Marv3Lシ

Welcome.

Welcome.

Welcome.

Welcome.

Name Game: Vaporum Price: $19.99 - $9.99 The Discount Rate: -50% Link Store: Click Offer Ends Up After : 18/11/2019

?

_By Andrew Ogley, 03 Aug 2017.. Hapless, unarmed and defenseless victims, broken machinery, locked gates, unfamiliar territory and a ruthless homicidal maniac with powers bordering on the supernatural. The killer wields a brutally savage weapon and there are bloodied meat hooks dangling from gallows as a constant reminder of the fate that awaits the unwary. We've all seen this before. We all know how this will end, or at least we think we do, but in the procedurally generated and randomized world of Dead by Daylight, nothing turns out to be that predictable. The premise is as simple as a slasher b-movie. Four survivors are thrust together in a nightmarish arena tasked only with escaping. All the while, they are stalked by an unstoppable killer whose only desire is to see them killed and sacrificed to the supernatural evil force known as 'The Entity'. However, from starting with such a straightforward idea, developer Behaviour Interactive has introduced an extraordinary depth to the gameplay based on two key ideas that run throughout: asymmetry and procedural generation. The asymmetry is seen in a number of ways, even whilst waiting in the lobby. Whilst the survivors can see each other, they cannot see the killer. However, this is the only opportunity to talk to each other in-game because once the match starts, there's no more chat available. The unfortunate survivors have no idea which of the six homicidal maniacs — a mix of human and supernatural — they will be facing until after the match has started. With each killer having a very different special skill, such as teleporting, invisibility, or setting traps, it's difficult to strategize. The killer can see exactly which four of the seven survivor characters they will be facing, something vitally important as each character has different skills, such as quicker repair times, better stealth or increased mobility. To escape, survivors have to repair five of the seven generators found within the map, which will then power up the two sets of exit doors. This is no easy task as other than the environments of each of the six maps, everything is randomly placed — the generators, the exits, the escape hatch, and the killer's meat hooks — so the locations have to be rediscovered with each new game. This forces the survivors to explore and the maps are created to make things difficult at ground level with corn fields, long grass, swamps and mist obscuring the view. Burning offerings at the start of each game can also have an effect on the environment, so there is a degree of unpredictability too. Fortunately, survivors play in third person view that at least gives a better view of the immediate surroundings. The killer is restricted to first person view but has the advantage of heightened senses. Generators show up with bright outlines, as do the meat hooks. If a survivor fails a skill check - a Quick Time Event - when attempting to repair a generator, there is a visual and audio cue showing the killer exactly which generator that was. With the skill checks being randomly timed, this happens more than you would like. The killer's heightened senses also reveal the trails left behind by wounded and fleeing survivors. For all parties, it becomes an extremely nerve-wracking game of cat and mouse that can end in a horribly twisted and bloody manner. That first time that you see one of the survivors sacrificed on the hook and being claimed by The Entity, it is genuinely disturbing. Everything is set up to unnerve players. Survivors will hear the heartbeat of the Killer, which gets faster and louder as they get closer. Music gets louder too, heading towards a crescendo. This leaves the survivors the choice to hide or flee — fighting back is not an option. When you're forced to flee, it is genuinely tense, doing your best to shake the killer on your tail. Your only option is to jink and to throw obstacles in the murderer's path hoping, to stay out of reach of the killer's weapon. You know it's a game but it's spine chilling in these moments. The killers have no one and nothing to fear. They enter each match with complete impunity, fully embracing their own dark passengers, but for the survivors it's a very different matter. One blow from a killer's weapon is enough to cripple them, leaving them hobbling for safety. A second hit will leave them on the ground crawling, a position from which they mostly end up dangling from a hook, hoping that a fellow survivor will try to rescue them. Players can heal each other, but that too includes random quick time events — mistime it and the patient will let out a yelp of pain that can be heard by the killer if they are close enough. It's all unpredictable but so finely balanced that it feels like everything is on a knife-edge. It is extremely compelling. Actions throughout the match reward players with bloodpoints — experience points — that can be spent on skills and perks found on a skill tree, the bloodweb. Each character has their own set of perks and a special perk that can be taught to other survivors. However, the skill tree is another element that is procedurally generated; it contains perks, add-ons and skills, but with each leveling up, you never know what you are going to receive. After reaching level 10, 'The Entity' starts devouring nodes of the tree, potentially removing that rare special perk at the end of a particular branch before you can get it. This means that the progression and build of characters, both survivor and killer, is random. Graphically, there is a Left 4 Dead vibe to the graphics and it's surprising considering what is possible with the Unreal 4 engine. The graphics are certainly not stunning, but they do the job and don't detract from the essential parts of the game. Fortunately, the ear candy with the ambient sounds and the soundscape is exceptionally good and forms an essential part of the gameplay. Audio cues pepper the environmental background sounds. The whimpering of injured survivors, painful gasps of those being healed and the wailing of impaled victims all add to the eerie atmosphere and the already highly charged and dramatic tension; more importantly, they help lead the killers to their prey. For any multiplayer only title, it's imperative that the matchmaking works well and the amount of time spent waiting for lobbies was frustrating. It was often so frustrating that fellow survivors would often quit and search for another match; given that you need a complete team to start, this left you waiting even longer. You can create a dedicated party and play with friends, but most of the time you will be playing with strangers. This doesn't include the loading time for the map that also seems to take more time than you'd like. This could become a classic drop-in title if only the matchmaking was quicker. In all fairness, there is a recent patch to improve this on the PC, so this may well be another fix that eventually arrives on the console. Even during the review period, the game was updated to version 1.5.1. This also highlights the continuing support for the game from the developer. For achievement hunters, the game takes on a different form of nightmare. There are three achievements for hitting prestige three times, meaning reaching level 50 three times over. Similarly, there are achievements for completing a game with all three levels of perks, but you won't unlock all of the perk slots until level 25. Being asked to do this for seven different characters will take some time. There are more like this but the picture is clear — this is a game for hunting survivors and not for hunting achievements. *-Summary. Dead by Daylight has the potential to become a cult classic among asymmetric games. Everything is finely balanced and the way that all of the random elements can alter a match adds an intriguing level of depth to the title. The chase, from the standpoint of both Killer and Survivor, is an intense, adrenaline filled, and nail-biting affair. This could be an ideal title to drop in and out of while grinding through the achievements and leveling up characters, but that concept of drop-in game reveals the achilles heel of the title: the waiting time to play. As a survivor, it seems to take numerous attempts to find a server and you have to be patient. With a few more tweaks, there is a good multiplayer survival horror title here for horror fans. *-GAMEPLAY.

Cities: Skylines didn’t have to stretch far to trump 2013's SimCity: it needed to be a good city builder without any of EA’s mistakes. That means no always-online DRM, an expansive area to build in, and support for custom content. The good news: Skylines does all this. The better news: it's also a fun and addictive city building game. It's not unexpected that Skylines' biggest challenges involve roads and traffic, as it comes from Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive, the same developer/publisher duo as Cities in Motion, a game based around transportation management (Cities: Skylines is not related to the Cities XL series). Laying down roads is easy. It's more difficult to lay down roads that make sense. It's not just traffic congestion you need to worry about, it's logical traffic routes. Garbage collection, unattended building fires, and dead body removal were recurring problems in all my cities, and it's because they all involve vehicles (hearses, in the last instance) needing to get to specific locations quickly, which is as much a function of easy access as of smooth traffic. Figuring out the best way to build roads and intersections takes time, experimentation, and close scrutiny, something I think many players will really enjoy. If you're more interested in building unbroken tree-lined avenues and long, winding roads than logical grids, you certainly can, but be prepared for your city to lose a good deal of functionality. Once you've got some roads built and have assigned them as residential, commercial, and industrial, basic buildings will begin appearing. Add nearby services like police stations and schools, and amenities like parks and plazas to allow buildings to level up. You can also use a brush tool to divide your city into districts. Districts are a great feature, allowing you to tinker with policies and regulations like recycling, free public transportation, and legal drug use, without having to unleash them citywide. You can tax your districts differently, and even ban industrial traffic in congested areas (just make sure to provide heavy trucks an alternate route). You can also create industrial districts to focus on oil and ore mining, logging, farming, or general industry. *-City of light bookkeeping. In addition to managing the physical aspects of your city, you'll have to keep an eye on your bank account and supplement it with loans, decide what to budget for various utilities and services, and tweak taxes for residents and business. None of this feels deep, simulation-wise—it's mostly fiddling with sliders and finding a balance between keeping a positive revenue and annoying residents with steep taxes—but nothing about Skylines' simulation feels terribly deep, at least economically, and apart from focusing on specific types of industries, or choosing office towers over factories, none of my cities have felt particularly specialized. That suits me just fine, though players looking for a deeply complex city simulation might be a little disappointed. Skylines' UI is pretty slick and easy to understand. You can view your city through several filters: pollution (including noise), crime, property values, wind speed (for turbine power), water and electricity availability, and even see how many people are using public transportation. Icons appear above buildings to signal problems, like businesses with a dearth of customers or homes with sewage problems. Citizens can also communicate with you via "Chirper," a Twitter-like feed at the top of the screen. This gets repetitive pretty quickly, but a menu option thankfully prevents these messages from automatically popping up. At times, Skylines is intensely satisfying, such as when solving a troublesome traffic snarl or when all the buildings in a district begin leveling up because you've provided the right combination of services and amenities. It's often soothing, like when flying the free camera around or peering down at the tiny NPCs living in your creation. It can also be terrifically tense, like when you realize your industrial zone has poisoned the groundwater of a residential area or when a power grid gets overloaded and you've got no money to add a new plant. The citizens of Skylines are pretty tolerant, but let them suffer too long and they'll abandon you in droves. In addition to homes and businesses, there are unique buildings like stadiums and opera houses that become available as your city grows, as well as monuments like a space elevator and a large hadron collider that increase tourism or provide other benefits. Transportation options appear as you progress, like underground metro tubes, airports, and trains and ships for both passengers and industrial use. Your available building space, initially just a single square of land, grows as well. There's a healthy five-by-five grid of land, of which you can officially purchase nine tiles of 2x2 km each, though there's already a mod in the workshop that lets you buy and build on all 25 tiles. (I tried it. It works. Rejoice.) *-Complaint department. There are a few issues. I wish plumbing was just auto-drawn in when roads are built, not because drawing pipes manually is hard but because it's easy, and thus begins to feel like repetitive busywork after a while. Even when business and resident satisfaction is sky-high there's sometimes zero demand for new buildings (and thus no po[CENSORED]tion growth) for long stretches, and then, seemingly arbitrarily, demand suddenly ramps up again. Even in happy, healthy neighborhoods and commercial districts, entire buildings are routinely abandoned, and I don't quite know why. Driver AI is a little off-kilter, and cars will sometimes cram into a single lane when others are available, which can contribute to traffic problems. These issues haven't done much to dampen my enjoyment, though. My cities, even the poorly planned ones that wound up filled with horrific traffic jams and uncollected corpses, were all fun to build, and I learned enough from each to make my next city better. For those who find building a city to Megalopolis status just a little too easy—and I think it is—there's a 'hard mode' included to increase the challenge. Conversely, for those who want completely unrestrained construction, there are modes for an unlimited bank account and the unlocking of all buildings at the start. Due to the map and asset editor, I suspect the Steam Workshop will quickly fill with custom creations. It ran very smoothly on my GeForce GTX 960, even when zipping and zooming the camera around in my biggest city. Top it off with Cities: Skylines' reasonable price, and I suspect no matter what your interest in city building, casual or intense, you'll find a lot here to like. *-GAMEPLAY.

Welcome To CSBD.

Civilization 6 is the ultimate digital board game. More than ever in the series, the board—the world—is the soul of every opportunity and challenge. As usual for Civ, I build empires, compete for a set of victory conditions, and fend off warmongering leaders like that scoundrel Peter the Great. But I’m also playing for, with, and against the board. Forests and deserts and resource-rich tundras each influence the flow of my civilization, granting us boons and burdening us with lasting weaknesses. Bands of barbarians put my farms in crisis, but also open up opportunities to speed the development of my military techs. The glorious, challenging dynamics that emerge from Civ 6’s redesigned maps left me with no question that the storied series has crowned a new king. _The storied series has crowned a new king. While Civ 6 is probably the most transformative step forward for the series, its changes shouldn’t trip up longtime players too much. There’s definitely a learning curve to overcome, but much of what you need to be to be victorious isn’t necessary when you start exploring. You still settle cities, develop tiles, train military units, wage turn-based warfare, and conduct diplomacy. It mirrored my memories of past Civs closely enough that hints from the in-game adviser were all I needed to course-correct when something I hadn’t seen before came my way. But there are so many of these new features that it could feel overwhelming at times. The depth and variety of systems resembles a Civ game that’s already had two or three expansions added on top—from the new Districts that perform specific tasks and spread my cities out into an often messy but somehow pleasing sprawl, to a whole separate 'tech' tree for civic and cultural progress that ties into a sort of collectible card game for mixing policy bonuses to build a unique government. The feature richness averts the common problem with strategy games on day one where I feel I’m being sold a platform on which a great game will eventually be built. But I also worry that Firaxis may have sailed a bit beyond the calm waters of accessibility for more casual strategy fans, and any expansions that add major features or new systems could heighten the barrier to newcomers. *-Hexistential realities. What binds everything together, though, is the map. I have reservations about the art style—I preferred the pseudo-realism of Civ 5, and some of the Civ 6 military units in particular look goofy enough to have fallen out of a freemium mobile game. But the map itself, and its cities, iron mines, and festival squares, is more alive than ever. I was delighted, for example, to discover that I really never needed to pull up an overlay to see which tiles were being worked, because the models and animations do that job for me at a glance. Unworked fields lie barren, and I could tell how many citizen slots in my commercial district were taken up by the level of bustle occupying its streets. It’s a pretty brilliant way of keeping you engrossed and focused on what matters. The tech trees and the leader interaction screen are the only parts of the UI that hide my soaring cities from my view. The latter of the two involves fully animated, 3D representations of everyone from Montezuma to that jerk Peter the Great who thinks his mustache and his science bonus from tundra tiles are so cool, even though they’re not and I’ve had bombers in range of his second largest city since the Atomic Age, ready to wipe that stupid grin off his face. They’re all very well voice-acted, with the return of native language dialogue from Civ 5. Spending a lot of time staring at hills, valleys, and potential pyramid locations isn’t just enjoyable and informative, however. It’s critical to getting the most out of the game. Terrain and tile types have always been a factor in Civ, but they’re at the heart of nearly everything in Civ 6. With districts and wonders each taking up a whole tile, and being the most powerful tools I had to catapult myself toward victory, city planning became a huge focus of my every move. When I unlocked the ability to build a Holy Site, I had to ask myself if I wanted to nestle it in the middle of all those forested hills to gain bonus faith from the adjacent, natural splendor. If I did, I’d miss out on the chance to clear out all the trees later on, plop down an industrial district surrounded with mines, and enjoy a huge boost to my production. *-If you build it… (it might be wrong) There was never a time that I felt I could fill every tile around me with the most obviously ‘correct’ district or improvement and call it a day. The need for foresight is unending. There are always sacrifices to make, like when I fell behind in culture because my only eligible tile for a theater square was the one I’d been saving to build a rocket launch site to clench a science victory. It’s a fantastic, richly realized way of forcing difficult decisions at every bend in the river and making sure no two cities you build will ever look or feel the same. It feels like a revelation for someone who’s been playing 4X games since before I could see over a car dashboard. The constant planning and trade-offs seem like how this series was always supposed to work, and they inject a layer of variety that made the pull of “Just one more turn…” even stronger than ever. There’s a level of trial and error in this that caused me some legitimate frustration in my first few races to the space age. When everything is fresh and new, you might not realize that you’re plopping down a university campus in a place you should have waited to build a neighborhood several centuries later. One late game civic (the cultural equivalent of a tech) unlocks the ability to build National Parks, granting a massive boost to culture—but unless you’ve been planning where it’s going to go from 4000 BC, chances are you’ve already destroyed all of the pristine nature required to set one up. I longed for some kind of city planning utility, where I could mock up where everything was going to go once I’d unlocked all the districts and improvements, especially considering some of them get adjacency bonuses for being next to each other as opposed to specific terrain features. If you like to play efficiently, just be aware that you’re going to be slapping yourself that you dumped out such a haphazard monument to mediocrity until you have a few campaigns under your belt and understand where to leave or create an ideal space for something important—and have the patience to do so. *-Worlds of inspiration. The other way the map has become a much more important part of Civ 6 is in how it ties into the tech and civics tree. Every technology and civic has an associated mini objective that will trigger a “Eureka” moment and pay off half the cost immediately. Founding a city next to an ocean tile sped up my progress toward Sailing. Building three industrial districts with factories jumped me ahead in my quest to embrace communism (Viva la Economic Policy Slots!) These are often tied to having room for specific districts, access to specific resources, or contact with other civilizations. Where I spawned on each map had a significant effect on which techs I could get quickly, and thus which ones I tended to go for first. It also really helps alleviate the feeling of spending several turns waiting for a building or a unit to finish, since I could always be pursuing a Eureka objective for a tech I had my eye on. It’s not all a reinvented wheel, though. The Civ staples of war and diplomacy have returned recognizable, but honed to the sharpest edge we’ve ever seen on them. I particularly enjoyed the way AI leaders are now given agendas (one public, and one that must be uncovered through espionage, building a positive relationship, or observing context) that overtly tell you what they like and don’t like, and make it theoretically possible to stay on everyone’s good side through the whole game if you’re willing to jump through a lot of hoops. Frederick Barbarossa of Germany, for instance, wants to kill all city states and hates anyone who so much as lets them borrow a cup of sugar. If you’re going for a very pacifist run, you can let that agenda guide your gameplay (ignoring city-states and the benefits courting them can provide), and chances are you won’t have pretzel-scented warriors knocking down your door. In the event that hostilities do break out, Civ 6 has split the difference between 5’s one unit per tile and 4’s Clash of the Doomstacks to reach a happy middle. Support units like medics and Great Generals can attach to and occupy the same tile as a regular combat unit like a pikeman. In the mid and late game, you also gain the ability to combine two combat units into a Corps, and later you can add a third to make an Army, which is are more powerful versions of that unit that only take up a single tile. This adds some new layers and tactics to a model of warfare that could get predictable and repetitive in Civ 5. Civ's score breathes life into all these conflicts and conferences. Christopher Tin’s new main theme, 'Sogno di Volare,' is just as sweeping, catchy, and beautiful as 'Baba Yetu.' I predict it will join his previous Civ effort in the pantheon of the greatest pieces of music written for a videogame, though I suspect it won’t spawn as many memes—if only because it’s more difficult to imitate its soaring, Italian cathedral choir chorus without sounding like an asthmatic screech owl. The real magic happens past the menu screen, however, where each and every civ has a main theme that grows more complex and epic as you progress through the ages. England, for example, begins with a simple, inspirational, and somewhat haunting flute rendition of the medieval folk ballad Scarborough Fair. By the Modern Age, it has exploded into an orchestral and choral celebration of all things English that made me want to sail a ship of the line made of crumpets through the walls of a Spanish fort and unleash the redcoats to toss scalding tea into the faces of their enemies. When I looked down upon everything I’d built as my Mars colonists blasted off to barely snatch victory away from Peter and his doubtlessly mustachioed cronies, every tile struck me with a sense of history. The sprawl of the Dehli-Calcutta metroplex reflected moments from the windows of its skyscrapers. There was the little tentacle I’d made by purchasing tiles to get access to coal. There was the 3000-year old farmland I’d had to bulldoze to place an industrial-era wonder. And just beside where our first settler had spawned, at the foot of the soaring peaks that had protected us from marauding armies for generations, was the new growth forest I’d planted on the site of a former lumber mill to have enough uninterrupted nature for a National Park. For each valley and steppe and oasis, I could tell you why I’d developed it the way I did much more meaningfully than “Because hills are a good place for mines.” As the board shaped my empire, and I shaped it, the history of my civilization and my decisions accumulated and followed me right up to the threshold of the stars. And that, more than anything, is why I’ll never need another Civ game in my life besides this one. *-GAMEPLAY.

Welcome.

Fate/Extella Link is the direct sequel to 2017’s Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star, picking up shortly after the finale. However, Extella Link feels akin to a side-story rather than what I’d expect from a full-blown sequel to the Dynasty Warriors-esque hack n’ slasher full of historical figures and legends. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable improvement from its predecessor, at least when it comes to gameplay and mechanics. Extella Link’s tale revolves around a brand-new character to the Fate franchise, Charlemagne. He meets and joins up with the main character right at the start, and problems suddenly arise as a new mysterious threat has begun to brainwash previous allies and past foes against them. It’s a straightforward, streamlined plot compared to The Umbral Star. Players who may have grown weary of the text-heavy nature from the previous game’s story mode will find this much more palatable. Nero Claudius, Tamamo no Mae, and Altera from The Umbral Star take a backseat in Extella Link. Instead of a dedicated route for each of the previous three heroines, the storyline now follows one path that splits into multiple branching paths. There’s initially two endpoints at the start and a third “true” route opens up upon completion of them. There are frequent choices of which stage to tackle next in the campaign, though they’re practically inconsequential. Players can always back out to the stage selection screen to take on the other stage they didn’t initially choose before proceeding on. I found Extella Link’s plot beats are merely serviceable for the most part; there’s nothing really special about it. Fans of the Fate series will certainly get a kick out of a few key moments with some po[CENSORED]r rivalries getting the spotlight. It took me just shy of 14 hours to completely finish the story mode. _You can now slot in some support characters that'll occasionally pop in to attack with you or defend you. The entire cast from The Umbral Star return and are all still playable. Most of the campaign focuses on the handful of new characters though. Besides Charlemagne, familiar faces from a lot of other Fate properties make their way into the fray - Francis Drake and Robin Hood from Fate/Extra, Lancelot and Gilles de Rais from Fate/Zero, Astolfo from Fate/Apocrypha, and lastly, Scáthach, Arjuna, and Darius III from Fate/Grand Order. They're all welcome additions in my book and are enjoyable to play. I’m not much of an Arjuna fan, but I particularly liked the way he plays in this game. Decent additions with a few personal favorites of mine like Lancelot and Scáthach were a lot of fun to see. Although Extella Link’s campaign is relatively slimmer, there are a handful of smart design decisions to make this a more exciting package to play. Firstly, Extella Link feels considerably faster to The Umbral Star - it’s almost as if its standard speed is a turbo mode to it. Several major changes in Extella Link also give it the upper hand above The Umbral Star on top of its breakneck speed. The irksome Extella Maneuver system has been completely removed and replaced with the Moon Drive mechanic. Upon filling up a meter, players can activate Moon Drive; this not only enhances their attack and defense stats along with a super attack to expend it, but enemies defeated in this mode will also drop items that fill up the gauge to activate their ultimate attack - the Noble Phantasm. Unlike The Umbral Star’s meddlesome treasure hunt for Noble Phantasm items to activate it once per stage, Extella Link’s method allows for multiple Noble Phantasms to be fired off. XSEED Games and Marvelous have also subtitled the dialogue spoken during Noble Phantasm attacks this time around thankfully. On top of their standard weak and strong attack strings, every character in Extella Link now has active skills they can fire off mid-combat. They learn up to seven as they level up and only four can be equipped at once. After learning all of them, they’ll continually get stronger and lower cooldowns. All of these skill sets are tailor-made per character, though several may share the same properties. A few might get counter stances while others lean into afflicting status ailments or a temporary power-up mode. Despite that, I feel that there’s enough variation so no two characters felt the same. _Rush attacks are a great way to make sure that enemies never get a chance to mount an offensive against you and are probably too overpowered. Some skills have a special class-based property attached to them that corresponds to the numerous classes assigned to characters in the Fate series. When these skills hit other characters in battle, there’s a chance to get them into a juggle state where they’re unable to move as you and nearby allies lay waste to them with rush attacks. Doing so also speeds up your skill cooldowns. It almost feels a bit lopsided since these beatdowns occur often and the AI barely has a chance to counterattack. Battle objectives aren’t as much of a hassle as The Umbral Star’s odd reliance on tug-of-war to get a stage’s boss to spawn. Extella Link simply has players complete a chain of missions before the boss shows up and the in-game map is considerably better about conveying information of the flow of battle to the player. Crucial information about an ally's remaining HP, where they need to be escorted to, and how long it'll take for someone to travel to another zone on the map is easier to read in the heat of combat now. Much of the game’s stage layouts are similar to The Umbral Star. Characters will quickly be zipping around sector-to-sector once again to clear out. I also noticed that stage hazards were taken out in Extella Link; no more running into a zone that’ll eat up your HP if you didn’t have the proper defenses against fire or ice. These elemental damage afflictions seem to have been relegated to character skills instead. They bugged me before, so I’m all for this change. Unfortunately, Extella Link still shares many of The Umbral Star’s problems in the same missions getting old fast. There are a handful of other small quality-of-life inclusions that went a long way for me. Characters can be leveled up with money up to your current highest leveled character as the cap. No one will be underleveled as long as you have the cash and you rack up a lot fast. Not all characters throughout the story join your group, but the game has a toggleable option to make it so previous enemies who don’t canonically turnover a new leaf can still be selected as a playable character - story reasons be damned. _The aptly named Money is Power system is the most appreciated quality-of-life addition for me. No need to grind levels when you can just pay for them. Other than the main campaign, there are unlockable extra stages that reward new costumes. If you have save data from The Umbral Star, you can transfer that over into Extella Link to unlock a few bonus costumes. There’s even a 4-vs-4 online multiplayer component. It has a king-of-the-hill style face-off where both teams try to seize control of an area for as long as they can. Thankfully this mode evens the playing field among combatants unlocking almost everyone, all active skills unlocked and maxed, all passive skill slots unlocked and all of the passive skill items maxed from the get-go. The game smartly gives everyone an equal amount of options and it’s up to players to decide how they want to customize their loadout. It’s a fun little side activity though at the time of this review, I’ve only played with bots. I can’t comment on how the netcode will hold up. Fate/Extella Link is a significant step-up to Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star. Its story may be shorter and more comparable to a gaiden, but I think it’s more important to nail down and refine its gameplay systems first and foremost. It’s a game for fans of Fate and fans of the hack n’ slash musou genre. I like both a lot, so seeing it get significantly better works for me. There are still some things I’d like to see improved with more elaborate stages and better graphical fidelity, but Extella Link tries its best with baby steps in those areas. Regardless, the game is a blast to play. *-GAMEPLAY.

Name Game: Grand Theft Auto V Price: $29.99 - $14.99 The Discount Rate: -50% Link Store: Click Offer Ends Up After : 15/11/2019

Like its hero, the wall-climbing, sewer-spelunking, city-hopping Kyle Crane, Dying Light has its ups and downs and is kind of all over the map. Techland, creator of the Dead Island series, takes elements from a number of games—especially the Far Cry series—and mashes them together in its open world first-person zombie shooter. It's an uneven mix, bookended by a slow start and an exasperating finish, not to mention a few troubling performance issues, but in the middle lies a sweet spot that provides hours of satisfying, zombie-stomping fun. Kyle Crane, a secret government operative, has been sent to the city of Harran to retrieve critical data about a virus that's turned most of the po[CENSORED]tion into zombies. Crane, after immediately botching his mission and getting bitten, falls in with a selfless group of survivors, contends with a vicious warlord bent on controlling the medicine supply, and takes orders from an agency superior who would prefer to simply napalm the entire mess. Who will Crane ultimately pledge loyalty to? I wonder. Crane, despite being what I assumed was a top physical specimen, initially can't run for long before slowing and gasping, and can only swing a melee weapon a few times before running out of stamina, which resulted in a slow and awkward first few hours of play. Weapons, at first, are limited to pipes, wrenches, small knives, or sticks of wood, all of which do little damage to zombies and need frequent repair before falling apart completely. The melee combat itself is a bit wonky: sometimes you'll score a staggering hit or grisly decapitation and win your fight instantly. Sometimes you'll just have to spam the mouse until you run out of stamina or your enemy falls. It doesn't feel like precise aiming helps: I've tried very hard to land my strikes perfectly, but the harmless glancing blows and devastating skull-crushers feel like they're randomly determined. *-Weaponize yourself. Blueprints can be found or purchased, letting you craft upgrades to electrify pipes, sharpen or poison knives, add nails to a baseball bats, and otherwise beef up your attacks, and better weapons like swords and axes slowly begin to appear as you progress. Flipping through menus to craft gear tends to slow things down a bit, though provided you don't play in marathon stretches like I did, it may not be as tiresome as it eventually felt. It takes hours of play to even get your hands on a gun, and the relief of finally having a firearm somewhat defuses the issue of there being only a couple of pistols, two types of rifles, and a double-barrel shotgun. Your best weapon is Crane's slowly improving agility coupled with a city perfectly built for climbing and roof-running. Once you get the hang of leaping and climbing and realize that nearly everything in the city that looks like it can be climbed can be climbed, Dying Light opens up and becomes a fun, zombie-infested playground. Techland has done a great job with the running, jumping, climbing, and clambering—zipping up the sides of buildings, sprinting across rooftops, and dodging and dashing through the crowded streets becomes real fun, an instinctive and exciting way to travel. Skill points are doled out slowly and individually as you play and there's lots to spend them on. The vaulting skill is a useful one: while dashing through the streets you can plant your foot right on a zombie's face and launch yourself over it, leaving it in the dust. A related skill can also stun your targets as you leap off them, so you can land, turn, and bash your wobbling enemy's skull in. A fun, flying, two-footed kick can stagger enemies or knock them off perches, and a sliding kick can shatter a zed's legs. Despite finishing the main story I've still only unlocked about half of the skills available, and uber-skills like stealth kills and the ability to use a grappling hook come very late in the game. The result is a well-paced, gradual increase in skills and a character who markedly improves but never feels like some sort demigod placed on earth to smite zombies. _The complete difference between daytime and nighttime in Harran is remarkable. Right, zombies! They come in a few flavors. Mostly, they're slow, shambling types, clogging the surface streets and bridges, lurking in buildings and alleys, and occasionally staggering around on rooftops, providing amusement as they flop off ledges or over balconies while mindlessly trying to follow you. There are also specials: huge, durable brutes who swing clubs or hurl hunks of concrete, spitters who barf slime from a distance, bloated blobs who scream and explode, and a handful of freshly-infected citizens who haven't lost their mobility and can still sprint and climb. Distracting them, rather than fighting them, is often the best move; firecrackers will divert zombies for the few important seconds needed to pick a lock (in a Skyrim-style minigame) or force open a door, and the city is littered with other traps like cars rigged to explode and puddles of water that can be electrified. The zombies' attraction to noise is a double-edged sword, of course. Shooting or using grenades is quick and effective, but can draw an overwhelming crowd. When night falls, the zombie game changes entirely. A new breed of zombie called Volatiles appears, and suddenly Crane is no longer the fastest thing on two legs in Harran. The Volatiles prowl the pitch-black city, and if you wander into their vision cones they pursue you at a lightning-fast pace while screeching to attract other zombies. You can set off traps or distract them while fleeing, but a single stumble usually results in a quick and brutal death. The complete difference between daytime and nighttime in Harran is remarkable, and I always find the approach of night to be genuinely panic-inducing as I hurriedly sprint for the nearest safe zone before the sun goes down. You're occasionally forced to do missions at night, but otherwise you can advance the clock to morning by sleeping in a bed. *-Bright frights, big city. Harran itself is peppered with stuff to do, much of it familiar from other open world games. In addition to lengthy story missions, there are multipart side-quests, looting and scavenging expeditions, random encounters with hostile thugs or boss zombies, airdrop recoveries, citizen rescues, hunts for collectibles, securing safehouses, and a few timed challenges. It's all pretty standard open world fare and easily ignored when you're headed to a mission, but if you're just out for a run you'll always find something happening nearby. *-GAMEPLAY.

The problem with War Thunder is it's a game that constantly swings from "amazing" to "outrageously frustrating,” often within the same session. It's a game I love, except for all those times I'm ready to nuke it from my hard drive. Every few sessions, something technical goes annoyingly wrong. A lot of times, I get an authentication error and can't log into my account. A few minutes later, it works again. Sometimes, my controls mysteriously go haywire. All my settings are lost, and I have to remap everything, which is the most boring and painstaking task in flight sims. Don't even bother wasting time on the Controller Wizard. It's the least effective wizard this side of Oz. Or there's that weird texture bug I only get in the cockpit view, when the world turns into a blurry, jagged mess, but looks perfect if I simply switch to a different camera. War Thunder often seems like a ramshackle construction. There are too many places where it seems unfinished or buggy. It'd be unbearable, except for all those times it's actually sublime. At its best, War Thunder is a game of rare beauty and grace. The game is breathtaking when you're in the air, soaring over mountain valleys or Pacific atolls. Just taking a plane up through the clouds, where the world beyond your wingtips vanishes into fog while condensation whips over the canopy, gives way to the most extraordinary joy and elation when you burst into the clear blue sky. It feels like I'm really up there at the controls of a plane, playing among the peaks and valleys of a cloud formation. That's doubly true when I'm using special flight-sim gear like a TrackIR head-head tracker and a flight stick. More important, War Thunder's air combat is simply some of the best and most intense I've ever experienced. World of Warplanes doesn't come close; its planes are too confined by the game's simple physics. It's a shooter where your avatar is a plane. In War Thunder, I always feel like I'm actually in the cockpit, and every kill is a story to tell. Even on the arcade settings, where the planes are extremely forgiving and every battle is basically an aerial melee, War Thunder forces players to learn and use basic flight maneuvers and aerial tactics. Bringing all the pieces together is very difficult but also very satisfying. It's not a stretch to say that War Thunder is the Red Orchestra of air combat. You can also crank up the realism, which does away with respawns and puts you into more varied tactical situations. Instead of just racing to shoot up all the other team's tanks or airbases, you might be waging a carrier battle in the Pacific, or trying to escort bombers to a target. The aircraft are a lot harder to handle and the stakes are a lot higher, but that only serves to heighten the authenticity. *-Gear-Grinding. If only War Thunder stayed at high-altitude. But unfortunately, it comes crashing to earth with the introduction of tank combat. Where air combat is fast and graceful, the tanks are plodding and fussy. The gestures toward realism only serve to drag things out. Early tanks grind to a halt over the gentlest grades, and War Thunder consistently overestimates my interest in managing a tank's manual transmission. It's like coaxing a slug. The slow pace is exacerbated by a combat system where the person who spots the target first is probably going to get the kill. So battlefields too often devolve into careful camping grounds, and by the time you maneuver to a good position, your glacial pace has eaten up a quarter of the battle time. Then there's the progression system. This is where War Thunder badly lags behind World of Warplanes and World of Tanks. Its upgrade tree is a byzantine mess. Rather than having everything laid-out in a simple step-by-step progression, the War Thunder tech tree is jammed full of weird side-branches and a few too many marginal upgrades. Plus, the currency and research required to progress in the second and third tier of the game lead to some real doldrums. Premium currency helps alleviate this somewhat, but unless you're willing to drop some real cash on buying aircraft, you should brace yourself for some slogging. Still, as frustrated as I get with War Thunder's limitations, there nothing else out there that so readily puts you at the center of a dogfight. When I swoop in behind an enemy fighter, drop the crosshairs just above the cockpit, and watch the bullets slope into the fuselage until it comes apart like a broken kite, I feel transported. I'm an ace, a master of the skies. War Thunder drives me crazy. I'm not sure how I can ever leave. *-Arcade and realism. The main objective of the game is to shoot down enemy planes and all its game modes are about this. What instead sets it apart is how realistic it is and how easy it is to get shot down. In arcade mode you play in two teams, and everyone can chose what planes they like, but the planes are very simplified in terms of damage models and physics. This also makes it possible for teams to mix planes from different nations. When in arcade mode you can either play “Ground Strike” mode which involves killing ground troops, shooting down airplanes and bombing airfields. Or you play “Domination” mode, which is just like any other domination mode where you hold objectives, or airfields in this case. To make the game even more interesting, there are realistic and simulator battles. The simulator battles are far more fun to play for the airplane enthusiast, while the realistic mode is more for the average player interested in playing the game’s full potential. In realistic mode the gameplay is much less forgiving and the planes are much more in line with how they were historically. And unlike arcade mode, the planes you chose will be from a specific nation and not mixed. You will also be playing historical encounters and have objectives similar to the real battles. While arcade mode can ease new players into the game, which has a steep learning curve, it is in realistic mode where the game truly spreads its wings. *-Simulation and events. Simulator battles are very similar to realistic battles, but the flight physics here are set as close to the real deal as possible, so if you want to master the simulation battles you need to know all the details about your plane’s real-word attributes. You also only have a first-person view here, and there is no mouse-aim available, making it a must to play with a joystick or gamepad. If you are hit or run out of ammo, which happens way too fast if you are not smart about it then you must return to the airfield to repair and load up. Then there is the events mode, which is available in the realistic and simulator settings. Here you can partake in recreating battles as accurately as possible, where the regular matchmaking system with battle rating is off. But there are also a few other events in which you can partake. In squadron events, 8 players per match fight for the air supremacy and only players from the same clan can be in it. In racing you will fly through a marked course and capture zones in the water. But while there are a multitude of ways to playing and there is a possibility for customization, most of the events didn’t feel like a good fit for the game, and only something plastered on afterwards. The best way to play it is via the realistic or simulator battles. *-GAMEPLAY.

Until You Fall is something of an unexpected title for Schell Games. For a studio which has previously focused on education and puzzle based VR games, Until You Fall brings a surprisingly rich combat experience which successfully fuses meta-game elements in a way that no other VR title has yet managed. Note: This game is in Early Access which means the developers have deemed it incomplete and likely to see changes over time. This review is an assessment of the game only at its current Early Access state and will not receive a numerical score. Until You Fall is a procedurally generated rogue-lite dungeon crawler that’s all about melee combat. You’ll battle your way through a string of rooms po[CENSORED]ted with enemies of increasing difficulty. Eventually, inevitably, you’ll die. At the end of each round, you’ll respawn in a hub space where you can spend money you’ve earned on new weapons and weapon upgrades, making you stronger for your next bout. _While enemy placements are randomized and get more challenging as you go on, the environments in which you fight are little more than a backdrop. | Image courtesy Schell Games. Schell Games has come up with a unique VR combat system that goes deeper than merely swinging at the right time. All enemies have both a shield and health meter. The shield meter must be broken before you can do any damage to the enemy’s health. You can attack at any time, but your opponent can too, and you must block the attacks in the indicated position unless you want to lose a portion of your scarce and non-rejuvenating health. Upon breaking an enemy’s shield bar, you’ll have a opportunity to execute a combo to deal big damage—so long as you can swing quickly and accurately in the prescribed directions. If you don’t manage to kill the enemy with your first combo, their shields will recharge and you’ll need to break them again. _After breaking the shield, strike in the direction of the orange indicator to deal big health damage with a combo. | Screenshot by Road to VR. In terms of enemies, you can expect zombie-like fodder who will die in a few strikes, capable knights who will strike you down if you get over-confident, hammer-wielding behemoths with attacks that must be dodged rather than blocked, and ranged ninja-like casters who will shoot ranged spells at you which you can slice out of the air. If you make it deep enough into the dungeon you’ll also come across some interesting mini-boss encounters. Between the incoming attacks you must block, and the openings presented by your opponent, Until You Fall establishes a clear combat pace which is essential to compensating for VR’s lack of force feedback. Things get even more interesting in the way that weapons significantly contribute to your attack and defense strategy. Each weapon deals varying amounts of damage to shields vs. health, which means you’ll want to think carefully about which weapon you use against shields and which weapon you use against health. Each weapon also deals varying amounts of damage when it blocks incoming attacks, so you’ll want to think about which weapon you should be blocking with. On top of that, each weapon has a unique weight to it, which dictates how quickly you can move it through the air. That mace you’re holding might deal a lot of blocking damage, but can you move it quickly enough to block back to back strikes? What’s more, each weapon has a unique activated ability which significantly contributes to the way you’ll approach some encounters. For instance, there’s a dagger which can freeze enemies in place for a short time—you’ll want to use this to freeze one of the stronger knights while quickly finishing off some of the fodder. Another weapon has a shield ability which temporarily lets you absorb two strikes before your health is at risk, which gives you at least a little peace of mind before going up against two knights with only one hit point remaining. But wait, there’s more! Each weapon also has temporary upgrade slots (which only last for the current round); at the end of each room you’ll get to pick from three rewards. There’s a handful of weapon upgrades that you could find here, some which will improve the weapon’s special ability, some which will allow the weapon one extra hit on a combo, etc. As you upgrade your weapons along the way, the choices you make will continue to influence your battle strategy. The way that weapons influence the game’s combat creates a rich opportunity for players to experiment with different weapon combinations and combat strategies. Aside from weapon upgrades, among those three rewards you pick from at the end of each room you may also find health, Aether (the game’s currency), or even an extra hit point. Because you only get one life and start the game with just three hit points, health is incredibly precious. But so are weapon upgrades. And even still, more Aether means more money to spend on new weapons and upgrades. At times, the choice can feel like a serious dilemma—do I snag one extra hit point, heal three of my four total hit points, upgrade my weapon, or bank a big chunk of Aether to come back stronger and fight another day? The fact that the choice is so often difficult shows clearly how engaging and impactful Until You Fall’s various meta-game systems really are. *-Immersion. Until You Fall lacks any real narrative beyond a setting and a bit of lore, but the combat really manages to stand on its own. The game offers smooth locomotion which is combined with dash attacks to close distance between enemies. The game cuts interactions down to just the basics—weapons are ethereal, and you summon them into your hands by pulling the grip button (this has the nice benefit of making them impossible to lose track of)! Aside from grabbing item upgrades at the end of each round, there’s no objects within the game world itself that you’ll be interacting with. Fighting is mostly done by squaring up with your opponent and facing them without locomoting around, and the use of your body to make big swings and block attacks by moving your weapons into specific positions is quite embodying. Until You Fall keeps you alert and on your toes thanks to the scarcity of health and the depth of the combat system. You’ll be painfully aware when you have just one hit point left and your next battle is with a pair of knights. At times you’ll find yourself taking a deep breath to get a moment’s pause before the next challenging encounter. *-Comfort. Until You Fall is quite comfortable thanks to minimal reliance on artificial locomotion. Smooth movement is slow, and serves just to get you from one enemy to the next; the dash move, which serves as an opening attack or retreat, is perfectly comfortable in my experience. The combat is quite physically engaging, and if you really get into it you’ll easily be able to break a sweat. The game encourages physicality by letting you deal more damage with harder swings (to an extent). In the later stages of the game there are enemies with attacks that cannot be blocked but instead must be physically dodged by leaning from one side to another or ducking out of the way. *-Conclusion. Until You Fall successfully fuses VR sword combat with meta-game elements in a way that no other VR title has yet managed. The game’s physical combat is underscored with a sense of deliberate strategy that can change from one encounter to the next. With deep and interesting combat, it’s almost a shame that the game isn’t more expansive in terms of its environments and overall scope, but fortunately what’s here feels really good and stands on its own. There looks to be plenty of room for expansion on top of the foundation Schell Games has laid; throughout Early Access the studio has an opportunity to add additional enemies, weapons, and upgrades to expand gameplay in interesting ways. Note: This game is in Early Access which means the developers have deemed it incomplete and likely to see changes over time. This review is an assessment of the game only at its current Early Access state and will not receive a numerical score. *-GAMEPLAY.

There's a killer idea here, and plenty of fun working with a team to tunnel to your objective. However, there's still a lot of work to polish this gem to its proper shine. This oddball dwarcraft (or maybe dwarf 'em up?) title was one of our most anticipated FPS games of the year off of the strength of its intriguing concept and eye-catching art style. Of course, four-player team shooters certainly aren't anything new -- from Left 4 Dead to a whole lot of WWII games and Space Hulk: Deathwing, we've tread this ground before. What's different with Deep Rock Galactic is the focus on taming the environment, navigating by tunneling or climbing, and its underground interesting setting -- where one wrong step sends you plummeting to your doom. The darkened corridors of a bug-infested planet make for a crazy multiplayer ride as you and your equally greedy dwarf co-workers try to make as much money as possible for your intergalactic mining corporation. _The game has strong contrasts between light, dark, and a riot of colors. *-Band Of Dwarf Brothers. After the tutorial mission and jumping into a quick match (or looking for specific matches that are at your skill level), Deep Rock Galactic features four different -- and quite satisfying -- classes to pick. Each strongly showcases a different focus on how to achieve goals in an underground tunnel complex, and there's a lot more variation than in the typical shotgunner/ sniper/ assault rifle loadout you'd expect from an FPS. Make no mistake, DRG is very much a team-focused outing. You want a well-rounded group of miners to be able to get around effectively. Without the zip lines, platforms, and quick tunneling options you will find it hard to reach high or low locations -- or to get to your team mates who may have been overrun by skittering awful monsters after falling into a chasm. _The engineer can launch platforms, set down turrets, and take out big enemies with the grenade launcher. *-Tunneling Terror. While there are periodic swarms of enemies to fight while mining, the real enemy here is the terrain and the lack of light. In fact, that interplay between light and darkness is one of the game's strongest points. The experience can get very tense, either via claustrophobia from tight tunnels or agoraphobia from overly open spaces where you can easily fall to your death if you aren't paying attention. Learning how to tunnel with your pick or use the special ability of your class to reach new areas is crucial, as there are wide open cave structures to fall into without any light to highlight your footing. When you finally complete a map's objectives, there's limited time to reach the escape pod at the end of missions, which forces you to work in tandem with your team mates to get up to higher areas or tunnel through tight spaces. _Zip lining across a chasm to reach some red sugar health rocks. *-Disgruntled Dwarves Of The Deep. In one match I played during early access, figuring out how to reach the mining objectives was a fun puzzle to work out between players. In the next, it was an intensely frustrating case study in how procedurally generated maps can go very, very wrong. We found two out of 10 alien egg objectives quickly, but then couldn't find any others. There was no obvious way out of this wide circular chamber and we just ended up running in circles, tunneling random directions with nowhere to go. After about 45 minutes of a match that was supposed to be on a 1-Star "short length" mission, we finally admitted defeat and all just logged off in frustration. Similarly frustrating experiences pop up for newbies in several different major game mechanics. A voiceover tells you to mine Nitra veins for ammo, but it doesn't seem to work. I mined plenty of the ore but remained at zero ammo after surviving several waves of enemies. I tried depositing my stash in the MULE but still remained at zero ammo. After pressing every possible button, I couldn't find any sort of crafting menu to turn it into ammo. After losing that round because none of us had any way to effectively fight without ammo, I had to hit the forums to discover the secret. Apparently, all the teammates have to deposit Nitra until hitting a certain threshold, then there's a separate keyboard option to call down an ammo resupply. Annoyingly, there was no indication of any of this through in-game prompts or in the controls menu. _There's a whole tunnel system way, way down there in the dark. *-The Bottom Line (So Far). Variety is one of the bigger issues for Deep Rock Galactic right now. More level types are a must, and Deep Rock Galactic will absolutely need a lot more enemy types and expansions on the progression system before full release. Fortnite felt overly complex at first, but now that I'm used to all those different ways to pick new skills and upgrade characters in a multiplayer focused game, this feels overly simple by comparison. Some of the physics are also quite odd and need of tweaking, which is bad for a game based around the concept of mining. If you dig out the middle of a column for instance, the top of the column stays floating in the air. Whoops. Sadly, there's no split screen for console players either, although that just seems to be the way things have been going in the industry lately. Deep Rock has plenty of positive aspects going for it, though. The game is surprisingly stable for an indie early access title, and I never experienced a single crash. I'm also loving that these graphically pleasing co-op style games have been landing a lot lately, like Fortnite, Sea Of Thieves, and now Deep Rock Galactic. They don't need to be hyper-realistic, but instead offer something more interesting to look at over extended periods of time. The game's unique style with gruff, grumbling, greedy dwarves working in tandem has something very special brewing... if the developers can overcome some glaring issues in early access.

Squad Offworld Industries.. My buddy Rock and I were the forward scout team of a nine-man, U.S. Army squad. We had cautiously strode ahead from the rest of our guys in hopes of locating any insurgent activity, or, more importantly (and improbably), a much-sought after weapon’s cache. The map that we played on, Logar Valley, was composed of a dusty valley surrounded by foothills and more mountainous terrain. Streams trickled throughout the valley floor, winding their way through patches of trees and geometrically planned poppy fields. Rock and I had spotted movement within the vicinity of a certain group of thatch-roofed mud huts, which we now carefully approached. We advised the rest of the squad that we’d be going radio silent as we neared the area in question, and they promptly hushed their chattering. As we crept up (on the opposite sides of) the length of a narrow street, we suddenly spotted two Insurgents who dated across it further up ahead. My blood began to pulse within my temples as we moved on. “Looks like we have something up here—stand by, squad lead,” Rock relayed to our fearless leader, who was holding fast with the rest of our teammates from a nearby position. We continued to stealthily sneak up the street when I spotted something through a window of one of the huts I was passing. Sure enough, it was the last of five weapons caches that our team had been tasked with destroying. “Eyes on the last objective,” I blurted out. My battle buddy Rock quickly jogged across the road and took up a defensive position behind a low wall nearby. No sooner did he scoot into position than the two insurgents that we’d spotted earlier came running around the corner. But this time, they saw us too. They raised their AKs and began firing on our position. “Tangos spotted. Under fire. We are engaging,” I said as I raised my own rifle and opened fire. Fortunately, Rock and I managed to make short work of our first two enemies. But there was no time to celebrate—the end of road from where they’d come was soon a busy blur of activity. It reminded me of an angry hornets nest. The insurgents had been alerted to our presence. Fully automatic fire ripped over our heads and we hunkered down as an insurgent’s light machinegun suppressed us. “Squad lead, requesting backup. Under direct PKM fire,” Rock said, indicating the type of deadly weapon that we were faced with. Rock and I managed to periodically pop our heads up for brief moments of return fire—and then we heard it. A booming cacophony of long barreled doom sounded. A machinegun-mounted HUMVEE peeled around a corner behind us as the rest of our squad joined the fray. A steady stream of metal death engaged the Insurgents from the top of the vehicle. The cavalry had arrived… As you may have guessed from the above description, from one of my recent Squad experiences, it can be quite an intense game. Indie developers Offworld Industries have created a team-based tactical shooter unlike any other, save the venerated Project Reality. In fact, one of the reasons that Squad is such an excellent game is because the development team includes a couple of Project Reality’s original dev members. Just as in Project Reality, Squad pits two teams of up to fifty players each against one another. So far, the major factions include the U.S. Army, Russian Army, Insurgents, and Irregular Militia. What sets Squad apart from other military-themed games is its reliance on teamwork. Whereas in the Battlefield and Call of Duty series’ of games, you can’t just hop into a vehicle and one man them. Likewise, running off by yourself will put you in an early grave. In Squad, communication is paramount to not only your survival, but accomplishing your team’s goals. Squad’s main mode, Assault and Secure, sees two factions vying for map control, which is split up between objective points. When a side takes the flag of an objective, they unlock access to the next objective. This creates an emergent ebb and flow to matches, where factions push to secure objectives while trying to defend the ones they’ve already captured. The other mode is called Insurgency. In this mode, one side plays the insurgents, which must protect weapons caches which are scattered across the map, while the other team plays as BLUFOR and are tasked with locating the secreted caches and destroying them. This mode can get plenty tense, as BLUFOR squads try to detect where the caches are hidden, while the OPFOR team set up ambushes for them. Both modes can make for some pretty hectic gameplay, especially (as of August 7th 2016) now that there are vehicles that have been introduced into the game. Unfortunately, however, the Assault and Secure mode still needs a lot of work. Not the actual game mechanics—those are perfect, we’re talking about the community that plays it. Many players, not used to the careful planning and strategizing that was inherent in Project Reality, tend to all glom together during AAS maps. Instead of defending points that have already been captured, they tend to all run off in order to capture the next objective. That means that since no one thinks to stay behind and defend, by the time they all get to the next point, the enemies flank around and take the objective that they just left behind. This creates a sort of rubber-banding, where teams are constantly rushing points, and then have to turn back around and go back to objectives that they just came from and have to recapture. Squad’s graphics are simply stunning, with excellent environments and highly detailed weapon and character models. Those gamers with 4k gaming set-ups will be in pure eye-candy nirvana, and will probably want to show off their gaming laptop or gaming PC’s visuals to friends. Squad is undoubtedly the best teamwork-based tactical shooter out there right now. Well, besides Project Reality, which is currently (sniff) dying out. If more team-centric players, such as PR vets, can teach the newer Squad players how to defend objectives as well as utilize better team-based tactics, this could indeed turn out to be the next Project Reality. But for now, with its current community, it leaves some things to be desired.

Name Game: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six® Siege Price: $19.99 - $7.99 The Discount Rate: -60% Link Store: Click Offer Ends Up After : 5/11/2019

A lawyer for U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland told The Wall Street Journal that Sondland told impeachment committee members that President Trump's dealings with Ukraine amounted to a quid pro quo. Sondland's lawyer Robert Luskin told the news outlet that Sondland revealed to House committees that he thought a meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would take place only if the country agreed to investigate corruption allegations about his political rivals. Last month, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) launched an impeachment inquiry into Trump's dealings with Ukraine following a whistleblower complaint about a July 25 call with Zelensky. When a lawmaker asked Sondland if he believed this arrangement was a quid pro quo, Sondland said he believed so but warned that he was not a lawyer, Luskin told the newspaper. The Journal's report follows text messages between Sondland and U.S. diplomat William Taylor that came out during the impeachment inquiry. In the exchange, Taylor said, "It's crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign." "The president has been crystal clear no quid pro quo's of any kind," Sondland responded. Taylor's subsequent testimony resulted in scrutiny of Sondland, and some lawmakers have called for him to return and answer more questions. Taylor's testimony was similar. He told House investigators that a meeting between Trump and Zelensky as well as security assistance for Ukraine were conditioned on the country's pursuit of investigations into whether Kiev interfered in the 2016 election and into unfounded corruption allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden and his son. Taylor also relayed that Sondland told a Ukrainian representative, "The security assistance money would not come until President Zelensky committed to pursue the Burisma investigation." Luskin told the Journal that Sondland would probably return if he were asked to do so. Trump has denied that there was a quid pro quo and blasted the impeachment inquiry as a "witch hunt." However, a rough transcript of the July call released by the White House reveals that the president did ask Zelensky to look into the former vice president. Trump has also publicly asked Ukraine and China to investigate the democratic presidential candidate.