Please Insert Coins

Even Goths need homes.

blankstrife — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 15:26:51 -0400

Even Goths need homes.

Feature – Neverwinter Beta Impressions

blankstrife — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 15:24:03 -0400

Neverwinter is a new MMORPG, for PC, from Cryptic Studios. It’s set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe and story wise, takes place about 100 years after 2006’s Neverwinter Nights 2.

The beta featured seven playable races: Human, Elf, Dwarf, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, Halfling and Tiefling. There were five classes to choose from: Guardian Fighter, Great Weapon Fighter, Devoted Cleric, Trickster Rogue and Control Wizard. There is of course, always the chance that more will become available once the game is released. You can play as any class with any race of either gender, though each race has different natural bonuses.

A friend and I played over the closed beta weekend, which ran from 23^rd-25^th of March. Like most MMORPG’s you’ll need a fairly decent internet connection and hardware in order to run the game smoothly. Once you’ve created your character, the game opens with very little fanfare and thrusts you into the middle of a conflict on the shores of the eponymous city. This early stage works like a tutorial, the game drip-feeds you information, only giving you pop ups when you have access to the feature in question. This is preferable to the way many MMO’s flood you with essential game mechanics right off the boat. On top of that Neverwinter is fairly simple to understand anyway, a lot of the micromanaging has been stripped back in comparison to other examples of the genre and you only have access to a handful of skills at any one time.

I played as a Great Weapon Fighter and my friend was a Trickster Rogue and one of the first things we noticed is how fluid the combat feels. Some people in the chat argued that the combat felt a little clunky, while still others praised it, specifically in comparison to other games that tried to bridge the gap between action and RPG, like Guild Wars 2. Personally I felt that the combat mechanics were by far one of the best features of the game and a welcome breath of fresh air. Games like The Old Republic make a big deal out of looking fluid in their cinematic trailers and then have stagnant combat where opponents stand next to each and mash the mouse button until one of them falls over. Neverwinter allows for a slightly different approach, where positioning and attack range combine with a limited set of skills that can have a big impact. The result is a more tactical kind of button mashing and can make combat a joy rather than just a grind.

There are problems with it however, AI seem to target healers over other members of a party with particular hatred, to the point where they aren’t a viable class to play. Another problem is PvP, my friend and I jumped into our first game and were met with a domination style objective, with three hills to hold. The opposing team was almost entirely made up of Control Wizards and we found out the hard way why they have “Control” in the title. It was literally impossible to fight, their class allows them to lift enemies in the air for long periods of time, slow them down with ice, eventually freezing them and all the while their spells deal damage. I’m sure it’s fine in PvE but against other players it felt cheap and overpowered, if nothing else because there is simply no way to counteract their abilities. Both of these problems are reasonably easy to fix however, after all that’s what betas are for, and they hopefully will be when the game is eventually released.

The game looks okay on its highest graphics setting (so I’m told by my friend who has actually has a half decent computer), but the graphic style certainly isn’t anything to write home about. However the design, while attractive, was fairly limiting. Areas can be reasonably big but don’t expect to have world scale free reign, the majority of the game takes place inside the walls of Neverwinter, be it above or below the surface.

Unfortunately, like so many MMO’s, the story and characters fall rather flat, especially in comparison to past iterations of the universe. Of course multiplayer games allow you to meet real people and create your own stories together. However recent games like The Old Republic are great examples of how you can still capture that essential solo adventure feel, even in the confines of the genre. Speaking of making your own stories, the foundry allows you to create your own dungeons and quests and for once the creation tools are relatively simple to grasp. These creations can be shared with other players and feature in the game on bounty boards and certain NPCs.

Overall on the surface Neverwinter is just the standard fare, go here, kill this, bring me the trouser snake of Atlantis etc…But never has it been so fun and given you so many options to customise your own experience. Plus it’s free, with the game relying micro transactions rather than upfront money. This means there’s no reason not to try it out when the vague release date of “early 2013” finally rolls around.

© Alex Annabel, 26^th March 2013

GameSpot’s experience.

blankstrife — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 15:22:55 -0400

GameSpot’s experience.

The Bird Men are coming!

blankstrife — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:08:24 -0400

The Bird Men are coming!

Review - Assassin’s Creed 3

blankstrife — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:07:09 -0400

After the excellent Prince of Persia: Sands of Time trilogy, (the first game in particular), I craved more adventures with a sword wielding monkey man. Something the not terrible, but insufferably easy, 2008’s Prince of Persia couldn’t deliver. However the answer to my problem had already been found, 2007’s spiritual successor, Assassin’s Creed. The first instalment in the new series was a really good game, but the second game raised the standard to an entirely new level. With such lofty expectations in mind I couldn’t help but be a little cautious in my approach to Assassin’s Creed 3.

When I started the game as Haytham Kenway, British spy and man about town, I was initially confused. I figured I’d only be playing as him for all of five minutes because as the trailers and gameplay footage had shown, all British are bad guys. But no, in fact you play as Mr. Kenway for a little while and I quickly found myself liking the character immensely. So much so that I was disappointed when I was finally forced to hand over the reins to the eponymous ‘Connor’ and even more disappointed when ‘Connor’ turned out to have about as much personality as a plank of wood.

Right around the time you give up control of Haytham, there is a twist in the story, one that ought to be depressingly predictable given the game’s slant on history. However any surprise I might have felt was already spoiled by the in-game database that is updated as you progress through the game. After meeting a particular character, the entry out and out tells you the twist ahead of time. Now I first started playing the game offline, so there is a possibility that there was or has since been an update to patch the problem. But either way it was quite a glaring error in the game’s narrative and is the kind of mistake you’d expect to be fixed before release.

Technical problems aside the narrative suffered from clumsy attempts to paint particular characters as bad guys and Connor’s origin story is about as formulaic and done to death as they come. That aside the atmosphere is as great as ever, the game now featuring children and animals, the latter becoming an important feature. The musical score and sound effects take you right back to the 1700s and you can almost smell the gunpowder in the rich and attractive world.

If I had to pick my two least favourite things about the game it would be the fast travel system in the cities and the optional objectives in the missions. The fast travel system requires you to first explore the tunnels under Boston and New York to unlock them and damn can it be tedious. Forced to move slowly through tunnel after dead end tunnel, solving simple puzzles for hours…It takes the ‘fast’ out of fast travel and I would’ve found it far easier (and more enjoyable) to simply run over land. Some of the optional objectives are equally tedious, I like a challenge and I enjoyed trying to attain full synchronisation in previous games. However in Assassin’s Creed 3 many of these tasks are simply annoying and often ruin the pace of the game for obsessives like me who refuse to move on without completing them.

The combat in the series has always been easy, but never have I felt less like an Assassin than now. There is simply no reason to be stealthy, unless the objective demands it. The streamlined combat system makes Connor a one man army, who can very easily walk into the middle of an enemy fort and slaughter its inhabitants to a man, without taking a single blow in return. All of this can be done right from the beginning of the game and it lacks the semi-satisfying difficulty curve of the first and second game. That aside Ass Creed 3 certainly doesn’t stop you from being all ninja if you want to, but it lacks the tension of knowing that if you’re seen you might have to make a hasty escape.

The multiplayer introduced in Brotherhood makes its return again and features the same tense cat and mouse gameplay. Unlike previous games however it also features the series’ first attempt at micro-transactions using real money and although this attempt to milk consumers for a game they’ve already paid upwards of £40 for is despicable, it’s also incredibly prevalent in the games industry of today and hardly surprising.

I enjoyed Assassin’s Creed 3 and if I hadn’t been playing four other Assassin’s Creed games for the last four years then I’d have loved it. As it is, despite their best efforts, it doesn’t really bring anything truly new to the table. An ‘open world’ style hub in the form of the frontier and the ability to hunt animals both sounded like cool additions prior to the game’s release, but neither were ground-breaking enough to rush out and buy the game if you were on the fence. What might attract you are the naval side missions, which put you at the helm of a hundred feet of timber and steel. They are in a word, awesome, and far better implemented than the disappointing tower defence game of Assassin’s Creed Revelations. They are however also sadly lacking in the grand scheme of things, with only a few (albeit re-playable) missions available.

Assassin’s Creed 3 has its flaws; it has more graphical errors, bugs and glitches than any of the previous games. But at the end of the day rather than rest on its laurels the series continues to push the boat out, literally in this case. It isn’t the ground breaker Assassin’s Creed 2 was, but it more than makes up for its shortcomings in any one area by simply giving you so much other stuff to do.

© Alex Annabel, 25^th February 2013

All you have to do to beat the firing line of an entire army is...

blankstrife — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:04:00 -0400

All you have to do to beat the firing line of an entire army is run at them…who knew.

Photo

blankstrife — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:44:53 -0500

Feature – Project Destiny

blankstrife — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:44:38 -0500

Project Destiny, the long-time leaked title of Bungie’s next project is seeing the light of day for the first time. Information on the game is still a closely guarded secret for the most part but we can now confirm it is definitely called Destiny. Wooh…

Now I liked Halo 4 just fine, but there was something about it that was just lacking for me, when compared to previous instalments in the series that is. The multiplayer in particular felt very unlike Halo to me and a little bit too much like another game I’ve played a lot of…it rhymes with Ball of Fruity. It’s CoD.

Now I know this is a very unpopular opinion, but regardless I found myself a lot more excited for whatever Bungie’s new IP would be than Halo 5. So you can imagine my disappointment when I heard that Bungie had signed a ten year contract with the CoD-fathers; Activision. Now in reality I had no idea how much control this would afford Activision over Bungie’s new baby and I certainly had no idea how it might affect gameplay. But of course my first sleep deprived realisation was that Activision had essentially ended the long standing feud between the shooter series by simply buying out their competitor and thus would begin a dark and terrible ten year reign of CoD clones…

The reality is of course very different and the newly released details about the game has only served to reignite my interest. The facts:

The series is planned to span multiple sequels and features the last struggling vestiges of humanity against a collection of superior alien races, like Halo. Unlike Halo however this world is in a far bleaker state of disrepair, with the human resistance on Earth sitting pretty in one remaining stronghold, a city built under an interstellar ping pong ball. Destiny is a first-person shooter, set in a persistent multiplayer world and it won’t feature a subscription fee. It would seem that Bungie is essentially attempting to blur the lines between the FPS and MMO genres, quite a tall order as they are hardly natural bedfellows.

“If you enjoy shooters, Destiny is going to be the best game you’ve ever played, Destiny is Bungie’s next great shooter and is set in an amazing new world that we’re building. In Destiny, players get to build their own characters and grow them over time. We’re really putting players in the center of the world and giving them control over their experience. From the ground up we’ve built this game to be social and cooperative.” – Bungie Cofounder, Jason Jones.

The “best game you’ve ever played” are bold words indeed and while other developers throw statements like this around all the time, Peter Molyneux, you know if a company like Bungie is mouthing off like this then they’re bringing the big guns to the table. It’s certainly not like an Activision/Bungie project is going to be lacking funding…

The social aspect of the game is based around the idea that as a player plays through the campaign; they will work with other players on missions almost at random. Though you can hook up with you mates easy enough, there will be no lobby allowing you to seamlessly join forces with strangers. There are also social hubs outside of combat that will feature somewhat less violent interactions between players. The “shared-world shooter” will feature both cooperative and competitive elements as well as sci-fi and RPG elements. Bungie hopes to create a game where your experience is different every night, with time-limited and random activities.

The concept art of the game released so far is certainly very beautiful and features the grand sci-fi settings we’ve come to love in Bungie games, more importantly however the score is composed by Halo’s trusty Marty O’Donnell. Music is one of the most important aspects of media for me and is often sadly overlooked in games and films, so that news alone is enough to get me excited.

Despite “not coming out in 2013” according to Activision, the game is set to be released on current generation consoles Xbox 360 and PS3, with no word yet on a PC version.

© Alex Annabel, 20^th February 2013

Video

blankstrife — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:41:02 -0500

Photo

blankstrife — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 10:59:53 -0500

Feature – Warframe Beta Impressions

blankstrife — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 10:59:00 -0500

Warframe is a free-to-play, cooperative 3^rd person shooter for PC. Set in a Sci-fi world you play as one of the Tenno, a race of badass space ninja, and play through missions with up to three other players. These missions can vary from sabotage to data retrieval to extermination, although while some present the player with interesting tactical choices (like giving you a time limit to escape), most seem to play out in a pretty similar way. There’s nothing stopping you from going out of you way to explore and kill everything on a given mission regardless of the objective, in fact there is often incentive to do so with all the upgrades available through experience and money.

Like many free-to-play games, Warframe makes its income through optional micro-transactions, though the game also features in-game currency, which is admittedly harder to gather. It presents the player with quite a wide array of customisation options for your style of play, firstly each warframe is essentially like a ‘class’ and lets you choose one of three at the beta’s start. The player has three weapons, a main weapon, side-arm and melee weapon. Not only does your Warframe level up as you play but so do your weapons and levelling up opens an upgrade system reminiscent of Dead Space’s power nodes.

Once you’ve completed the tutorial you are presented with a galaxy map, where each system contains missions. The missions, for the most part, need to be completed in chronological order, once completed however you can replay them at any time and the map designs shift randomly every time you do. There are three settings when connecting to games: online, private and solo. Online will hook you up with other players on your region’s server, private is for playing with friends only and solo is also an option despite being punishingly difficult at times. Solo is difficult partly due to the constant threat of running out of ammo, however the main reason is the respawn system. Each day you are given four revive tokens, if you run out then die you cannot play for the rest of the day, however other players can revive each other Gears of War style making playing as a team essential. You can also bypass this by spending real money to buy more revives, some might say this is a cheap attempt to milk players for money, but personally I relish the incentive to stay alive at all costs and at the end of the day it’s no different to the arcade games of old.

The gameplay itself is very similar to Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer mode. Enemies have health bars and players must work together to survive against their vastly greater numbers. You combine your guns, powers and good ol’ fashion slappy sticks to mash your way to victory and the game can be quite difficult when you find yourself surrounded. Warframe manages to achieve that clever balance between being at times very challenging, whilst still making the player feel like a spinning whirlwind of future samurai death.

Try the game for youself by registering an account on their site:

https://warframe.com/

IncGamers are kindly giving away beta keys at the moment so get em’ while they’re hot:

http://www.incgamers.com/2013/02/warframe-beta-keys-back-again-again-at-incgamers/

© Alex Annabel, 11^th February 2013

This diary is a little old now, but it introduces the concept.

blankstrife — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 10:58:54 -0500

This diary is a little old now, but it introduces the concept.

Photo

blankstrife — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 13:35:00 -0500

Review – Far Cry 3

blankstrife — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 13:34:00 -0500

Far Cry 3 has an opening cutscene that grabs you by the balls and refuses to let go, it starts with a bunch of rich kids just maxin’ and relaxin’, before the camera pans backwards to reveal that it’s camera phone footage. The man waving it in your face is quite mad and is holding you and all your friends for ransom.

The game offers a great deal of freedom when it comes to how you want to play the game, after the first couple of missions it gives the player free reign to do what they want in whatever order they want. For example you could go straight to the next story mission to continue the campaign, or run about the island hunting wild animals for their precious meat coats. I chose to do the latter and bought myself a bow as soon as I could so I could stalk the jungles Turok style. The Turok I’m referring to is 2002’s excellent Turok Evolution, in which you are given a wide variety of guns including a rocket launcher that can blow things up, make enemies puke until they die and fires a drill that explodes their limbs one by one. Though maybe somewhat less graphic, Far Cry 3 affords the player a similar variety of weapons with which to wreak havoc on its pirate denizens. Anything from landmines, to flamethrowers to the classic RPG is available once you’ve got a big enough wallet to afford them, or unlocked them for free by disabling the radio jammers dotted about the island. Each combat situation also presents you with multiple options to achieve your ends and a fairly large selection of skills allows the player to custom tailor their character for their play style (Though if you spend as much time dicking around as I did you won’t ever be left wanting for skill points). The game rewards a stealthy approach, close quarter takedowns are more difficult to pull off but provide XP bonuses. On the other hand there is no penalty for going in all guns blazing and the game gives you ample opportunity to indulge your inner psycho with its big toys.

As far as narrative is concerned, Far Cry 3 is a game that relies on width, rather than depth. Despite some compelling scenes and a couple of well-designed characters, I found it hard to become truly engrossed in the game’s story, but the fun and addictive gameplay more than makes up for any shortcomings. The game also features both multiplayer and co-op modes. The co-op mode allows up to four players to run and gun through a linear set of levels, a stark contrast to the open ended nature of the single player campaign. Despite this it can still be enjoyable to cut a bloody path through hordes of pirates with friends for once and as a nice bonus it supports two player splitscreening. The multiplayer also has its fair share of laughs, with the ability to perform ‘mercy’ or ‘punish’ scenes to an enemy at the end of each game. Multiplayer also features a lot of unlockable equipment and skills, unfortunately the gap between what is available to new players and what is available to veterans is so large it can lead to very unbalanced fights. Multiplayer also supports splitscreen, but only if both players have xbox live memberships, although that isn’t too bad with so many multiplayer games these days refusing such a fundamental feature entirely.

Far Cry 3 is an excellent example of the sandbox genre, want to hand glide over a jungle then drop into a river far below? You can. Want to set the jungle on fire? You can. Want to punch a leopard in the face? You can. If you enjoy Assassin’s Creed, Red Dead Redemption and Call of Duty and wondered what you’d get if you put the three together, then this is definitely the game for you.

Video

blankstrife — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 13:33:24 -0500

Photo

blankstrife — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 16:40:37 -0500

Preview - Project Zomboid

blankstrife — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 16:40:00 -0500

Project Zomboid is an indie game being developed for PC and in case you couldn’t tell from the title, it has zombies in it. Zomboid is a top-down, zombie survival game with retro graphics that throws you into the zombie apocalypse with a singular promise: you will die. Personally I saw such a statement as a challenge, which I accepted, partly because I love survival games and partly because the early build of the game was free download. The build I played was pre-alpha and doesn’t accurately reflect what the finished game may be like. That said I recruited two of my friends and had a little competition to see who could last the longest.

Me: The game starts out with your character Jim, standing over the wounded form of his wife Kate. Jim and Kate have obviously been having a rough day and I took it upon myself to make it better. The first task was to go to the shed in the garden and use the tools within to fortify the house the couple are sheltering in. The controls are fairly straightforward and the interface turned out to be not unlike Minecraft, an inventory with the ability to combine items and two equipment slots. With hammer, board and nail I set about the house, covering ground floor windows and doors. One of the first things I noticed is that it gets dark very quickly and when it’s dark it’s really dark. With wifey secure, the conversation led to sleep and more importantly light. Now I was presented with a new problem, food. Being the man I had to go out and forage for food while the woman stayed at home doing womanly things like bleeding. I headed into the street, hammer in hand, and began to search from building to building. The first building in and you’re already you’re running into the walking dead, the game gives brief instruction on how best to cave their skulls in; my Jim flailed his hammer to put the thing down and was rewarded with a cache of food for his trouble. I repeated this process in another house or two but it was already getting dark, I found myself sprinting down the street towards my safehouse, chased by a growing horde of zombies. I desperately boarded up the door behind me and turned my attention to the much more difficult task of cooking. With the soup on the stove, I was reading a radio report wifeski was tuned into, when a man broke down my boards and walked in the door. Unfortunately he wasn’t friendly; he levelled a gun at my head and demanded we go upstairs to see the wifesicles. Now I wasn’t about to give in to his demands, but I also knew he’d pop me in the head if I tried anything, while I was deliberating all hell broke loose. That same zombie horde I’d led to the house earlier decided they wanted to chat too and promptly proceeded to swarm the gunman, I took the opportunity to run upstairs and see if I couldn’t drag wifebot to the safety of another house. Pleasantly surprised that I was now able to move her, I headed back downstairs with a mind to go out the back, through the kitchen. The kitchen was on fire. Somebody had left the soup on and now the whole room was being rapidly consumed by flames, to top it off the zombies had finished munching on my new friend and had their sights set on poor old Jim. Carrying the Mrs was slowing Jim almost to a crawl and I soon abandoned her to the fire and the zombies and ran for the door…which was still boarded up. About to burn to death and surrounded by flesh hungry monsters I shouted “You’ll never take me alive coppers!”. I swung my hammer madly, to no avail. At least I didn’t burn to death…

Survival Time – 1 Day, 7 Hours

Chloe: Chloe decided right off the bat that she didn’t care one bit for her poor, hard done by wife and abandoned her. Instead she had a survival plan of her own, with the tools in hand she started clearing buildings, much like I did. However she decided to fortify a different house and use that as her base, I advised that she pick one with two exits, that way she’d never be cornered by zombies, unless she was stupid enough to set the other door on fire…This is when we learned something new about the zombies, as I found out they can follow you home and they will eventually break down boards and doors. However I noticed they didn’t seem to come through the windows, as a result Chloe didn’t board them up. The zombies kept gathering round the house even though Chloe didn’t leave, we realised perhaps a little too late that they can see you through the windows if they’re not boarded up and will attack the door as a result. Unfortunately Chloe isn’t a natural gamer and doesn’t react well to that kind of pressure. When the zombies bashed in her back door I advised her to try and escape out the front, instead she ran upstairs and barricaded herself in one of the bedrooms, sure that they’d go away if she just believed hard enough. Unfortunately nobody was listening to her prayers and she ended her life being chased around a small room by a crowd of dead folk. I found it hilarious. She did not…

Survival Time: 3 Days, 4 Hours

Josh: Despite her somewhat questionable tactics Chloe had already beaten me; meanwhile Josh had been patiently watching both of us and learned from our mistakes. He wanted to see the ‘story’ through to the end, by complying with the gunman’s wishes and seeing where it led. He led the gunman upstairs, which prompted a little dialogue between the three survivors. Based on the amount of supplies you’d gathered the gunman would say different things, but either way he decides he wants your safehouse for himself and also that Kate’s broken leg is a bite so she should be put down. With wifeski in danger Josh heroically bashed the gunman’s brains out, saving the day, Kate thanked him….and that was it, we figured it was the end of the story for the alpha build. With that out of the way Josh decided to have a proper explore of the town and he managed to rack up quite the hoard of useful items, including baseball bat and even a shotgun. There were a few locked buildings with no obvious way in, but apart from that Josh had completely mapped the place out. After all the situations he’d survived he got brought down in the most undignified, yet dramatic of ways. A simple lone zombie managed to get a hit it on our star player; it wasn’t long before he became very unwell and eventually succumbed to the zombie virus. We then spent at least another ten minutes just watching what his zombified husk got up to in 3x speed.

Survival Time: 14 Days, 9 Hours!

By this point Chloe had literally fallen asleep and if you’re still reading this, I’m surprised you haven’t. But we had our winner and could safely say we had seen all there was to see, despite it being a pre-alpha tech build of the game it had already showed potential to be incredibly fun.

Video

blankstrife — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 16:39:13 -0500

Photo

blankstrife — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 14:03:49 -0400

Review – Xcom: Enemy Unknown

blankstrife — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 14:03:08 -0400

I am not a natural strategy gamer, but my brother is and as a result I’ve found myself playing many such games over the years. I was more excited for Xcom than I have ever been for a strategy game and my high hopes were not let down. In the business of reviews we are taught never to make stand-alone, declarative statements, but let me start by saying Xcom is a brilliant game.

Xcom is a turn based, top-down, squad shooter. It is the latest instalment in a classic franchise that has gone 11 years without a release and even longer since a good one. Given it’s illustrious history the game had a lot to live up to, even though many gamers, myself included had never heard of the originals. Enemy Unknown does a good job of both pleasing fans of the old games whilst still inviting new ones. The turn based combat is methodical and addictive, it rewards careful players and delivers brutal punishment to the cocky and that’s just normal difficulty. Personally I enjoy challenging games such as Dark Souls, games that put pressure on the player to try their hardest and Xcom has that in spades. The game features ‘classic’ and ‘impossible’ difficulties as well as Iron Man mode, a brutal setting where the player is allowed no manual saves, making every decision final. If difficulty isn’t your bag then there is a ‘casual’ setting, though in my opinion normal is easy enough once you know what you’re doing. Wimp. On the other hand if you find the computer still isn’t giving you enough of a challenge though you can always test your alien gun chess skills in the multiplayer, in one on one deathmatches

The ant farm, base management is reminiscent of Starcraft 2’s, with the ability to choose your research and engineering projects. However, unlike Starcraft, Xcom doesn’t deliver much in the way of story, with the former title setting benchmarks for the genre I can’t help but feel they could have done more in this area. That said the Area 52 theme is enjoyable, it benefits from the slightly cartoony graphics, which feature death animations anywhere from the mundane to the grisly. Whether you’re into strategy games or not I strongly suggest you check Xcom out, it achieves that rare balance of difficulty and rewardingly fun gameplay that many games promise, but few deliver.