worked so well as a break from reality because the game never took itself too seriously. Jack, your nemesis in Borderlands 2, is “the most perfect ass” to quote a friend. He’s constantly jabbing you with the most immature insults and you tell yourself that it won’t get under your skin, but damn, you can’t ignore it. Before long you’ll find your eye twitching and your knuckles going white as you listen to Jack insult you in the most imaginative ways –

Jack – “I’m wracking my brain trying to think of a name for that diamond pony I bought. I was going to call it ‘piss-for-brains’ in honor of you, but that just feels immature. Hey, maybe ‘Butt Stallion?’”

Just the same though, the game doesn’t pull any punches, and anybody buying the game should be prepared to have the game rip out your heart and sauté it in your own tears especially if you played the first Borderlands. Gearbox certainly didn’t pull any punches in making this game a memorable experience whether you play alone or with a friend or three.

If you normally play games alone though, I might stress that the game is easily one hundred times better with a friend because you actually have someone there to exclaim and laugh with as the ridiculous antics of Jack get progressively more homicidal. It’s simply a better experience when shared with someone else, and I think that can be said about a lot of games. Gearbox certainly did a remarkable job when it came to gauging their players’ moods, emotions, and adrenaline. The game never once ended an emotional peak incorrectly and it was a fantastically smooth ride throughout the game.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the play style, let me explain a little bit. You end up on a planet, which, for all intents and purposes, is lawless and is inhabited by bandits, hick colonists, and a whole lot of bad asses with more guns than you can imagine. Every living thing on the planet, and even most inanimate things, has a gun you can rip from its obliterated remains. As long as you have a weapon you can get a better one and that mechanic combined with a nearly infinite number of guns gives you a constantly evolving style of gameplay, which Gearbox deserves to be extremely proud of.

I’ve found in my experiences that cooperative gameplay is a nesting ground for glitches, the most memorable and entertaining of which would probably be from Fable 3 if any of you have played it. Borderlands certainly didn’t have anything on that level of ridiculous, but they did have some. My partner and I did occasionally have issue reviving one another even when we were practically standing on top of each other, which often resulted in the death of one or both of us. This wouldn’t be such a problem if it didn’t happen most often in the Circles of Slaughter half way through one of the last waves of enemies. It definitely caused a lot of frustrated groans and ice cream breaks were completely necessary after those happened.

The UI had its frustrations too, of course.  I found that having the “dismount from vehicle” button and the “travel” button on the same key caused a lot of unintentional dismounts and often ended in my partner and me running on foot looking for a new Catch-A-Ride Station when we got to a new zone.
This game was also the first game ever to actually keep me entertained and interested in every side quest. For once they weren’t just another way of grinding out levels and instead actually brought more depth to the game’s phenomenally designed NPCs. My favorite side quest involved a string of tortured souls leaving messages behind referencing a gun with an unimaginably terrible curse that I won’t spoil for you so that you can discover on your own. Just know that it’s totally worth the side quest, and you’ll probably end up throwing the gun off the highest cliff you can find.

If you know what quest I’m talking about, you’ll understand why I’m going to mention the sound of the game next, which was extremely satisfying from headshots to gun fire effects. Most of all the character voice was spot on and unique for every major and minor NPC. I was also a huge fan of the smooth gradient transition from normal voice to radio voice when you walk away from an NPC who’s talking. That way you don’t have to just sit there absently while the character gives you the mission and its backstory. I’ve never enjoyed, in real life or games, when someone wastes my time and I really appreciate it when the game company takes that into consideration.
I’ve got some questions though. The New-U stations are Hyperion owned and Jack is owner of Hyperion, yes? He spends the entire game trying to kill you off and any time you do actually die, you use a Hyperion New-U Station to resurrect. That just seems counter-productive to me. A lot of games play off the dying thing by having you play from a save point as if you never died, but Borderlands turned it into a mechanic that they flaunt. Personally I think that they should have just slapped a different company name on the New-U station and called it done, but they kept Hyperion on it and it confuses me.

The tech trees were also stuffed with great new innovative mechanics to have fun with, but a few were less effective than others. Clearly the game is about guns, guns, and more guns, but when you have a tech tree that builds melee skills from level five and upwards I expect melee to be a viable option and a play style I can enjoy from the first point I put into the tree. Instead, melee generally becomes useful around level twenty to twenty five. Of course, it’s not really an issue in the end because you can re-spec your talents for a more than reasonable price so you can level up with guns primarily and switch over in your thirties to the melee-centric tree to at least try it out.
The level design of the game was well laid out. With that said, my co-op partner and I continued to run into small collision volumes that just had no business being where they were. Suddenly when driving the Light Scout we’d just find ourselves doing random one hundred and eighty degrees spins accompanied by a crashing sound when nothing was in the road at all. We also ran into a bit of an issue with some forgotten UDK material and texture applications as you can see in the picture below.

This glitch, if it really was a glitch, really seemed almost more like an easter egg homage to UDK so I’m really not that bothered by it.
Overall, Borderlands 2 is the perfect response to any emotional situation you might be having. It’s a perfect way to let out aggression when you’re mad. It will make you laugh when you’re feeling down and, once you’re feeling better, you’ll continue to have a good time for as long as you want to play the game. Best of all, Borderlands 2 has tons of content and I assume the DLC will be worth waiting for. It certainly doesn’t get stale and is a perfect game if you want to invite some friends over with their laptops for a good old fashion LAN party.

At first glance, this game has you wondering why you had spent 10 US greenbacks on a game that looks like it came right out of the late 80’s. But just as you can’t judge a book by the cover, you can’t always judge a game by its graphics. Being the arrogant gamer/man that I am, I jumped straight into the game. After about 10 minutes I was frustrated and about to give up and become sad at the fact that I just might have wasted my $10. After trying to complete a mission and getting my ship destroyed and my first crew killed I decided that the tutorial might be beneficial. The tutorial that the game provides is very informative. So informative in fact, that I wanted to jump straight back into the game and avenge my quickly demolished first crew. I did so, and soon after became immersed in this 8-bit game of space exploration for quite a few hours. This new breed of RTS has you feeling as though you are captain of the Starship Enterprise, and you are boldly going where no man has gone before, even though this game has nothing to do with the Star Trek series.

There are many ways throughout the game that you can customize your ship and your weapons. The weapons that you attain all have specific stats that insure that you can wreak havoc on those dastardly space pirates and save all of the stranded cargo ships. Rather than using the common story mode, you instead see how far you can take your ship before you are completely demolished or are stranded out in space forever. The game then takes that information and puts it on a leader board for all of your friends to view.

All in all Subset Games has proven that top tier graphics and a controller aren’t really necessary to have a good time. You as well can own this great indie game through Steam on PC or Mac. Now if only I could find a way to rename all of my crew…

http://wolfenstein.bethsoft.com/game_NA.php