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Initial release date: November 1, 2016 Developer: D-Pad Studio Engine: Microsoft XNA Platforms: PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, Linux, Macintosh operating systems Designers: Simon Stafsnes Andersen, Adrian Bauer Genres: Platform game, Action-adventure game --------------- MINIMUM config : OS: Windows 7/8/10/Vista Processor: Dual Core Memory: 1 GB RAM Graphics: Pixelshader 3.0 enabled graphics card(DirectX 10 capable graphics card) Version 9.0c DirectX: Storage: 600 MBavailable space --------------- By their very nature, retro-inspired games are fighting an uphill battle against the nostalgia they aim to invoke. How can they form their own identity when they're partly designed to make you remember other games? After finishing Owlboy, it seems D-Pad Studio might have the answer. For almost a decade, Owlboy has lurked behind the curtain of mainstream releases with a small-but-devout following. Looking at screenshots and videos over the years, it was always apparent that Owlboy would look and sound great, but there's so much more to love about the final product: the humor, the varied cast, the disasters that befall its otherwise bright and uplifting world, and the incredible action set-pieces that punctuate the calm found elsewhere. It's not until you break through the surface that you're blinded by Owlboy's artistic brilliance and swayed by its heartfelt story. It begins with Otus--our mute protagonist and the runt of his village--during a stressful dream where his professor and dark figments criticize his inadequacies and chastise his inability to speak. It's a powerful setup that endears our hero to you. Trouble brews shortly after he wakes up and concerns of pirate sightings explode into panic as a nearby metropolis comes under attack. Otus teams up with a military mechanic, Geddy, to put a stop to the pirates before their home is destroyed. Owlboy is old-school, not just in its presentation, but also in its storytelling--there’s no voice acting, and events are set in stone with nary a major decision-making opportunity in sight. The plot manages to avoid predictability, however, not only through a handful of twists, but by allowing characters to evolve throughout the course of the game. Sad moments aren't swept under the rug by unreasonable optimism--they stay with your squad and fundamentally alter their outlook on the mission and their own identity in surprising ways. There's great attention to detail in the cast's animations, which are often tailored for a specific scene, as opposed to falling back on routine reactions. Coupled with a script that's rife with emotion and nuance, Owlboy's characters feel real in your heart despite their cartoonish look. Owlboy tackles multiple artistic themes and subjects with consistently impressive execution. It may be a throwback of sorts, but Owlboy's visuals aren't tailored to specifically ape 8- or 16-bit graphics; it doesn't have a limited color palette, and its pixel resolution changes based on the scene at hand. When you enter wide-open spaces, the camera zooms out, chunky details shrink, and meticulously designed structures and environments take shape. In tight spaces, you're brought closer into the scene for more intimate inspection. From subterranean creatures to ancient structures, Owlboy tackles several artistic themes and subjects with consistently impressive execution. And if you have a soft spot for 2D games with multiple layers of parallax scrolling--where the background moves slower than the foreground to simulate depth--you're in for a treat. When you first take control of Otus, darting around floating islands and chatting with other creatures makes for a pleasant experience, and while the open air and bright colors deserve some credit, it's the orchestrated soundtrack that solidifies Owlboy's shifting atmosphere and tone. Violas and flutes instill merriment at first, but this innocence is short lived; when the pirates invade, oboes drone and cellos growl to the slow beat of a heavy drum. When the dust settles and the second half of your journey kicks off, sprightly piano compositions provide a much-needed respite from the stress of a society under attack. Your trek to the pirate's den takes you through expansive spaces and into the heart of sprawling cave systems where buccaneers and wildlife alike lie in wait. They typically bombard you with rocks and other projectiles, rarely engaging in close-quarters combat. On his own, Otus can only dash into enemies, stunning them at best. However, with the help of a handy teleportation device, he can summon one of three partners into his claws mid-flight to utilize their long-range blaster, shotgun, or webbing that can ensnare enemies and be used as a grappling hook to escape dangerous situations. Otus is unfortunately a tad slow by default, which causes you to spam his dash move repeatedly to keep things moving along outside of combat. There’s a modest upgrade system driven by collecting and turning in coins found in chests, but you're upgrading health reserves--in the form of soup canisters--and your team's weapons, not physical traits. Still, a keen eye and fast reflexes are more critical to success than any upgrades purchased during your adventure. Knowing that success comes from a show of skill rather than your ability to collect upgrades is gratifying, but you walk away from Owlboy with the sinking feeling that the equipment and upgrades in the game have unrealized potential. Owlboy is consistently charming and surprising, and when its final act doubles down on every front, it's bittersweet to see it end. Standard combat isn't anything special, but it never wears out its welcome thanks to deft pacing. Owlboy steadily mixes combat and exploration with measured stealth challenges, fast-paced escape sequences, and entertaining exchanges between characters. The chase/escape sequences in particular are some of the most impressive moments in the game, throwing you into a harrowing race against time in the face of tightly choreographed hazards. These scenes are challenging and filled with visual effects that add to the sense of danger, and they're overwhelming at first, but should you die, not to worry: Owlboy never truly punishes you for failure, allowing you to restart from the last room you entered. Owlboy is consistently charming and surprising, and when its final act doubles down on every front, it's bittersweet to see it end. As you relish the outcome of the final battle and watch the closing cutscene, you can't help but reflect on the beginning of your adventure and how far the world and its inhabitants have come. You'll never be able to play Owlboy for the first time again, but the memories of its magic moments stick with you. This is more than a treat for fans of old-school games; Owlboy is a heartfelt experience that will touch anyone with an affinity for great art and storytelling.

Initial release date: September 4, 2018 Developer: Planet Alpha ApS Genre: Platform game Designer: Tim Börrefors Publisher: Team17 Digital Limited Platforms: PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows From the outset, Planet Alpha is purposefully vague about what is going on. Your unnamed protagonist, a non-entity in an unrevealing spacesuit, limps through a series of harsh environments during the game's opening. After a minute, they stagger and collapse only to awake in a new area. The how and why of this event and everything that happens afterward never become important. This is a game of mystery and discovery where you're never sure who you are, where you're heading, or why you're on this glorious, mysterious planet. Planet Alpha does not have answers to the questions you might have--it's a sightseeing tour of a planet that feels truly alien, by way of a 2D puzzle platformer. The sights and locations you'll see and explore are varied, with each of the game's chapters taking you to a different environment. You move through catacombs, jungles, enormous architectural structures, and even across islands floating in the sky. There is beauty in every environment, but nothing beats the deep backgrounds of the game's numerous outdoor sections, which teem with life and a sense of history. It's clear that something has gone terribly wrong on the eponymous planet and watching it all unfold--occasionally becoming involved in incidents as they break out--is a pleasure. While you might leave without a clear idea of what just happened, there's a coherency to Planet Alpha that suggests some deeply established lore. From its opening moments through to its closing credits, Planet Alpha is stunning. It's the sort of game that dedicated screenshot buttons were made for--you feel like a tourist taking holiday snaps, only you're coming home with pictures of giant squid-aliens, bioluminescent plants, and inter-species battles that break out in the distance. There's no UI on the screen, so you can really appreciate how beautiful everything looks. The camera often zooms out to let you take in the scope and beauty of your surroundings and the vistas that stretch to a distant horizon. A large part of the appeal is wondering what you might see around the corner. Planet Alpha focuses on platforming puzzles--you'll frequently have to move climbable boxes and figure out how to avoid the hostile creatures and robots that inhabit the planet. There are no real head-scratchers though, and succeeding is mostly a matter of paying attention to your environment and timing your actions well. Getting past enemies usually requires either some rudimentary stealth (like hiding among foliage or behind a pillar until an enemy moves) or luring them into danger. This can be frustrating since the AI patterns of your enemies are unpredictable, but the feeling of relief in finally managing to lure a killer robot to its death is always satisfying. Several sections can be solved through trial and error, and running forward and getting killed is sometimes the easiest way to work out how to avoid getting killed next time--respawning is very quick, and changes you make to the environment persist. For reasons never fully explained, you also have the power to rotate the planet with the shoulder buttons. At first, you're only able to do this in designated spots, but later in the game you can do it anywhere. This means that you can switch from daytime to nighttime, making use of the day/night cycle and the fact that some elements of the environment change between the two. For instance, during the day, a mushroom might appear as a platform you can jump on, and at night some plants awaken and unfurl, allowing you to use them as cover as you sneak through an area. Rotating the planet can also move elements within the environment, so a platform might rise or shift, or a door might open if you rotate in the right direction. These puzzles are interesting, but they're rarely challenging or clever, and while the world rotation ability feels inherently grand when you first start using it, there are no unexpected twists or new interesting wrinkles in how this mechanic works. There’s beauty in watching the shift happen, though, as luminescent plants glow in the moonlight and the dawning sun casts a glorious light across the planet. Planet Alpha gets trickier when you're asked to perform death-defying physical feats. Large sections of the game feel reminiscent of Uncharted and its ilk, as you scramble up walls and leap between pillars, or slide down an embankment and jump at just the right moment to avoid falling to your doom. These moments can be quite exciting, and there are plenty of great scripted sequences throughout the game that see you just barely surviving as you run, jump and climb away from danger. But the controls can feel stiff in instances where precision is required, and sometimes you'll fall to your death because your last-microsecond jump didn't register or because you character doesn't grab the ledge for some reason. This is an especially big issue during a handful of sequences that warp you into what seems to be another dimension, a trippy, dark void full of huge floating blocks where gravity is greatly reduced. These sections are weird, even by "mysterious game set on an alien planet" standards, but their pure focus on low-gravity platforming can be exciting at times. Flinging across long jumps is exhilarating--if you're on a moving block and jump from it right as it comes to a stop you'll be sent flying, which allows for traversal puzzles on a bigger scale than anything outside of the void. But these areas can also get frustrating when the physics aren't quite gelling and you're finding yourself being flung further than expected, desperately wishing you could wall jump off the floating pillars you're smacking into. While there are moments of frustration in its platforming, and the puzzles are relatively unsophisticated, the locations of Planet Alpha will most certainly stick with you. It doesn't matter why you're there, or what it is you're looking for. There's great pleasure in just existing on this planet, in navigating its harsh terrain and admiring its vistas, and the sheer beauty of it all makes the game's shortcomings easy to bear.

Initial release date: August 28, 2018 Developer: Rebellion Developments Designer: Tim Jones Publisher: Rebellion Developments Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows Genres: Third-person shooter, Action-adventure game While it definitely carries the troubling legacy of colonialism, there's still something indelibly appealing about the adventure genre--which is to say the genre of adventure broadly, not necessarily adventure games. The trek, the hunt, and the questing through ancient ruins all make a compelling foundation for any journey. That spirit is one that Strange Brigade carries well. It cribs iconography and ideas from the likes of Indiana Jones and its thematic kin for a cooperative romp through unknown jungles packed with zombies, magic, and mysteries--all while nailing the fun-loving wanderlust and, unfortunately, flubbing some of the basics. The premise is simple enough: a cooperative third-person shooter where you beat down mythical monstrosities. Often these will take the form of a cadre of mobile, combat-hardened mummies or the legendary Minotaur. Your mission, as given to you by the English secret service, is to conquer these foes and help lay to rest the soul of a millennia-old queen whose spirit rampages through the region. Your crew of four is a raucous bunch, each with their own thematically-appropriate skills and story. Tough-talking Gracie, for instance, provides the industrious muscle for the squad, and Frank is the experienced leader. The pair of magicians include the classically styled Archimedes and the vaguely racist Nalangu, an amalgam of tribalist stereotypes of indigenous shamans and warriors that does Strange Brigade no favors. To be fair, there's little hint of mean-spirit in Strange Brigade itself; it's more a natural consequence of the genre and a failure to adequately or actively push back against some of those tropes. Problematic elements aside, there's plenty of stylized presentation and jovial pomp to keep you entertained--though you'd be more than forgiven to not overlook those touchy aspects, too. Beyond its setting, it can be a bit tough to nail down what precisely Strange Brigade does that stands out. Gunplay is straightforward, as are its foes--most of whom are either big baddies or swarms of mooks. But the '30s radio serial tone actually works well to create a solid premise for its better elements. Traps and puzzles feel like logical extensions, and the cooperative nature helps you better manage the chaos. While you've no doubt mowed down your share of zombies while an NPC scrambles to unlock a door, shifting that role to another player adds a little something extra. When those panicked shouts come through the headset, you feel imminently responsible for your friend's safety and they trust that you'll have their back. All of this works with the game's relatively straightforward inventory system. Alongside the spread of traps and obstacles throughout the stage to create an unusual method of traversing and battling, an array of bonuses and upgrades encourage traversal of these branching worlds. You can, and are encouraged to, for instance, mani[CENSORED]te traps to squash, pierce, and dismember teeming hordes of monsters. These battles play out in labyrinthine stages, too, offering a few different ways to guide and control enemies along the way. Everyone in the group will get a chance to flex their skills and contribute at some point. While the variety of locales is a bit limited--they're all Egyptian-themed to a degree--there's quite a bit of variability within that. Desert areas offer much more open battle spaces than the caverns of an ancient tomb, which will funnel you through cramped passages packed with swinging axe blades and pressure-plate flamethrowers. All-told, you can spend upwards of 10 hours exploring each of them with a crew, and while they're all a bit similar, they don't wear out their welcome too soon. Each character will have items and supplies they can buy with the loot they collect along the way, and all carry a magical amulet that can absorb the spirits of the baddies they've conquered to unleash super-charged attacks. Other gear, like specialized and temporary weapons--akin to the turrets or miniguns you might be able to wield in more traditional shooters for a time--help break up the pacing a bit more, and offer up a few more chances to coordinate with the team. Despite the extra fluff, it's hard to shake the sense that Strange Brigade isn't much more than a snack. The tongue-in-cheek tone and setting are the big draws here, and while they facilitate some unusual and entertaining play, they don't do much beyond that. Puzzles are dreadfully simple--bouncing between connect-the-pipes and basic matching games--and upgrades just don't provide a lot to play around with. Each weapon has a few slots, but even that's plug-and-play. For such an unusual world, more types of attacks, weapons, foes, would be a joy. And, unfortunately, what's there does have some significant technical problems. Texture pop-in can be jarring, and a bevy of other problems like clipping issues and uneven loot distribution give the impression that parts of Strange Brigade are in need for further refinement. The grand result is an amusing adventure that makes a powerful case for more creativity with level design, setting, and pacing in co-op shooters, without thoroughly capitalizing on all of its own best ideas. Traps and their extensive use within many of the levels are a joy, and the underpinning gunplay is strong enough to warrant a sturdy recommendation, but it all comes to a head well before it should.

Initial release date: 2018 Genre: Platform game Developers: Crunching Koalas sp. z o.o., Juggler Games Platforms: PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows Publishers: IMGN.PRO, Crunching Koalas sp. z o.o. Nominations: Polityka Passport Award for Digital Culture My Memory of Us, a game by Polish developer Juggler Games that focuses on the plight of two Polish children during a robot uprising, serves as a thin allegory for World War II, and obviously means well. This is important, as a version of My Memory of Us that didn't have its heart in the right place would be a disaster. This puzzle platformer aims to pay tribute to the Polish citizens who lost their lives during the Nazi occupation, especially those that provided shelter and help to the people around them, and the game feels like it intends to be respectful, especially in the collectible "memories" that tell you more about the real-world people who inspired the game. Unfortunately, the good intentions of My Memory Of Us are obscured by dull gameplay and poor metaphors. You play as a young boy and girl simultaneously, neither of whom are given names. Early in the game a "robot occupation" occurs, standing in for the Nazi occupation of Poland, and you find yourself guiding these two kids through an increasingly perilous situation. The game is a puzzle-platformer with an intentionally limited monochromatic color palette, with a sparing use of red. You can swap between the two characters or move them both at once by having them hold hands, and solving most puzzles comes down to running around interacting with everything and using the unique abilities of each kid. The boy can sneak and shine light into people's eyes to temporarily blind them if he happens to be standing in a patch of light, while the girl can run and use a slingshot, abilities which make her more enjoyable to control. Occasionally the children will be separated or will need to work together while having access to different parts of the map and different resources. Some sections have a stealth focus, where you'll need to creep between cover and avoid enemy patrol patterns, and there are even a few vehicle sections (think Excitebike but much slower) scattered throughout. Any sequence like this with a potential fail state can get tedious thanks to some control issues--climbing objects requires more inputs than it should, the hand-holding mechanic can be unresponsive, vehicle sections feel stiff, and checkpoints that could stand to be more generous. The puzzles you solve often resemble those you might find in a very simple point-and-click adventure and are rarely well implemented into the game world or plot. For example, figuring out a padlock combination during one sequence set within an orphanage involves observing an equation left on a blackboard, which encourages you to multiply birds by strawberries, then subtract the number of ships. The solution is to use a telescope upstairs to count the birds outside, multiply that number by the strawberries that appear in a thought bubble above an NPC's head after finding and giving them a jar of strawberry jam, and then subtracting the number of ships dotted around the house the padlocked door is in. This isn't a difficult puzzle to solve, but there's a sense of disconnect between your actions and the outcome, and completing it feels like busywork. This is an issue throughout the game, where the impact and logic of your actions is often unclear. You're regularly stumbling ahead just looking for the next thing you're able to interact with, unsure of what outcome you're trying to achieve. The best puzzles are the more traditional ones--there are sliding tile puzzles, a few numeric brain-teasers, and even a clever maze later in the game. They largely feel divorced from the levels they're in, but some of them are at least entertaining. A bigger problem is the concept of dressing up a Nazi invasion as a robot invasion. The plot's framing device--that the boy, now an old man voiced by the great Patrick Stewart, is telling a story to a young girl who visits his bookshop--can only justify the game's euphemisms so far. The conceit is that the story is being changed to make it child-appropriate and more exciting; in practice, though, obscuring the truth of the story just makes things weird. Stewart delivers his lines, set against static cutscenes between missions, with his trademark timbre, but it's hard to get past the fact that the game has taken something horrific and made it cute. Worst still is when the metaphor the game is operating under starts to fall apart. Partway through the game, the girl gets marked as "red" by the robot army. The game's "red" people wear red clothing, painted on by the robots' machines, and suddenly find themselves treated like lesser beings by everyone. It's an obvious tribute to the girl in the red coat from Schindler's List, but as a metaphor for how the Polish Jews were treated, it feels too ham-fisted as a metaphor and far from the horror of what it is meant to fill in for, especially when it seems like the citizens being painted are being chosen, essentially, at random. It's possible to tell a Holocaust story like this through metaphor and abstraction--Art Spiegelman's comic Maus stands as perhaps the best example--but it never feels like My Memory of Us has anything new or interesting to say about the period it is depicting, and framing it as a story being told to a child does not excuse this. The disconnect between the game's cuter aesthetic elements and the story, where characters get sent to live in ghettos and whisked off to concentration camps, is jarring. In one scene, a robot commander demands that the girl dance for him (which plays out as a button-matching minigame), throwing her a literal bone (which you need to subdue a dog) when she succeeds. The cruelty of this act is obscured by the game's layers of metaphor. There are a few moments when the game's aesthetic works well--one section where the two characters dress up in a crude robot costume is a standout--but the tonal confusion dampens most of the experience. The game's art style and soundtrack are both great, despite a few mild performance hiccups where the music would blip out for a moment, but even the way both children are smiling in their idle animations feels wrong. Things improve later in the game when it leans in harder to the underlying horror of the situation. The weird fantastical elements still don't quite sit right, but when you're, say, releasing other "red" people from the robot's flying train while it's on its way to a camp, there's a tangible sense of gravity to proceedings, and there are a few plot beats that land well. When a weird, out-of-place final boss fight (complete with stuttering performance issues) breaks out in the penultimate level it's hard to know what the game stands for. But the emotional finale that immediately follows, while simple, manages to pay off well on the relationship at the game's core, providing the closure a story like this needs. My Memory of Us feels misguided; a concept that doesn’t sit well, marred by puzzle gameplay that fails to challenge or excite. It means well, and divorced from the game's context, the game's aesthetic is charming. But it doesn’t really work as either a puzzle game or as an educational experience.

Initial release date: September 1, 2015 Developer: League of Geeks Engine: Unity Composer: Lisa Gerrard Platforms: PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, Linux, Macintosh operating systems Genres: Role-playing video game, Board game Armello's hybrid of tactics, dice-rolling, and political intrigue has aged better than expected in the three years since its release, and on Nintendo Switch, the game is almost as formidable as it is on PC. Its charming blend of animal kingdom hijinks and turn-based strategy gameplay has yet to be replicated by a newer, flashier title; Armello has definitely held up well, and its uniqueness is undeniable. However, there are a few major differences between PC version and Switch releases, and not all of them are positive. The most important distinction is the fact that the Switch version includes all of Armello's DLC content. The Complete Edition of the game includes a bunch of morally-grey heroes, seasonal effects, and a whole new clan to contend with. While the base game has a fair amount of material to keep you occupied, a criticism of the launch content was that particular victory styles were incentivized over others. At their core, the DLC packs attempt to address that by expanding your potential champion pool with heroes that operate very differently from the original ones in the base game. Luckily, the champion pool increase is more than just a numbers game. The Usurpers DLC in particular has heroes which are brimming with devilish personality, along with playstyles that revolve around more than the just original victory avenues of skirmishing and keeping a death grip on the King's coffers. The Bandit Clan DLC adds around 50 new quests specific to this charismatic new faction, along with a thematically-appropriate follower that gives risk-taking players a second chance when taking up arms against their competition. The other DLC packs focus on mostly aesthetic and minor upgrades to dice variety, but they're still notable improvements on the range of material that was initially available. The unfortunate change to the Switch version is the performance. Unlike the DLC additions that are, on the balance of things, a net positive, Armello doesn't run as nicely on Nintendo's console as it does on other platforms. It's not the sort of frame rate drop that makes the game unplayable by any means, but there's a clear disruption in the smoothness and timeliness of actions and animations that play out on the screen when you're in-game. This isn't something that you can attribute to online connection troubles either; some graphical degradation was experienced in playing against the AI in the Prologue segments, which in itself contained condensed elements of the game's mechanics. If you can put that to one side, then Armello's unique blend of strategy makes it a worthy pick-up on Switch. -- Ginny Woo, 10/16/2018 . When you don't have three friends and some reasonably good beer to keep you engaged, a board game--especially a virtual recreation of one--has to work a lot harder to hold your attention. Armello accomplishes this and then some, and while it could use some fine tuning, it remains one of the best virtual board game experiences available. At first glance, Armello can feel like a tangle of things--dice and cards and boards and coins and stats--but the quick four-part prologue does a good job of making sense of these pieces. Your primary actions include moving a character around the board to complete quests and avoid hazards. There are eight playable characters, and each character has different strengths, weaknesses, and abilities in addition to items they can equip to skew their stats in a slightly different direction. They also each have great-looking combat animations. Ever wish Disney's Robin Hood had 40% more bears punching each other senseless? Well, this game is for you! To win in Armello, you have to either kill the king or have the highest prestige when the monarch dies due to a disease called the rot. Every full day--one turn for day and one turn for night--the King's health dwindles lower while his rot creeps higher, so no matter how things shake out, there are a finite number of turns that can be taken before the King will keel over on his own. It's also possible to defeat the King in combat, either by gathering four spirit stones from quests or tiles, or gaining a higher rot level than him. If a would-be assassin fails, the victory will automatically be handed to the prestige leader. Unless you're playing against clever friends, a prestige victory is almost always the easiest way to win. This can make the game feel unbalanced, especially when playing against AI opponents that frequently make ill-advised assassination attempts. That said, if you can resist the siren song of an easy victory or have other players wanting to spoil your plans, the varied win conditions provide enough variety to accommodate different play styles and keep things spicy through multiple sessions of playing with friends. You also have a hand of cards--which are as well-animated as the characters themselves--that can be anything from equippable items and followers to spells and tricks that can be applied to yourself, other actors on the board, or specific tiles. Imagine if you could slam your Hearthstone deck down on a Clue board and swarm Professor Plum with Murlocs, and you have an accurate idea of just how neat this is in practice. Cards all have different costs to play, and crucially, they can be played regardless of whose turn it is. This allows for some tense moments and sharp twists in matches with other human players. On the other hand, when it comes to the A.I. opponents, the game tends to jump around a bit too fast to take full advantage of that ability unless you're particularly quick on the draw. What Armello suffers from most is a lack of customization options, something it could have stood to learn from more-traditional strategy games. There's no way to define whether you want a quick or a long game, A.I. skill levels are static, and when you're playing with friends, you're bound to a move timer whether you like it or not. Graphics controls are also somewhat limited, which means that you won't be able to turn off the haze of clouds in the sky, which would be dlightful if you didn't have to look down through them when you zoom out to see the full board. Armello picks and chooses a variety of elements from board, card, 4X, and role-playing games without demanding either a familiarity with or a fondness for any genre. It also leaves a lot of room to engage as deeply as you want with the game's guts without feeling like you're floundering if you don't. Whether you're bumbling your way to the top or playing all your cards right, Armello makes regicide ridiculously entertaining.

Games i remember minecraft CS : GO Cs 1.6 CSN:Z Fortnite GTA V ...

Initial release date: April 9, 2019 Developer: Three Fields Entertainment Genre: Racing video game Platforms: PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows, Xbox One Publishers: Three Fields Entertainment, Maximum Games Modes: Single-player video game, Multiplayer video game It's impossible to play or talk about Dangerous Driving without comparing it to Criterion's seminal Burnout 3: Takedown. This is by design, of course, as developer Three Fields Entertainment--a small indie studio comprised of former Criterion alum--set out to create a spiritual successor to the dormant racer; latching onto the groundbreaking Burnout 3 as a clear and po[CENSORED]r focal point. Everything about Dangerous Driving's design, right down to small details like font selection and the phrasing used in its loading screens, is distinctly Burnout 3. It foregoes the advances made in its sequels--like traffic checking and the introduction of an open-world--to hone in on what made Takedown so special. My first hour or so with Dangerous Driving was fraught with bewilderment, however. There's a single song that plays on the main menu, but other than this there's a complete absence of music throughout the entire game. Licensed tracks are a crucial component to the Burnout formula, and after playing a few events in near-complete silence, their monumental importance can't be overstated. Obviously, this is true of most games, but particularly one where high-speed exhilaration is on the menu. After initially thinking this was either a bug or that music would eventually find its way into the game via a day one patch, I hopped into the audio settings and discovered the reason for its omission: Spotify This is a smart idea for an indie studio that might not have the budget to splash out on licensed music, and after finding something suitably upbeat and aggressive myself, the experience of tearing around the track and wrecking other cars was improved tenfold. Yet asking people to own a premium service just to get music in their game is a fairly excessive compromise. It's an understandable trade-off for gaining access to po[CENSORED]r music in a budget-priced game, but beyond the monetary requirement, it also has an effect on gameplay. Three Fields can't mani[CENSORED]te Spotify music in any way, so songs will just play through from start to finish without the incorporation of any interactive elements. This means that the music doesn't change its tone when you boost, or slow down and warp during takedowns, and that robs these moments of some of their potential impact. When you're out on the road, the handling of each car will feel instantly familiar to anyone who's ever played Burnout before. While most contemporary racing games are wary of fully embracing an arcadey style without featuring some kind of simulation element, Dangerous Driving is a full-blooded, balls-to-the-wall arcade racer. You'll hold down the accelerator ad infinitum until your finger aches, careen around corners by either scraping across the steel guard rails or tapping the brake button to effortlessly drift around, and weave between oncoming traffic at over 200-miles-per-hour as the nitrous oxide flames spewing out of each exhaust pipe propel your car forward. Unfortunately, the physics can be fairly wonky at times, often bringing your vehicle to a complete stop because you brushed against a wall; while other times it will shoot you straight up into the air, or force your car into a complete 90-degree turn. This can be incredibly frustrating during the latter stages of an event when one mishap is enough to send you tumbling to the back of the pack. Collision detection is also inconsistent; numerous times a head-on crash resulted in my car clipping through the floor and appearing unscathed on the other side. The face-distorting sense of speed, though, is genuinely electric, and the PS4 Pro version maintains a stable 60 frames-per-second with one notable exception: It has a tendency to hitch rather egregiously when you're driving through tunnels. The crux of Dangerous Driving's racing is centered around the need to drive recklessly and constantly put yourself in harm's way. By hurtling towards incoming traffic, performing near misses, nailing drifts, tailgating, and taking down your opponents, you earn variable degrees of boost that will help fire your chosen vehicle towards the finish line. There isn't a discernible difference in how each car handles, other than the fact that some go faster than others, but their pinpoint responsiveness coupled with the high framerate ensures that you're fully capable of serpentining in and out of danger if your reactions are quick enough. Again, this is quintessential Burnout, with the destruction of your fellow drivers doubling your boost meter and incentivizing the most perilous behavior possible. These takedowns are reminiscent of those that debuted in Burnout 3, although the slow-motion crashes in Dangerous Driving are surprisingly underwhelming. They're not bad, but they're also not impactful enough--which the aforementioned issues with music contribute to--lacking in any real dynamism or metal-crunching detail. There are exceptions to this rule, but vehicle collisions actually look a lot more violent when they occur near you in real time, with broken cars hurtling across the road in a furious cascade of fire and sparks. A wrecked car doesn't signal the end of its lifespan either. While Dangerous Driving unabashedly riffs on Burnout, it has its own ideas, too, like persistent wrecks. Now, if you're driving on a track with multiple laps, any takedowns that happen will leave the battered husk of that car out on the road as a smoke-billowing obstacle. This is rather ingenious, as subsequent laps gradually evolve the track until it's veritable minefields of dead vehicles. The slow-motion crashes are not impactful enough--which the aforementioned issues with music contribute to--lacking in any real dynamism or metal-crunching detail The problem with this--and it's not a problem with the mechanic itself, but rather one with the game's overall structure--is that these multi-lap events, and the most stimulating moments within them, are too few and far between. Dangerous Driving excels when you're in the middle of the pack, trading paint with other cars, and fighting tooth and nail to move up the field. It's here where it's at its most exciting, and really latches onto what made Burnout 3 so brilliant in the first place. But reaching first place is relatively easy--I was taken down by the AI twice in all my time playing--and once you're there the rubber banding isn't aggressive enough to ever compete with your driving unless you crash. Rivals drivers will hover just behind you, waiting to capitalize on any mistakes, but there are far too many instances where you can take a leisurely drive in first place, resulting in a feeling that you're missing out on all the action. It doesn't help that the track design is bland. Visually there's a lot of variety with a cohesive theme of North American National Parks that encompasses sunswept canyons, beachside cliffs, snowy mountain ranges, and so on, but the tracks themselves are made up of the same kinds of long, winding corners that it almost feels like they were copied and pasted from one track and into another. They rarely deviate from this standard blueprint, and there's nothing that sets the tracks apart from one another either. This compounds the issues with difficulty and AI during race events, and also results in a dearth of engaging racing in other game modes. There are face-offs against a single opponent, the takedown-centric Road Rage, time trials, a survival event that tasks you with reaching checkpoints to stave off an ever-depleting timer, and even a nod to Criterion's work on Need for Speed in the shape of police pursuits. Again, there's a decent amount of variety here, with familiar modes returning from Burnout (including one that was previously its namesake, re-titled to Heatwave here), but the lack of interesting courses and a scarcity of racing events depletes much of the excitement. Online multiplayer is being added in a future update, and playing against other people might allay some of these problems. But the more I played the more I began to realize Dangerous Driving lacks that magic spark the Burnout games had in abundance. That kinetic energy, palpable sense of danger, and the heart-racing thrill that something could and would go wrong at any moment. The AI was aggressive--competitive--and the satisfaction of taking them down was born of more than just getting to watch their car crumple against the nearest brick wall. The tracks were inventive, too, more interesting in their environments, and full of diverging paths and risky shortcuts. Dangerous Driving nails the basic feeling of driving a car in Burnout, but the lack of small details quickly begin to add up and peel away at everything that doesn't feel quite right. The most damning criticism I can level at it is that it's often dull and lifeless. There are too many events that fail to capitalize on its strengths, and those that do can only reach those heights in fleeting moments. I was concerned that maybe I'd feel the same way about Burnout; that one of the greatest racing series ever made just doesn't fit in 2019. So I went back and played Burnout 3 again and it quickly alleviated all of those fears with a rapid combustion of thrilling vehicular mayhem. The potential was there for Dangerous Driving to latch onto that magic, and there are brief moments when it feels like you're playing a brand new Burnout. But the truth is, I'd rather play a 16-year-old game than pick up its spiritual successor again, and that's a disheartening outcome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm9pOGbPxk0

Initial release date: April 11, 2019 Devoloper: Robotality Publisher: Chucklefish Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Linux, macOS, Macintosh operating systems When you're struggling, Pathway sends you a dog to help out. It's that kind of game. You might have seen your squad massacred in the North African desert, but look! Here's a cute puppy called Donut. He's even got sharp teeth and the "Anti-Fascist" character trait that means he does +20% damage against Nazis. In moments like these, Pathway picks you back up and says maybe you can still complete the mission after all. Pathway is generous like that. Heavily indebted to the genre of mid-20th-century pulp adventure of which Indiana Jones is the obvious cultural touchstone, Pathway depicts a world where the Nazis are plundering ancient artifacts to harness their powers in occult experiments and so must obviously be stopped by an international band of mercenaries. It's a light, breezy, knock-about game of turn-based combat that understandably always wants you to succeed at killing Nazis, with or without a surprise canine companion. However, it lacks tactical depth and, while killing Nazis is a noble pursuit, its moral stance is less sure-footed when it steps into the territory of tired colonialist tropes. The core of Pathway is in its XCOM-style combat. Every encounter is preceded by a planning phase in which you place each member of your squad onto the battlefield. Smart players can take advantage of this head start by positioning their squad to, say, rush an exposed enemy on the first turn. In an early sign of Pathway's charitable spirit, you get this planning phase even when your squad has been ambushed and, unlike in XCOM, you'll never see an enemy already in cover on the first turn of a fight. During combat, each squad member can typically perform separate two actions--move and shoot, heal and reload, or some combination thereof--and much of the time an encounter consists of outflanking an enemy to get off a shot at them around whatever cover they happen to be hiding behind. Characters can also perform special actions depending on the weapon they carry and, in some cases, the skills they possess. Pistols, for example, allow for a special double-shot action that can target two enemies, while characters require specific skills to use items like grenades or medkits in combat. And that's about as deep as it gets, unfortunately. Aside from minor variations in clip size and range, all the guns function in much the same fashion and can drop most enemies in one to two shots. As a result, a character with an assault rifle plays no differently to one with a shotgun. The only meaningfully different weapon is the knife, not merely the game's only melee weapon but the weapon with the highest damage potential. Since there's no "zone of control" or "attack of opportunity" mechanic (outside a special action reserved for sniper rifles), it's perfectly feasible to run right up to enemies, jump over their cover and attack from the adjacent square. In fact, it's often the most effective approach, no matter how silly it looks or tactically uninteresting it becomes. Fights can still be challenging, even on the default normal difficulty. A way of evening the odds is to have the enemy greatly outnumber you. Unimaginative, sure, but it gets the job done. At other times, some enemies will have access to special abilities that you don't, while others can move further than your squad. These factors create situations where you're encouraged to think several turns in advance, coordinate attacks between your squad members, and time your limited special actions. But still, most of the time you're not really feeling that pressure. Most of the time you're just moving and shooting, moving and shooting, with the odd moving and knifing thrown in. Where the lack of depth is truly exposed is in the slim variety of actions on display, a failure that can be attributed to the derivative nature of each character's skill tree. Indeed, when leveling up characters don't earn new abilities, they merely improve existing ones; they'll boost that chance to for a critical hit, perhaps, or beef up their HP. True, you can unlock the ability for a character to use an additional weapon, so that they can now carry a shotgun as well as a pistol, but it's hard to get excited about that when, again, weapons don't function in any meaningfully different way. The lack of variety extends to the maps on which the battles take place. There is barely a handful of scenarios--Nazi camp, desert village, underground temple--and you're served up a seemingly randomly-generated version assembled from stock parts each time you enter combat. A benefit of this approach is that you never know exactly what you're going to get, but on the flip side, it means that none of the individual battlefields are ever memorable and they all end up blurring into one by the end of a campaign. That's not to say the arenas are poorly designed; they're serviceable and little more. Linking one encounter to the next is a campaign structure that sees you plotting a pathway across a network of nodes. At each node, you hit a narrative event that could be anything from following some Nazis into a mysterious mineshaft to finding an oasis at which you can rest. Sometimes you might end up in a fight, sometimes you might find some treasure or a trader with whom you can buy and sell, and sometimes nothing happens at all. It's a bit like FTL, really, except instead of zipping across space you're driving a jeep across the Sahara. These narrative moments are fun and typically well-written. They often allow for choices that can lead to surprising results and occasionally let you utilize the skills of one of the squad characters you've opted to take on the journey. But they do a poor job of depicting the African people whose countries, from Morocco and Egypt and beyond, have been invaded by the Germans. The locals you meet are helpless simpletons, peaceful goat herders at best and, at worst, cowards hiding in ruined villages and collapsed caves until you wander by to hopefully rescue them. These poor people can't do anything until saved by a globetrotting band of wealthy adventurers. Further, throughout the entire game, you're collecting treasure, much of it ancient religious and cultural relics of the people you're ostensibly helping. Literally the only thing to do with this treasure is sell it to fund the purchase of more fuel for your jeep and ammunition for your guns. Retrieve an ancient inscribed vase from the altar room of a secret temple? That goes for $250 at the next trader stop. The suggested idea is you're keeping these precious relics out of Nazi hands, but surely there's a better option than looting them for yourself and then selling them back to the people you stole it from . Pathway looks and sounds great, it nails the pulpy attitude it's aiming for, and, of course, it's always fun to shoot Nazis. But the more I played, the more the cracks started to show, the more samey it all became, and the more uncomfortable some aspects of its design made me feel. I still enjoyed much of my time with Pathway. There's a pleasure to be had in both its aesthetic choices and the frictionless grind of its structure, but I came away wanting more--more tactical meat in its combat and a more thoughtful approach to the way it chose to represent its world.

You have copied the model from the last admin request . And u have only 17 hours in total . Big Pro ¤ Your Nickname (same as in forum): >>> g0 pR0 >>> ¤ Your Address Skype, facebook: No facebook Sir ¤ Age: 19 ¤ Languages That You Can Speak: Hindi , English ¤ Your Location: India ¤ Experience As Admin (last server GT link): I was a moderator in newlifeZM last in 2018-2019 , but i need to left because of my studies. ¤ Can You Stay Spectator Or Playing Between These Hours (24:00 To 12:00 PM): Yes Sir¤ Link Of Hours You Played On Server : https://www.gametracker.com/player/>>> g0 pR0 >>>/178.32.241.12:27015/¤ Reason That You Want To Be Admin: I want to keep the server friendly and clean.¤ Password/key for admission[ Read The Rules to find it] : OKNewlifezm

Enough daily activity but you didn't reach 40 hours . and you didn't respect the title model . Pro for Helper . Good luck

you played 666 minutes in total . how could you tell if admins are doing their job or not .. that wasn't the best start . To make an admin request . you need at least 40 hours activity in total . Contra

The manicured lawns in Etherborn are minimally sculptured. Their soil is thinly layered with patches of grass contained within grey slabs of concrete, and they stand in stark contrast to a backdrop of crumbling pillars and decrepit buildings. And like examining the self-contained scenes of a diorama, you'll find yourself ruminating over these landscapes as you unravel the puzzle of how to traverse them. But while Etherborn's minimalist beauty carries suggestions of loftier and more ambitious storytelling it's instead hampered a dissonant narrative, and a brevity that makes it feel lacking. Like many platformers, Etherborn seems deceptively simple initially: just leapfrog your way towards the level's finale while collecting crystalline orbs that unlock previously inaccessible areas. In fact, some of Etherborn's geometric planes and architectural complexity very much harken back to Monument Valley, a title that famously plays on optical illusions and the mathematically-inspired art of MC Escher. What makes this puzzle game different is that its laws of gravity aren't like our world's. You can simply walk across any surface--even those perpendicular to your character--as long as there's a curved edge that connects them. However, you're still vulnerable to injuries and death; accidentally sliding off these landscapes and into the endless void below is a possibility Scaling these lopsided grounds introduces another dimension and new, unforeseen challenges. Etherborn often mani[CENSORED]tes your perspectives, challenging you to find the abstract solutions to its puzzles. There are occasions where I was left baffled, unable to move on, only to realize much later that I didn't notice a few platforms I could jump on because they were turned onto their sides. At other times, you may even spend the bulk of a level on a horizontal wall and leaping over chasms within the same plane--a perspective that's tough to get the hang of. It's highly likely that you'll slip through the cracks at least once or twice due to the obtuse angles and see yourself spiraling downwards into the emptiness below (or sideways, given the game's unconventional gravitational pull). Key to solving some puzzles is a keen eye for detail, which can help you to spot obscure passageways that open another route to your goal. Becoming intimately familiar with the nooks and crannies of every miniature world is something you'll want to do not only to satisfy your curiosity about the environment--it's also necessary if you want to get through the game's levels. Upping the ante in later chapters are shifting monochrome blocks, which expand and retract depending on where you are--and they can be a great source of grievance when they hinder your path. It would have been a drag to commit to all these efforts if Etherborn's ecosystem were a lusterless one. Luckily, wandering and discovering each microcosm is mostly joyful and even oddly meditative. You can hike along the side of a flight of steps and find a starkly different landscape tucked away underneath, or run along the contours of the structures surrounding the island. Even though Etherborn's world is sparsely decorated and may even appear sterile, with only a few shrubberies, dandelions and elements of urban decay adorning each world, it is a universe still feels genuinely intriguing. Discovering a hidden passage or a curved pathway as a new means of moving forward toward uncharted surfaces is hugely gratifying. Given that you'll probably be devoting a fair amount of time tinkering away at its puzzles, it also helps that the orchestral, instrumental soundtrack is soothing and non-intrusive. And while there are only five chapters in the game, each will probably take you at least an hour to figure out. Coupled with its steep levels of difficulty, it's also comforting that mistakes via accidental deaths are also quickly forgiven, with the game swiftly transporting you back to the state you were in a few seconds ago. What's decidedly less impressive, however, is how hard Etherborn tries to shoehorn an ill-fitting narrative within the puzzles. You're a featureless, transparent humanoid figure with a very visible circulatory system, a character vaguely resembling the human anatomy mannequin found in a biology classroom. At the behest of an incorporeal, hallowed voice, you're tasked to travel across these lands in search of a series of waypoints. Tapping on these will eventually reveal various paths on a massive tree called the Endless Tree, its bark gradually peeling off to expose a meandering, vein-like system across its trunk that ties all the chapters together. It's a nifty inclusion that references the game's imagery of humanity and anatomy, but ultimately an inconsequential one. Even as this disembodied voice tells a story that alludes to the beginnings of human civilization, the plot feels perfunctory and strangely divorced from its puzzles. Aside from introducing each chapter, the voice doesn't influence the game very much; instead, it simply delves into vague parables about the folly of human nature, without really explaining the significance of your mannequin character and this exotic world. This sense of dissonance makes the tale rather tenuous to follow. Exacerbating this is how the dialogue is filled with abstract ideas that teeter on pretentiousness, bloated with lofty lines like, "And so, their vast ego was also reduced to mere language." Etherborn would have been even more intriguing had it allowed you to project your own stories and interpretations onto this universe--like many curious onlookers would as they peer into a diorama. The highlights of Etherborn are undoubtedly its inventive puzzles and its constellation of small, compelling worlds. But with just five chapters, its brief runtime feels lacking, and it left me wanting for more puzzles to solve. Etherborn attempts to compensate for this by unlocking a new game plus mode after you've completed the game, which lets you dive into the same worlds once more. This mode is largely similar to the original one, the only difference being the crystalline orbs, which are located in harder-to-reach places. Apart from the slightly more challenging platforming puzzles, however, the electrifying thrill of discovery has largely subsided--you've already found all the secrets, after all--and there's little incentive to revisit it. By the end, even the allure of these small worlds isn't enough to make you return, with only the yearning for more remaining in its wake.

Contra You have played only 22.75 Hours in the server while for admin request you need 40 hours at least . i see that you had kinda decent activity before 3 days . my advice : make your hours +40 . play daily or semi-daily for 300 minutes . then make a new request next week . if you did these you will be 100 percent accepted . Good luck

Nick: Salah DZ Real name: Salah How old are you?: 18 Which Games you play? and for how long?(each of them): cs 1.6 +6-7 hours a day Where are you from?(country and city): Algeria . Djelfa Describe yourself(at least 50 words): nice guy helps people .. plays games alot and speaks 2 and half languages xd pretty good at following rules and applying them ( respecting rules ) . i use steam - facebook - discord .. used to play fortnite and pubg mobile alot . play cs 1.6 alot ( zm ) . i listen to music prefer pop and rock and a little bit of rap music . i paint too most of what i paint is dark . learning germany currently . spanish after it or russian ( im lunguages lover ... ) Note some of your qualities: i speak arabic - english and a little of french and germany . Tell us some of your defects: im not a perfect guy . but i don't really know my defects other than that im a bit shy On which category/categories have you been active lately?(describe your activity): almost every category Which category/project you want to care off?(choose from THIS LIST): Devil's Club / Social How well you speak english?(and other languages): Very well i suppose ? i understand and i make ppl understand xD Do you use TS3? Do you have an active microphone?: yes i use it .. but i don't use microphone . Contact methods: Facebook ( u find it in my profile here - discord and csbd messages . ) Last request: December 24, 2019

There is no one in our server playing or ever played with this nickname . and the password is wrong as well. #Contra EDIT : He fixed the nickname . Toxic player and low activity . so still #contra . GT https://www.gametracker.com/player/adyroiha/178.32.241.12:27015/

Before it made games that just dropped the pretense altogether and used plastic instruments, Harmonix was already the master at turning your average, run-of-the-mill controller into an instrument of musical chaos in Frequency and Amplitude. That same ethos is the engine driving Audica, which seeks to do the same for VR motion controllers. It's a game with a killer idea, but the execution is just short of the mark. At its core, Audica is a VR shooting gallery that makes music. In a world where stylishly slicing boxes with lightsabers is the current gold standard for rhythm games, stylishly making music with blasters was pretty much the logical--even welcome--next step on paper. Your instruments are two neon laser tag guns. Colored targets fly toward you to line up with a circle on a specific beat in a song, and your job is to shoot that target on the beat with the correct colored gun for the maximum amount of points. The game does throw curveballs at you--some targets require you to hold your gun sideways, for example. But, by and large, Audica's premise is simple: make music with laser pistols. Despite this simplicity, though, making beats with bullets feels great in Audica. Your lasers feel appropriately futuristic; by default, they're cool, reflective cannons with mirrored blades attached to the barrel that convey a sense of power. That feeling of power is all the more pronounced once you start firing away at targets and get in sync with the ebb and flow of a song's note pattern. Every successful hit generates a slick, track-specific "thwap!" that punctuates every note. If, for whatever reason, the default sound on a track doesn't work for you, you do get the option to customize the effect. That same level of customization carries over to the calibration options, with some extremely user-friendly settings to account for your sense of rhythm or lack thereof. That's even more crucial in virtual reality, and Audica aces it, weaving the calibration tools in with the beat and targeting tutorials rather elegantly before you even start the game proper. Even with the calibration, the game is extremely forgiving when it comes to perfectly hitting a target dead center, though perfect aim does help achieve the best possible scores on a song. Still, just jumping into a track and firing at will is a blast because Audica is so approachable. Audica's big, pervasive caveat, however, is that you better like fast-paced, thumping EDM from the last five years, because there's really nothing else in the game. Constricting the pool of music causes all of the tracks to bleed together after long sessions. The DLC helps, bringing some bigger star power and at least some element of chill to the soundtrack with songs like Maroon 5's "Moves Like Jagger" and Billie Eilish's "bad guy," but these are also some of the trickiest songs in the game, even at lower difficulties. More than anything, those tracks are a perfect showcase of how versatile the note charting and game design can be given a bigger musical palette to work from, and highlight just how much less of that creativity gets a spotlight in the main tracklist. Also, even by rhythm game standards, Audica is too tricky for its own good. Far too often, notes are there to taunt, trip up, and challenge instead of letting you revel in the music being played. Audica's challenges often come from deliberately destroying your groove, creating off moments that don't feel like you're supposed to get in sync with the music being created by your shots and swipes. It feels like trying to win a dance competition, and every few seconds, someone tosses an orange at your head. In this case, that orange can take the form of frequent errant notes, targets outside your field of view, or modifiers that you can't turn off, many of which ask the unnatural--a certain modifier that requires you move your arms an arbitrary amount during the song is probably the most egregious of them. On Advanced and Expert modes, you still get a wide berth to hit the targets anywhere, but it doesn't matter if those targets appear off the beat and ask more of you than responding to the rhythm. When the game isn't getting in its own way--and the note patterns are complex, but follow a certain rhythmic logic--it does feel empowering, like you're in a breezy, futuristic version of Baby Driver. In particular, tracks like KD/A's "Pop Stars" that flit back and forth between poppy melodies and impactful hip-hop line deliveries lend themselves extremely well to punctuating every note with a pull of the trigger. But this isn’t sustained across all of Audica's tracks. Obstacles are far too arbitrary too often for that. Mostly, though, you just can't help but get the feeling of playing a grand experiment, and it's a shame that Audica doesn't land as well as Harmonix's other rhythm games. There's a lot that's simply, innately cool about Audica's concept, the very idea of using weapons to make music, but once you reach a certain level of proficiency, the enjoyment dries up faster than it should.

th from an alien threat, patching holes in the sinking ship via tactical combat and strategic upgrades. But Phoenix Point reinvents the formula in both big and small ways, sending changes rippling across the strategic map and tinkering with the nuts and bolts of close combat. Not every new idea is equally successful, though many of them are welcome, and in sum deliver a refresh that points the genre in an exciting new direction. As with the first XCOM sequel, Terror from the Deep, the threat here comes from the ocean. A mysterious mist is creeping at the coast, luring people into the sea and returning them as Lovecraftian fish monsters--all scaly-skinned, newly betentacled, and packing crustaceous heat, an army of soldier crabs. Phoenix Point is joined in defending the planet by three ideologically distinct factions: New Jericho want to destroy the aliens, the Synedrion want to coexist with them, and the Disciples of Anu want to synthesize human and alien life. Many of the missions you undertake will inevitably involve offending at least one of the factions and so, no matter how impartial you to try to remain, eventually you're going to have to choose sides. It's a depressing, relevant example of humanity's failure to come together in the face of existential catastrophe. On the world map, presented here as it was in the original XCOM as the Geoscape, a rotatable globe pockmarked with scouted points of interest, the mist is a red miasma slowing enveloping the planet, a Doomsday Clock ticking closer to midnight one continent at a time. This strategic layer runs in real time as your Phoenix squads fly from one flashpoint to the next, while you work on increasing base capacity, manufacturing new arms, and researching new military solutions. All the while the red mist spreads, escalating the danger as new nests appear and strangling your ability to fight back as faction outposts fall. It's the perfect visual representation of the odds you're facing and the seeming inevitability of defeat. Despite the abstraction, it's genuinely painful to see the mist consume a settlement you had heroically rescued only days earlier. At a strategic level, Phoenix Point wants to let you pick your own path. The Geoscape is at the start shrouded in the fog of war. Through scanning nearby areas and aerial exploration it soon becomes a sprawling, cluttered morass of multi-coloured icons describing your own bases, factional havens, key quest destinations, potential scavenging sites, neutral colonies, alien nests, and other unidentified locations. You have considerable freedom in navigating your own route across this world. You can basically travel wherever you like and, when you arrive, you can usually decide whether or not to take on the mission you've encountered. Want to save this low-threat scavenging mission for some new recruits further down the line? Just hit abort and fly your veteran squad into more dangerous territory. It's liberating, at least early on, as you jet around, scouting the map, picking and choosing your next mission. Yet by the time you have multiple squads traversing the globe, and you're juggling a handful of different flight paths across a Geoscape that has exploded into a galaxy of competing icons, that liberation is swamped by confusion. It's not that it's hard to tell what you could do next--important story missions and factional quests are highlighted--it's more that there are so many things to do that it's easy to lose yourself in endless distractions or worse, drown under an overwhelming wave of map markers. Indeed, the chaotic, confounding clutter of the Geoscape is emblematic of some wider interface issues. The research screen throws every possible tech into a long list with scant attention given to how useful it might or where it might lead. There's a research order function, but you can only send one tech to the front of the queue, not adjust the order further down. Inventory management is a mess when it comes to comparing different weapons to equip and deciding which new gear to manufacture. When you take a shot, you aren't given a percentage chance to hit while some dice are rolled to see if you did any damage. Instead, bullet trajectories are said to be physically simulated, meaning if you can see something, you can hit it. There are two ways to take a shot. The default has you aiming generally at the centre of the target's mass. Take an aimed shot, though, and you're given a first-person view where what you point at is what you'll shoot. You can target an enemy's limbs or their weapon or even another object in the environment, and for the most part you're likely to hit it. There is a degree of fuzziness here--you'll see the crosshair surrounded by two rings, the inner one indicating where most of the shot(s) will hit and the outer accounting for any remainder--and the accuracy and damage of any particular shot is still affected by the weapon's range and other stats. But it's very satisfying to destroy an enemy's shield with one well-aimed sniper shot, then follow it up with an assault rifle round to the now-exposed head. The ability to target specific limbs becomes vitally important as more diverse enemy types start po[CENSORED]ting the battlefield--you'll very quickly need to worry about more than those wielding shields. The sheer variety of enemy types and behaviours issues an interesting challenge every turn and have you constantly thinking about cover, height, range, support, supplies, teamwork and priorities. In addition, every enemy is susceptible to a well-aimed shot that cripples a specific limb, thus slowing its movement, nullifying its special ability, destroying its weapon or inhibiting its mode of attack. As a result there's so much more to think about in combat than just methodically moving your squad forward and shooting the enemy when they appear. The flexibility is heightened by the action point system that provides more options than just moving and shooting. Every soldier has 4 APs, but different weapons and abilities use different amounts, and the ground a soldier can cover in 1 AP is affected by their speed stat. Two of my assault troops worked in perfect tandem: one was a shotgun expert with the speed to close quickly on their target and use a debuff that reduced the APs of nearby hostiles, the other hung back a bit, offering support with their longer-range rifle, entering overwatch every turn thanks to its cheaper cost, and running in with a medkit if the other took damage. Both characters started out the same, but the wildly different level-up choices I made for them, coupled with the capacity to spend their APs every turn on a mostly unique suite of options, meant they felt distinct--like characters whose behaviour I had authored and who I was personally responsible for. I'd invested in their stats, tweaking them in parallel to become complementary, and as a result, had become emotionally invested in them. When you lose a soldier it hits hard, of course. Any soldier that goes down in a fight is permanently dead, and you have to recruit a novice to replace them. Yet while your emotional investment can never be fully recovered, the stat investment can be at least partially reclaimed. This is because experience points earned from completing missions is awarded to each individual soldier who participated and to a common pool. You're free to dip into this pool whenever you wish--maybe you just need a few more points to unlock that next tier perk you've had your eye on--but my strategy was to save the pool for new recruits. Every time I hired a new soldier I was able to level them up several times before they had pulled a trigger. It's a clever, flexible system that means veteran troop losses are a setback, but never a debilitating or irredeemable one. The tactical combat doesn’t suffer from the clumsy interface design that plagues the strategic layer. There are convenient overlays informing you of movement ranges, AP consumption, and targeting possibilities, it’s easy to scroll between different terrain heights, and everything requires deliberate selection so you don’t end up performing an action you didn’t intend. However I did very, very occasionally run into a problem where the overlay would tell me I had line of sight from a certain tile if I moved there, only to move there and discover I couldn’t actually see the enemy. And after dozens of hours of play, I still have no idea why my soldiers would sometimes start a new mission with their weapons needing reloading, nor indeed how to reload them when not in a mission. But these feel like trivial concerns in the grander scheme of what is an overall robust combat engine. Phoenix Point has plenty of bold new ideas for the XCOM genre, but not all of them have the same level of shine. It can feel a bit unwieldy at times, a bit less user-friendly than you'd hope. But it's a game that feels more concerned with experimentation than perfection, that's more interested in discovering new paths to take than walking one that's already well-trodden. As a hybrid tactical/strategy game, it's dynamic and deep with the occasionally disorientating misfire along the way. As a contribution to the genre XCOM first defined, it's a well-aimed shot.