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_Die Young is a first person, open world survival exploration game that is currently in early access on Steam. You play as a young woman who’s been kidnapped, and stranded on a dangerously beautiful island. You have no idea why you’re here, but you must find a way to survive, and escape. The story premise is interesting, and drove me to want to explore, and find more information. However, since the game is in early access, there’s no closure for the time-being, so I admit was a bit sad that the story isn’t finished yet. Die Young’s gameplay focuses heavily on exploration, parkour, and survival. There are main quest objectives, but also several side missions become available as you explore the map. The open world allows you to freely explore the different landmarks around the map at your own pace. The exploration is great, and you find more information about the events that have taken place on the island and look for clues on how to escape. The best part of the exploration is all the parkour that you get to do to reach some locations. I found the parkour very enjoyable. The motion and controls feel fluid, and the parts of the terrain you are able to grab onto are typically easy to notice because they usually have white paint on them. There were a few jumps that I encountered that were long distance jumps, and timing played a huge role in making successful jumps. Running and climbing uses stamina though, so you’ll have to be careful to not run out of stamina while climbing and fall to your death. There is no character progression system, but you can find items that give you bonuses, such as the running shoes that give you more stamina, or the backpack that gives you more inventory space. There aren’t a lot of items implemented yet, so it will be nice when more gear is available. Aside from stamina, you’ll also need to monitor your health bar. Early on in the game, you will be defenseless, so you’ll want to avoid combat until you have the tools to fight back. Later on, you’ll find recipes to craft tools to be able to fight back. The tools all have durability though, so you’ll have to keep crafting new ones, which can be a bit annoying since they don’t seem to last very long. Even with a weapon though, you’re still pretty vulnerable, so just because you can fight, doesn’t mean you should. If you do happen to die, you’ll respawn at the last campfire location that you saved at. Thirst is another survival aspect you’ll need to manage. You’ll want to scavenge for food and find water sources to stay hydrated. Eating food restores some missing health, but hunger isn’t in the game yet. Thirst mechanics are pretty balanced, and easy to manage since food and water are plentiful. Die Young also has a crafting system that unlocks new recipes as you explore and find them. Crafting is done through the crafting menu by combining various resources you’ve scavenged. The crafting system is easy to use and understand, and you can make items like tools, health kits, and a knife. There is a limited number of each resource you can carry, and your item inventory space is limited as well. *-Pros: very enjoyable parkour with good motion, and fluid controls exploration is rewarding, and you can find clues or items to help you survive and escape survival aspects (stamina, thirst, health) are pretty balanced, and easy to manage since food, water, and resources are plentiful (hunger isn’t in the game yet) good, intuitive crafting system, with an abundance of resources to find and craft with as you explore there are some fast travel locations to quickly travel that help cut down on the travel time and backtracking once you unlock them appealing graphics with nice environments sound effects and music are fine – it’s nice to have the audio cues when you aggro something keyboard and mouse controls are fully customizable, and there is full controller support *-Cons: inconsistent fall damage; sometimes sliding down a small hill that’s not even that steep can damage or even kill you, but then other times you fall from further and you are just fine (nitpick) weapon durability is low, and having to make more can be a pain (nitpick) some texture popping issues (nitpick) enemy models and their animations aren’t the greatest; they could use more detail, but they’re not terrible either (nitpick) while you can have more than one game, there is only one save slot per game that keeps the most recent save; more saves kept for the same game would be nice (nitpick) performance could use some improvements, but it’s still tolerable (frame drops into the low-mid 50s fairly frequently with above the recommended specs) I’ve played the game for over 5 hours so far. The gameplay is enjoyable, but I don’t expect there to be much in the way of replay value once you find and complete everything. -Info.. Die Young (PC [Reviewed]) Developer: IndieGala Publisher: IndieGala *-Conclusion: Die Young is off to a great start. The exploration is good, and parkour is fun. I’m eager to see more content added, especially the main story. If you’re looking to get in at the ground level, and explore and parkour all over the place, then you’ll likely enjoy Die Young in its current early access state. If you’re interested in experiencing a fully fleshed out story experience, then you might want to wait for everything to be fully implemented down the road.

After Kamala Harris pulled out of a South Carolina criminal justice forum because its organizer gave Donald Trump an award, the president duly lashed out. “Badly failing presidential candidate Kamala Harris,” Trump wrote on Saturday morning, “will not go to a very wonderful largely African American event today because yesterday I recieved [sic] a major award, at the same event.” The California senator trails the frontrunners in the Democratic primary, having faded after a strong performance in the first debate, but is still in the top five in polling averages. She has qualified for the next contest, in Georgia in November. Her campaign said on Friday she would skip the 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center event at Benedict College in Columbia, a historically black college, in objection to the group’s decision to give Trump its Bipartisan Justice Award, which she received in 2016 with the Republican South Carolina senator Tim Scott. Trump received the award for his work on criminal justice reform with the First Step Act, which has allowed thousands of non-violent offenders to gain early release from federal prison. In his speech on Friday, Trump belittled Barack Obama’s record on criminal justice. He said on Saturday he won the award because he had been “able to produce & sign into law major Criminal Justice Reform legislation, which will greatly help the African American community (and all other communities), and which was unable to get done in past administrations despite a tremendous desire for it.” The reform was greeted as a bipartisan success but it is not without its critics, among campaigners and even those who supported it. In December Kevin Ring, the president of Families against Mandatory Minimums, which backed the bill, told the Guardian it was “a small first step, but it is finally a step in the right direction”. On Saturday Trump also made a familiar claim, writing: “This and best unemployment numbers EVER is more than Kamala will EVER be able to do for African Americans!” Factcheckers have said Trump’s regular claim about African American unemployment being at its lowest point ever is, at least under modern methodology, accurate – up to a point. He has also regularly claimed strong support among African Americans, a claim which is not backed up by polling evidence. Harris also complained that only a handful of Benedict students were given tickets for Trump’s appearance. Most seats were occupied by administration officials and Trump supporters. “Donald Trump is a lawless president,” the California senator said in a statement on Friday. “Not only does he circumvent the laws of our country and the principles of our constitution, but there is nothing in his career that is about justice, for justice, or in celebration of justice.” Harris had been among 10 Democrats expected to attend the Benedict College forum. Soon after her announcement, the mayor of Columbia, a co-host, said he was organizing an alternative event. Harris’ campaign confirmed she would be there. “I honestly wanted to give everyone else another option,” the Columbia mayor, Steve Benjamin, said about his event, which will be held with the theme “students first” in a college chapel. As of Friday night, Benjamin said, Cory Booker, Joe Biden and probably Bernie Sanders planned to attend his event, as well as the original forum.

Simulation isn't the defining aspect of Arma. It's scale. The enormity of the map is the foundation for the experiences that distinguish Bohemia Interactive's flagship franchise. It's what makes radios, topographical maps, binoculars, and compasses practical equipment in an FPS. It's what allows for kilometer-long headshots and coordinated convoy raids. It's what makes using your eyes to spot hints of enemies--muzzle flashes, tracers, gunsmoke--as valuable as being a crack shot. The scale of Arma 3 dwarfs everything in the genre, including Arma 2. Altis, a keyhole portion of which is seen in these screenshots, is a Mediterranean island-nation assembled from ruins, airports, coastal villages, solar power plants, military outposts, salt flats, and tank-friendly scrubland. It's a variegated backyard for you to play war in, but what's more significant is that Arma's landscape finally has the technology it deserves. Arma 3 represents an aesthetic overhaul of the series. Unbelievable dynamic lighting, a volumetric cloud system, genuine vehicle physics, 3D weapon optics, ragdoll, noticeably improved weapon audio, and other grainy, eye-level details await scrutiny inside Arma 3's macro elegance. The best improvement is the merciful cutting of Arma 2's rigid, Tin-Man-without-oil combat animations, which makes infantry combat more responsive in your hands. A half-year in paid pre-release has given Arma 3 time to gestate, but the final build is far from being a comprehensive reinvention of the series, and some long-standing blemishes that arise from its nature as a gargantuan simulation linger. Even on high-end hardware, my framerate dips under the spectacle of some multiplayer missions. Friendly AI units, though marginally better-behaved, still depend on the player to be their brains, an issue that's circumvented by playing Arma the way God intended it: cooperatively. *-Operation cooperation. With voice-connected friends and a good user-created mission, Arma 3 is an unparalleled war story generator. On Operation Fault Line with a gang of Steam pals, I had to drive a clumsy, eight-wheeled transport called a HEMTT across the map. To protect this elephantine truck we had a IFV-6c Panther, an APC with a mounted grenade launcher and 12.7mm MG. Minutes after leaving base, our tanky bodyguard eats a land mine, ruining its left track. As we get out to survey the damage, rockets streak across the valley. Everyone's okay, but the Panther is immobilized. Dumping the APC is the only option. We clump into the fragile HEMTT, burning diesel to get off the exposed ridge. Green tracers track the truck, eventually pricking some of my tires. The wheels don't deflate enough to go flat, but the suspension slumps to the left. For the rest of the mission I have to drive lopsided, constantly counter-steering just to keep the truck on the gravel road. But everyone works together to keep our war bus on track--my teammates give turn instructions, read the map, and scan the road for more mines. When we're free of immediate danger, we send someone back to base to retrieve an ATV so that we have a forward scouting element. At one point we position two machinegunners with nightvision scopes at the lip of a valley to provide cover as we drive the HEMTT down an exposed valley, then taxi them back to us on the ATV. The sequence of events, the chatter, the wounds and kills we rack up, all developed because we happened to run over a mine and our tires got shot up. *-Getting flexible. Arma's capacity for stimulating camaraderie, atmosphere, and problem-solving, in other words, is fully intact. The feeling of ownership that arises over these moments between you and your squadmates sticks in your brain. Central to this fun is how malleable Arma continues to be for its community, which before launch day had published almost 1,500 missions to Steam Workshop. Assuming you have an internet connection, this well of content compensates for the absence of an official campaign at launch, which will integrate in three free monthly installments beginning in October. On the ground, a new stance adjustments system is the best thing that's ever happened to infantry combat in Arma. Holding the Ctrl key as a modifier while tapping W or S cycles between nine vertical stances, and you can also take a horizontal step in addition to using Q or E to lean. You feel articulate--making small body adjustments while behind cover initially feels like finger gymnastics, but the system makes more types of cover viable and more types of weapons viable in that cover. Coupled with the general smoothing of movement and the near elimination of Arma 2's uninterruptible, sluggish animations, running and gunning should finally feel comfortable to average FPS players. On the opposite end of your gun, though, AI remains a shortcoming. Arma 3's enemies share plenty of their ancestors' DNA, which means that they oscillate between being eagle-eyed snipers at one moment and static, dumb, 3D silhouettes evocative of a light gun arcade game another. Their greatest flaw is that they lack personality, which mostly resigns them to being targets rather than soldiers. 3D weapon optics contribute a lot to Arma 3's infantry combat. Holographic, high-magnification, thermal, and other types of optics can be attached to almost every rifle along with other rail items like grenade launchers and flashlights. A few sparks of intelligence did impress me--after we killed the rest of his squadmates, I watched a rifleman flee for the first time in Arma, setting up a tense shot where I had a narrow few seconds to snipe him in the back before he disappeared behind trees. This is the sort of human behavior I'd love to see more of, stuff like blind-firing, limping, throwing smoke grenades for cover, claiming abandoned vehicles, or looting bodies for supplies--anything that would lessen the predictability.

What if you could play through Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window or Shia LaBeouf’s slightly-less-classic Disturbia? That’s essentially the premise of Hello Neighbor, which asks you to uncover what your creepy neighbor is doing behind closed doors. Like its sketchy antagonist, Hello Neighbor has been quietly lurking around for a while now -- even if you don’t follow the indie scene, you’ve likely heard of the game. Hello Neighbor’s 2015 Kickstarter campaign fell well short of its goal, but developer Dynamic Pixels wasn’t deterred. Over the past two years, they’ve released several Alpha and Beta builds, attracting a handful of enthusiastic YouTube boosters, who have helped capture the game a small, yet dedicated fanbase. But is Hello Neighbor hiding something beneath its appealing facade? Time to expose this game to the light… Note: Our original review of Hello Neighbor was based on a pre-release build of the game. The review has been updated to reflect changes in the final release version of the game. Hello Neighbor is split into three acts, set over the span of several years. In Act 1 you play as a kid who seemingly witnesses a creepy mustachioed neighbor locking somebody in his basement. In Act 2, it’s you who has to escape from the basement. In Act 3, the player character, now an adult, returns to again face off against his nightmare neighbor, who has renovated his place into a ramshackle fortress. Who is your sinister neighbor? What’s he hiding in his basement? How did he get the building permits for that monstrosity of a house? The game hints at your neighbor’s story and your connection to him, but don’t get your hopes up for a clear-cut or particularly satisfying narrative. A lot of pieces don’t fit. Your goal in Hello Neighbor is to infiltrate the house across the street and find a way into the basement, except in Act 2, where you start in the basement and attempt to escape the property. Your neighbor patrols the premises, but, luckily, there’s no real consequence for being caught. You just start back at your house or at the cellar doors at a different time of day, and can get right back to the breaking and entering. Your neighbor is even kind enough to let you keep the inventory of stuff you just stole from him. The makers of Hello Neighbor flaunt their game’s “Advanced AI,” but I can’t say I was terribly impressed. Aside from hanging around the general area where he last nabbed you, your neighbor doesn’t adapt in any meaningful way and is easy to game. Want him to stay away from a certain room? Just let him catch you a time or two in, say, the kitchen, and he’ll blindly focus on that spot as you loudly trash the rest of his house. In most cases, he doesn’t even fix the damage you’ve done. If you moved a chair that was barring a door, it won’t be replaced after you’re caught. This gives game a bit of a Dark Souls vibe, as you gradually open up the house even as you fail repeatedly, but it doesn’t speak well for your neighbor’s intelligence. You’re not going to see this guy on Jeopardy any time soon. Even if Hello Neighbor’s AI was as clever as advertised, there’d still be no point in trying to outsmart it. Again, there’s no punishment for being captured, and no version of your neighbor’s house is that big. You can typically get back to wherever you last were in seconds, or, at most, a couple of minutes. Your neighbor also tends to lose track of you once you venture into the house’s upper floors, leaving you to your own devices for long stretches. Only one section of Hello Neighbor really forces you to deal with the game’s supposedly-brilliant AI, and it’s a complete ordeal. The end of Act 1 plunges you into a series of narrow, mostly-linear underground corridors that the neighbor AI clearly wasn’t designed for. If he decides to stake out a choke point you need to get through, you’re pretty much screwed. You just have to hope he has a brain fart and decides to stare at a wall while you stroll right past him, which is how I finally got to Act 2. Your neighbor is either a sucker or, in this one case, an omnipresent pain in the ass – there’s no middle ground. Thankfully, your neighbor’s living space is more interesting than he is. The house owes a major debt to old-school adventure games, particularly Maniac Mansion, as its various forms are packed with quirky, surreal touches. Amenities include a roller coaster, a water-filled room patrolled by a robo shark, and doors placed in all sorts of illogical places. You’ll also uncover plenty of cryptic hints about what might be going on in the house. But the Maniac Mansion comparisons only go so far. That classic had tightly designed puzzles, which followed a certain recognizable logic, while Hello Neighbor leans heavily on random trial and error. For example, at one point the game requires you to throw an object at a specific small painting in order to open a secret passage. There are probably at least a hundred paintings scattered around the house, and the game provides only the vaguest possible hint that this particular painting is special. When puzzles aren’t baffling, they’re just plain annoying. The game has a penchant for forcing players to build wobbly towers of cardboard boxes to reach high spots, and Act 2’s elaborate water pipe puzzle is finicky torture. Hello Neighbor has been designed to spark online discussion. To get players trading secrets, puzzle solutions, and guesses about the game’s lore. Some people enjoy that kind of thing, and it’s somewhat expected during the Alpha/Beta phase, but the average person who just wants to play a game without consulting messageboards and FAQs will be frustrated. Unfortunately, Hello Neighbor saves the worst for last. I won’t spoil story specifics, but potential players should be aware that the game culminates in not one, but two, multi-stage boss battles, which are among the most infuriating I’ve ever encountered. Both feel like they’ve been imported from a completely different game and do a terrible job of communicating what you’re supposed to do. I can barely express how awful Hello Neighbor’s endgame is, and I have a decade of experience in explaining why video games suck. Hello Neighbor’s frustration factor is magnified by its general lack of polish. This is an ugly game, to the point it effects gameplay. More than once I overlooked key items, because I wasn’t even sure what they were supposed to be. Controls are a mess, with basic stuff like picking up items, opening doors, and trying to jump through windows being a pain. Oh, and, of course, the whole thing is riddled with glitches – I fell through the floor and got trapped in walls multiple times. At least the glitches also effect your neighbor. I owe a lot of my progress to the time he got helplessly stuck in a doorway for half an hour. There isn’t much to Hello Neighbor. You could race through the game in around 40 minutes, although I spent about seven hours stumbling around before reaching the end. Once you’ve finished the game, you could go back to ferret out all its secrets or perfect your run, but I doubt most will have the patience. Given Hello Neighbor’s limited scope, its $30 asking price feels like a serious case of inflated property value.

Name Game: ASSETTO CORSA ULTIMATE EDITION Price: $79.88 - $17.39 The Discount Rate: -78% Link Store: Click Offer Ends Up After : IDK

Washington (CNN) The opening statement of Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, is "reverberating" on Capitol Hill among Republicans, according to GOP Hill sources, who told CNN that Taylor's testimony is a game changer in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. A senior Republican source on Capitol Hill told CNN that Taylor's statement was so detailed, so specific and that he is so respected that it is having an impact. "It points to quid pro quo," the GOP source told CNN. There is an ongoing conversation among GOP members on Capitol Hill about the impact of Taylor's testimony, but it remains a question whether it will move Republicans closer to considering impeachment. In a closed-door deposition Tuesday, Taylor said he had been told by Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, that "everything" Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted, including a White House meeting and military aid to the country, would be held up until he publicly declared investigations sought by Trump. Taylor's statement undercut the White House's defense that there had been no quid pro quo offered on the call, as well as Sondland's previous testimony to Congress, but it corroborated many of the claims made by the intelligence community whistleblower whose complaint prompted the impeachment inquiry. While most Republicans have sided publicly with the President, they've been privately grumbling that they're "fed up and tired" of being asked to defend him in the impeachment investigation. Republican sources on Capitol Hill told CNN there's a "growing unease that there is no defense" of the President's actions. "How do you defend the indefensible?" one source told CNN. "We can't defend the substance, all we can do is talk about process." Taylor's deposition, however, marked a turning point in what has been a difficult week for Republicans in defending the President in the impeachment probe and other matters. Republicans were still being asked about acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney attempting last week to walk back his stunning admission to a quid pro quo involving security aid to Ukraine. Top congressional Republicans criticized Trump's comparison of the impeachment inquiry to a "lynching." Another Republican congressional source said that "the testimony by Taylor was devastating and we are waiting for the next shoe to drop." The most significant criticism of the situation by any leading Republican had come from Sen. John Thune of South Dakota. The second-ranking senator in GOP leadership acknowledged on Wednesday that he was troubled by what Taylor had revealed. "The picture coming out of it, based on the reporting that we've seen, I would say is not a good one," he said. But a day later, Thune walked back the concerns he had raised, saying Taylor's testimony is secondhand information. "Right now we are hearing one side of the story. Until we get the picture, it's hard to draw any conclusions," Thune said Thursday on Capitol Hill. Republicans have focused less on Trump' actions and more on railing against the Democrats' approach to the impeachment inquiry. They have demanded the release of transcripts from closed-door interviews and complained about not being able to call their own witnesses. The inquiry, led by House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, has interviewed witnesses in private and limited access to the testimonies to members who serve on three House committees: Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs. However, there are 48 Republicans on the committees. CNN's Manu Raju, Alex Rogers and Ted Barrett contributed to this report.

There are times when the best thing you can do for a game is to log off and exit out. This is our Wasteland Survival review. Wasteland Survival is a fairly basic game with intuitive and very simple controls. It features WASD movement, E interaction, and space bar for combat. Your intro is largely undemanding, starting you on your home map, which is helpfully po[CENSORED]ted with a few starting resources, a handful of zombies and some animals. Your base is partly constructed, with parts that need repairs or rebuilding, and some storage containers for dumping extras in. The graphics aren’t bad, but definitely not cutting edge by any means. The maps are small but straightforward and the animations are smooth. I was disappointed the character creation didn’t exist at all – you’re stuck with a skinny white boy with a growing in goatee vaguely reminiscent of a chocolate milk stain around his mouth – but I can understand that cutting models down is a pretty common way to keep production costs down. The first ten levels serve largely as your tutorial, giving you directions on what to kill, how to get around and some starting gear and goods. Every day you’ll receive a free lucky chest and log in rewards, to help you on your way. Like most mobile to PC ports, you can always head to the store and buy whatever you feel you need. That’s where the trouble starts. When you begin, you have the stamina and coins to manage along rather well, however, by tenth level, both of those become significantly more difficult to obtain. Stamina, the resource you use to run to maps regens at 1 per hour. Not a problem, except all of your quests, will be on other maps as well as most of your resources for progression. Those handfuls of resources on your base map? They do respawn, but slowly and only enough to get you a piece of starter gear, like a club or a pick for mining. The zombies on the base map don’t. It should also be noted, at this time, that your equipment breaks and breaks fast. So even if you get a great drop, you might have it for a dozen fights, if you’re lucky. Your quests are how you get coins without spending money, though in a daily login you might get a handful. Coins being used for additional talents, refreshing stamina to travel to maps and for resurrecting with gear are fairly important, but without the stamina and gear to finish questlines, your only option is purchasing them. The in-game store. Oh boy. When I first logged in I was greeted with a pop-up advertisement for a deep dive sale. If you’re not familiar, a deep dive sale is when something is advertised at a very high price and slashed down to a fraction of that. The first deep dive you’ll be greeted with boasts that it is a value of two hundred and ninety-nine dollars-it includes a pet and some resources. Yes, I didn’t miss a decimal, that’s almost three hundred dollars. Their sale promises that you can receive this for a fraction of the actual value, but only if you buy now. Generally, I’m ambivalent about microtrans, despite my gaming history. Yes, I prefer an upfront sub, but I don’t mind that devs try to get paid in microtrans for your free to play offerings, after all, we’ve all got bills to pay. I do mind, however, when the microtrans have been placed as a barrier to actually playing the game, making it nearly impossible to progress without spending. To me, that’s disingenuous to the entire free to play label. When you can’t progress without buying, it’s no longer free to play, and shouldn’t be labeled as such. I also have a general problem with the label pay to win, since it’s thrown around so liberally, but if any game qualifies, this would be it. With enough coin purchases, you can buy gear, stamina, talent points, companion pets, and pretty much everything you’d need to breeze through. This isn’t cosmetics and xp potions, it’s literally game progress you’re buying. Instead of free to play, if pay to win isn’t an attractive label for Joyloft Co., they should have relabelled it paid progression because when you log in, that’s exactly what you get. COMPARE TO: Last Day on Earth: Survival, Ark: Survival Evolved

I’ll never forget the screaming. We'd just locked down checkpoint C, a three-storey townhouse in a wartorn village, and the six of us had taken up positions guarding all windows and entry points, waiting for the counterattack. First a pregnant silence, then a racket of assault rifle bullets and panicked shouts. We were repelling them. The timer had almost expired. Then a squadmate threw a speculative incendiary grenade at a doorway, and the screaming started. The area was being contested, and the insurgent contesting it had just been set alight. The round ended with six of us watching in mute horror as he crawled, wailing, through the fire, into the hallway where he eventually expired. This unscripted moment from one of Insurgency Sandstorm's eight-player co-op matches against waves of AI forces really does speak of its qualities. Not just of the eerily convincing soundscapes it conjures, full of dialogue and terrifying reverberations, and not just of the inherent tension to its control point-based modes. It also demonstrates an ability to convey the ugliness and horror of modern military combat, without the need for overwrought scripted sequences as with Battlefield and Call of Duty. Not bad for a series that started life as a Half-Life 2 mod. Sandstorm is equally brilliant as a co-op or competitive multiplayer game, offering competent large-scale 16v16 fights with vehicles but really excelling at tighter encounters on chokepoint-heavy maps with fewer combatants. The exact nature of the conflict you're fighting and dying for is non-specific but the reference points span Black Hawk Down to Zero Dark Thirty via The Hurt Locker—in other words, a patchwork of post-millennium war in the Middle East. Among the men in bomb vests sprinting at you and the RPG fire, what stands out in particular is that no one's playing the hero. _I haven't played a multiplayer shooter as exciting as this for ages, and I'll be coaxing friends into its co-op mode for months to come. Instead, every player-controlled and AI soldier sounds terrified. They shout out when they spot an enemy, when they need to reload, or when an objective state has changed, but they never sound like they're relishing the fight like Call of Duty's psychopathic operatives do. They're bricking it, like any sensible person would do. I'd love to see the inner workings of Insurgency: Sandstorm's code so that I could understand how developers New World Interactive manage to trigger appropriate canned dialogue at just the right junctures. That said, they've probably got their hands full, what with this game releasing, so walking an imbecile through their complex systems maybe isn't the most sensible use of their time. Nevertheless, the game's unusually articulate soldiers have plenty of provocation to sound terrified in a given match, treated as they are to very few lulls in the action and bombarded by surprise attacks. Co-op consists of a series of checkpoint captures, in sequence, while AI attack each one in waves. Competitive modes, meanwhile, range from Hardpoint-like power struggles to traditional two or three point control scenarios. There's no attempt to reinvent the wheel that's turned at the centre of modern military online shooters, nor any great imperative to do so. Insurgency: Sandstorm just gets on with doing the fundamentals brilliantly. Weapon behaviour takes a bit of getting used to, mind you. There's no extra layer of visual or sonic feedback for successfully shooting an opponent, so you're sometimes at a loss as to whether your long-range shots connected or not. The active reload mechanic is also sure to catch the new player out at least a dozen times, but these are concessions to realism that Insurgency Sandstorm absolutely convinces you are worth making. Eventually the absence of hit confirmations becomes something to actively enjoy, just like those moments you remember to lean around a corner and hit your mark. Here, more than anywhere except arguably ArmA, you can take tremendous pride in playing like a professional soldier and forgetting about K:D ratios. If nits must be picked, it's the vehicles that stick out for their rough and ready implementation. I've had some great moments in the gunner seat of a converted pickup, true, but the vehicle handling itself and the extent to which map design actually accommodates them just isn't quite there. There's the lightest touch of jankiness reminding you this isn't a triple-A shooter, but it's only with vehicles that you feel the experience actually suffers for it. Even with those creases, I haven't played a multiplayer shooter as exciting as this for ages, and I'll be coaxing friends into its co-op mode for months to come. I'll also try—and occasionally fail—to describe just how good it sounds from moment to moment to anyone who'll listen. See you at checkpoint C. Update: This review has been updated to reflect the maximum co-op player count of eight, and that bullets do not self-replenish.

A lot of games try to emulate suppression, to approximate what it’s like to be fired upon, but Rising Storm 2: Vietnam does it more effectively than any of them. It's not through fidelity—the particle effects are unimpressive—or even the heavily applied post-processing that blurs your vision. The panic is kicked up by the contradiction of being utterly fragile and needing to throw your body at the enemy anyway. Stay still and lose, move and die. Rising Storm 2 forces us into chaos with enough authenticity to let us be consumed by it more often than not. The latest from Tripwire and Antimatter Games is a lateral move: the same 64-player, tactics heavy battles of the World War II-based Red Orchestra series, now in Vietnam, with assault rifles and helicopters and tunnels. Where the Battlefield games provide military playgrounds with activities for everyone, Rising Storm 2 generates military anarchy that must be coaxed toward victory by able commanders and squad leaders. On an individual level, it’s about performing unlikely feats of marksmanship despite a hundred sounds and two million jungle pixels distracting you from the little clump of color that counts: a helmet in the distance, just peeking over a rock. Rising Storm 2’s maps are more naturalistic than Battlefield maps. Cover is scattered about in the form of concrete half-walls, crumbling buildings, crawl spaces, jungle foliage and the crispy remains of tanks. The angles are more erratic, and the frontline less fixed. I love the moments where I've gotten turned around, and accidentally found myself behind the enemy's advance. It’s a hunt for clarity amid chaos—knowing where to aim is the first step in aiming. As a result, Rising Storm 2 isn’t as routine as Battlefield 1, where I know that on Fao Fortress, for instance, capturing the Ottoman stronghold is a useless grind for prime sniping spots, and it’s nearly always better to hold Delta and use it to stage attacks on the lowground. Rising Storm 2’s new Supremacy mode, which is similar to Battlefield’s Conquest mode in that each team can capture any point on the map at any time, isn’t so obvious. Without a communicative commander (one player on each team who monitors the map, calls in spotting planes, and initiates artillery and napalm strikes and other wide area attacks), a loss is almost guaranteed, because if everyone is doing their own thing they’re likely to accomplish nothing. *-Positioning is everything. _One well-positioned soldier can pin an entire squad in place. Replacing the bolt-action rifles of the series’ World War 2 games is the far deadlier technology of the '60s: the AK-47, the M16A1, the M14. Having 64 automatic or semi-automatic weapons on the field makes any dash out of cover near futile without covering fire, and means one well-positioned soldier can pin an entire squad in place. No longer can players dance around each other, swinging the long barrels of Springfields and Karabiner 98ks, firing, missing, and firing again as if playing Unreal Tournament instagib. Close-quarters meetings are resolved near-instantly as both players spray each other down with bullets. I miss that test of reflexive, single-shot marksmanship, though in its place Rising Storm 2 increases the importance of positioning, smoke grenades, awareness, and speed, demanding that you spot enemies rapidly and decide to shoot with no hesitation. Playing a round of Territories, the series’ core mode in which one team defends a series of strongholds while the other attempts to capture each of them in sequence, is reminiscent of the 2014 Tom Cruise flick Edge of Tomorrow. On my first life I was shot by a sniper I never saw, and won’t see for three more lives. Next my whole squad was hit by a grenadier. A few more lives later, I’ve killed the sniper, dodged the grenadier, and have now run head first into the long, flicking tongue of a flamethrower. The most exciting moments of Rising Storm 2 are when you wiggle your way into a blind spot, and I prefer playing defense for this reason. Individual power is muted on the attack, where simply getting your body on the point is the most important task, but as a defender there’s more time to seek out a dominant position. When I load into the game fast enough to claim one of the limited specialty classes, I prefer machinegunner. The most fun I have is when battlefield intelligence and my own intuition align to give me clear view of an enemy lane, where I can singlehandedly suppress an assault with bursts of fire and save a flank while I reroute my team to come help. I love those brief acts of individual heroism, though they are a small part of the team-focused roleplay. The bulk of any match is going to be spent laying down suppressive fire, calling out enemy locations, and edging into good positions. Communication is vital. Recently, I enjoyed having a little chat with a friendly sniper who was concerned my machinegun fire would draw attention to him, and of course, I relocated as a result. What Red Orchestra and Rising Storm remain great at is getting players to approach battles in physical terms. Excepting the cries of “get on the point,” we don’t talk much about gun balance or game systems, but of hillsides and LZs and flanks. *-Aim and fire. Tripwire’s Killing Floor 2 is all about close-range marksmanship: dual wielding Desert Eagles, each pointed inward, and intuiting the path from each barrel to the heads of mutants. As in the Rising Storm series, there's no reticle—just your sights. In Battlefield, meanwhile, guns lob glowing paintballs, and a headshot from any distance is like hitting a three-pointer, using your mental TI graphing calculator to draw a parabola that intersects with your target. In contrast to these games, Rising Storm 2 ups the bullet velocity and obscures your vision with bulky sights, muzzle flashes and smoke. I’m less focused on the physics of my projectiles—point at head, hit head—and more concerned with how quickly and accurately I can slide my mouse into position and keep it on a moving target, even when I can't see the target and have to guess their velocity. The guns are plain and unembellished, though each is distinct in its firing behavior. The M16A1 can be tapped for a single shot with little recoil, while holding down the trigger traces a vertical line that sometimes zig-zags or tends toward the right or left. The SKS-45 Carbine fires single shots with a big kick, the barrel making a roughly circular motion as it tilts upwards on multiple shots. The M3A1 Grease Gun is a bulky metal tube that is pinpoint accurate on close-range single shots, but nearly rams into your nose with each discharge, obscuring your peripheral vision and giving you a wider view through the rear sight. My favored LMGs are best tapped gently, unless you want to shoot at birds. There isn’t a gun that I don’t like using, and I’m never disappointed to be stuck as a grunt if I don't snag a special class fast enough. AK-47s are powerful, unwieldy bastards that require me to flick my mouse downward harder than I usually expect to keep them on target—not my favorite weapon, but a fun challenge anyhow. Details beyond the firing animations themselves also bring character to each encounter: the sway when I’m catching my breath from a long run; the way strafing left causes my arms to briefly shift right when I’m out of sights, pointing the barrel off center; the big puffs of dirt that indicate the effect of my suppressive fire. I love lighting up a rock I think someone might be behind, throwing debris everywhere, and then waiting a beat, as if I’m reloading, for a head to pop out of one of the sides. *-AK vs M16. _I want the sides to play differently, but in this case, one is simply more enjoyable than the other. As in previous Red Orchestra series games, the teams are asymmetrical, pitting armies with different equipment and different tactics against each other. The rivalry between the AK-47 and M16 is probably the most famous in history, and they absolutely fire differently in Rising Storm 2. The M16’s design and smaller caliber gives it less recoil, for instance, while the AK is more lethal. But this distinction means less than the distinction between bolt-action and semi-auto rifles we saw in Rising Storm. To play up the asymmetry further, Rising Storm 2 somewhat unsuccessfully applies it to how players spawn. American forces can spawn on their squad leaders, and in Supremacy mode—the one I mentioned is like Battlefield—can also spawn in helicopters which must be landed safely by player pilots to ferry troops around the map. The Vietnamese forces are more limited: they can’t spawn on their squad leaders, but on ‘squad tunnels’ dug by their leaders, which can be spotted and destroyed by Americans. It is more fun to spawn on my squad leader than it is to pop out of a tunnel at some secluded corner of the map, and it adds the subgoal of protecting my leader at all costs. Americans also get another goal: find and destroy squad tunnels, or find them and take up a defensive position near them to suppress them. While in theory tunnels allow the People's Army to appear anywhere on the map in numbers, they often become obsolete. If my leader dropped a tunnel near Alpha and I need to be attacking Delta, it’s no good to me. I want the sides to play differently, but in this case, one is simply more enjoyable than the other. There are also tunnels built into the maps—not squad tunnels, but actual underground tunnels players can move through—which feature Rising Storm 2’s oddest attempt at asymmetry. Americans can’t use their primary weapons in certain tunnels. They’re marked with a warning, and entering automatically switches you to your sidearm. It doesn’t make sense, especially for pointmen who carry SMGs for the purpose of being agile, and applies a hard rule rather than letting asymmetry manifest through the available weapons and tools, such as the People’s Army’s traps versus American flamethrowers. And even with all the ways to enter the battle, and all the tunnels to crouch-walk through, Supremacy can be a slog for either side. A minute of running might end with a sniper shot, and it’s back to waiting at the spawn screen. Or I might participate in the capture of a point, set up my tripod to defend, and a minute later find that no one is coming to take it from me. Supremacy is won by earning points from held bases, which must be connected to your home base by other occupied territories. That’s a clever twist on the Battlefield formula and changes the purpose of backcapping (you can’t gain points from an isolated capture, but you can deny them), but the consequence hasn’t been excitement and tension. Rather than pushing up a football field and scoring the winning touchdown with seconds to go, as in Territories, I often find myself capturing mostly-empty points, or chasing off single intruders, or making futile attempt after futile attempt to rush up a contested hill with my squad. *-A proper PC game. I've had fun rounds of Supremacy, but I avoid it in favor of Territories. Fortunately, Tripwire and Antimatter are among the few left making proper PC multiplayer games. You join matches through a server browser, not a matchmaking system. Servers have their own cultures, sometimes with custom game rules and Discord invites in their welcome text. There are already player-made maps circulating in a few servers, and they auto-download when you join. If you want a Territories-only server, you can find it. I’ve never had trouble finding a full or near-full server running the mode I want. The trick is finding a pleasant community which follows through on bans. I’ve never been griefed by a teammate, but one or two assholes on voice chat can put me off communicating with my team entirely—which is the most important thing to do in Rising Storm 2. The server I’ve most enjoyed is, unlikely as it sounds, the Xtremeidiots.com server, which declares “NO racist remarks” and “NO personal attacks” upon joining. So far, that’s been true. _There are no standout details, and no lighting effects that put much tactical importance on shadow and sunlight. Though it won’t come as a surprise for players of the previous games, it’s worth running down the somewhat lackluster technical properties of Rising Storm 2. The whole of it is impressive—64 players dodging artillery shells and scattering giant maps with bullets—but movement can be finicky, whether I’m jamming space to vault over a barrier I know I can vault over, or struggling to position my tripod while prone without having my character leap into a crouch. The thickness of the foliage is impressive, and RS2 runs well for me, but the lighting and textures create a flatness that doesn’t say, ‘it’s hot, it’s humid, the air is heavy and dusty and soaked with fuel.’ There are no standout details, and no lighting effects that put much tactical importance on shadow and sunlight. The tech shows its age especially in the ugly dirt textures, the tiling of which is easily noticeable as patterns repeat into the distance. While Antimatter Games doesn’t take sides in the war, portraying the armies with a fascination for the equipment more than the people, the period music and generic chatter about Charlies suggests war movie rather than reenactment, and the small towers and stilt houses feel like props rather than abandoned homes. It is authentic only to a point. But between the weapon design and the laborious helicopter flying, Rising Storm 2 represents the most thoroughly constructed multiplayer rendition of the war I’ve played. And like its predecessors, RS2 is still one of the rare shooters that emphasizes fragility over power. It puts more destructive capability in each player’s hands than the series ever has—good communication and good reflexes can make a single AK-47 an absolute monster—but it can also smack your screen to blackness the second you step out of cover. It portrays how fragile individuals can be directed at large scales to produce different outcomes, winning or losing through the accumulation of small victories among countless losses.

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A powerful daughter figure needs saving from an entourage of black-draped specter horsemen. Dangerous supernatural powers are at risk of falling into their malevolent hands, and I’m meant to stop that catastrophe. There’s an overwhelming sense of urgency, but there I am, basically tying off sacks for peasants. It happened like this: early in The Witcher 3 I was tasked with finding a witch. The witch lived in a nearby waterside cottage and was reported to have details on the whereabouts of aforementioned daughter figure. I was determined to speak to her immediately. My cause was urgent, after all. I’m Geralt of Rivia, scorned Witcher, master swordsman, and I have no time for nonsense. On my way to the witch I stumbled upon a typically destitute Velen village. I didn’t care about the village at all, and I wasn’t drawn to its armories or tradesmen. But something—maybe the sun setting so amber on the horizon, or the children dashing frantically through the muddy streets—made me stop. I was curious. It probably goes without saying, but if you’re in a hurry, never get off your horse enroute in an open world RPG. This is especially true for The Witcher 3. Several hours later, once I’d cleared out some monsters for a desperate peasant in her far-off stable, and made preliminary moves to slay a beast haunting the town, I forced myself to leave. Turns out the witch was only 50 metres North all along. I didn’t really want to leave, though. It’s not that I liked the town, and it’s not that I savoured the fantasy of being a hero to its people. It’s certainly not because I wanted to tick off this town’s quests (there are so many quests, there’s no point being thorough). I was just curious about the villagers’ circumstances. I’d gotten to know the town, but I didn’t understand it. How did they get so poor and wretched? Am I complicit, thanks to my (reluctant) connection with the Nilfgaardians? Is it the climate? Or is it just the way they’ve always lived? Straight up, this is the most remarkable thing about The Witcher 3. Its writing isn’t perfect—it still bears some of the familiar trappings of being a video game—but it almost always rewards curiosity, big time. The rewards for wondering are invariably bleak, but The Witcher 3 achieves something very few video games do: when I’m engaged in a peripheral mini-narrative I’m not necessarily thinking about its game aspects. I’m not thinking about the XP rewarded, or the money I’ll get, or the allegiances I’ll forge, or the buffs I’ll unlock. I’m not grinding. I just really want to know, and understand, what’s going on. Geralt’s cause may seem urgent, but the worst way to play The Witcher 3 is quickly. In this game, distractions overwhelm you. For mine, the game’s distractions are where its most engaging stories are found. *-Beyond the Villages. Geralt is the hero. He’s a gruff, powerful, chiselled, archetypal male video game protagonist. Early on, The Witcher 3 has him exploring the Northern Realms, recently taken over by the warmongering Nilfgaardian Empire, for women he’s either a) in love with or b) eager to protect. He kills monsters, beasts and bandits along the way. He’s recalcitrant in the face of royal authority. He lets his beard grow. He’s tough. I didn’t like Geralt before I started playing The Witcher games. I’d see his face on marketing material and smirk: he was just another by-the-numbers video game power fantasy. It’s not that this fantasy is thoroughly objectionable to me, but it definitely seemed as if Geralt of Rivia was a boring video game tough guy. A cliche. The truth is, he’s only the video game tough guy cliche you make him. Geralt has his complexities, but he inherits them from you. He’s a malleable character, and I feel more connected to him than I do the thoroughly customised RPG characters in Skyrim. His wit, his ingrained prejudices and allegiances, are just subtle enough that they don’t impinge on my ultimate control of who he is. Before I get to the finer details, here are the cliffnotes: Geralt is tasked with finding the daughter of Emhyr var Emreis, Nilfgaard’s emperor. The Nilfgaardians have taken, by force, most of the regions you’ll visit in The Witcher 3. It’s not immediately obvious whether they’re a force for good or bad (especially if you’ve never played a Witcher game before), but one thing is certain: nothing is going well. The people in The Northern Realms are miserable. There’s the weak and the strong, and no grey area in between. Poverty is everywhere: alcoholism, boredom, listlessness. Nothing is going to be OK, but evidence suggests it was never OK to begin with, Nilfgaardians or not. Matters are complicated by the fact that said Nilfgaardian leader’s daughter, Ciri, is someone dear to Geralt, and that a dark force–the Wild Hunt–is pursuing her. The official mission only lends a wider context to a more personal endeavour on Geralt’s part, as this was a woman he’d trained from a young age, and accepted as a daughter. In true sprawling RPG fashion, that’s not all that The WItcher 3 is about: finding Ciri isn’t the crux of the game’s narrative. Other power struggles come into play later on, and then some other stuff happens, and then… the whole world is at stake and you’re the one to save it. It’s a fantasy RPG, after all, and while the ending is typically grandiose and heartstopping, the main thread would feel a bit rote without its minor story arcs. You won’t care so much that the world is at stake unless you’ve made the effort to learn a bit about it via sidequests. And while newcomers won’t feel punished for skipping the first two games, they’ll miss the rewarding familiarity of old characters and references. To accommodate new players, dialogue options are sprinkled with opportunities to gain background information on plotlines involving historical events. You’ll usually have a handful of main quests in your log, as well as potentially dozens of secondary ones, as well as Witcher contracts (fully fledged, investigation-led monster-slaying jaunts), and each is complemented with cutscenes. Certain secondary quests appear to affect the main narrative proper, and CD Projekt RED has done an admirable job blurring the lines between primary and secondary. Everything in The Witcher 3 feels big: the dungeons are huge and sprawling, the decisions immeasurably consequential, the moral responsibility through the roof. Truth of the matter is that the best stories you’ll take away from The Witcher 3 are peripheral to the main narrative. This is for two reasons: while Geralt is a character that you can’t aesthetically customise to any satisfying degree (you can’t deck him out in mage gowns), you can really make him yours thanks to a nuanced and consequential dialogue system. The second reason is more obvious: the Northern Realms is among the most lifelike, sadly beautiful and strange fantasy worlds ever committed to code, and you’ll want to pick it apart. You play a dual role as Geralt: steely, masculine protagonist on the one hand, and foolhardy, ignorant tourist on the other. *-The White Wolf. As a Witcher, Geralt is armed with two swords and five magic abilities called Signs in addition to bombs, crossbows and other, more spoilery strategies. Combat in The Witcher 3 is simple: slash away at your foes, apply effects and buffs where necessary, roll or block to evade, and sprinkle in sign abilities where needed. These signs include a fiery blast, a telekinetic stun, an offensive shield, a mind control ability, and a static magic trap. While simple to learn, the combat system punishes mindless hacking and slashing against anything but low-level wolves and dogs. Geralt’s cumbersome gait, and your inability to break his animations, means close attention needs to be paid to most encounters. Like the Souls series, a defensive approach is important until you’ve sussed out the weaknesses of your opponent. Some will be resistant to your fire sign, so you may be better off equipping a protective shield, and so on. Overall, it’s satisfying to exercise caution and dexterity, especially at higher difficulty settings where you can’t just meditate to replenish Geralt’s health bar. During my first playthrough I felt that levelling Geralt was excruciatingly slow, but it happens at a fast clip if you know what you’re doing, and skill points can be acquired throughout the world without grinding. There are four main categories to sink levels into, and three have five deeper categories of their own. The problem, early on in the game, is knowing what to prioritise—especially since trees need to be equipped in one of a series of growing slots. I specialised in swordplay and Igni in the early hours (fast attacks and Geralt’s fire ability), but it’s possible to go more defensive. For example, levelling your mind control ability will influence dialogue options against non-aggressive characters. The biggest bone of contention is going to be the alchemy and crafting systems, which are incredibly detailed in The Witcher 3. Geralt finds alchemy blueprints regularly, but happening across the ingredients required to create them is slow unless you know where to look (and you won’t). Thing is, there are hundreds of ingredients, and The Northern Realms are huge. Once you’ve found the ingredients you’ll never need to acquire them again, but when it comes to upgrading armor and weapons it’s important to have a game plan, and it’s unwise to concentrate on improving the lowly weapons you’ll find early game, which are colour coded according to their power. While there’s nothing wrong with complex crafting systems, it’s not improved by The Witcher 3’s dense and sometimes tedious user interface. There’s evidence of console-centric design in the radial menus and keybinds (number buttons can switch between signs but won’t immediately cast them as in Witcher 2), but the inventory and character menus are clearly designed with PC in mind. That said, a few more categories would help: it’s only a matter of hours before your Usable Items and Ingredients tabs are swollen to the brim, with no rhyme or reason as to how items are sorted. Overall, the PC version still feels the best. The PC advantage is obvious when it comes to combat, which benefits from a mouse and keyboard. Due to Geralt’s syrupy movements the ability to more rapidly adjust the camera with the mouse is a saving grace, especially when the game’s lock-on system leaves a lot to be desired. It definitely locks on, but when it comes to scrolling through enemies on the battlefield it’s less than ideal. It’ll usually take a left-to-right approach, rather than a back-to-front approach, which doesn’t work well when you’ve got more than three enemies baying for your blood, and one right up in your face. *-Lay of the Land. There are two main regions in The Witcher 3: the aforementioned Velen and The Skellige Isles. There are a few smaller areas, but it’s in these main regions that the bulk of The Witcher 3 plays out. They’re big, of course, but that’s not what matters. The Northern Realms are the most vibrant video game locations I’ve ever seen: less cartoony and more detailed than Dragon Age: Inquisition, and more naturalistic—less uncanny, less janky—than Skyrim. But that’s not hugely important either. What’s important is that when all of the Witcher 3’s environmental elements work in concert—the weather you can forecast by looking at the sky, the foliage that rustles and bends in the breeze—it’s hard not to feel something. When the sun sets it appears to melt in a sea of apocalyptic orange, and you know what? It’s a beautiful, sad orange. The Northern Realms are engaging and lifelike, sure, but they convey melancholy unlike any other open world I’ve encountered. That melancholy extends to the people and situations Geralt encounters too. Witchers are scorned for being mutants and sub-humans, and they’re reputed to not feel anything. The thing is that I, the player, couldn’t help being affected, and while many of the dialogue decisions I made appeared to be morally-inclined, it was sometimes hard to make decisions along those lines without feeling like I’d done something wrong. This is a dark fantasy. It’s dark and horrible and oppressive. This can be alarming. There are some obscenely vicious characters in The Witcher 3 that you’re allowed to feel sympathy for. You might not, but the option is there, and that’s perilous territory for a video game. CD Projekt RED has approached this openness with as much sensitivity as possible, but in the end, it’s hard not to cringe in dismay when you’re given the option to sympathise with a domestically violent character. There are other minor issues with CD Projekt RED’s world-building. There are few fetch quests as such, but there are several occasions where you’ll go to talk to one character, who will advise you to go talk to another character, who will advise you to go seek out four other characters, and so on. In a 100+ hour game these moments barely make a dent, but they’re a clumsy way to present story in a narrative-driven RPG. As incentive to explore the world they don’t work, because there’s ample reason to explore anyway. Then there’s the investigation scenarios, where Geralt uses his Witcher sense to detect telltale signs in the environment. There’s little thought needed on the player’s part, as simply finding the objects will help Geralt deduce his next move. This works especially well in Geralt’s monster contract quests, but as part of grander narratives they could benefit from a little more depth. I’d have liked to be forced to use my brain a bit more. Meanwhile, The Witcher 3 doesn’t bring much that’s bracingly new to the modern RPG. It’s a series of refinements: the questing and attention to detail is better than Skyrim, the pervasive sense of dread is thicker than Fallout 3 and the decisions more impactful than Mass Effect 2. It relies on familiar gameplay beats to tell a story, but shows no evidence of wanting to experiment on a grander scale. I was never surprised by the game’s systems as much as I was intrigued by its setting. *-Beneath the Skin. Comparing notes with my PC Gamer colleagues, the game ran well on a variety of configurations. Using an Intel i5-2500k processor and an Nvidia GTX 980 at 2560x1440, we were able to run everything on Ultra, barring HairWorks and Foliage Visibility Range, which we ran at High. The game operated comfortably at around 50 fps in 1440p, though with HairWorks on and Foliage set to Ultra, it dipped to 25-35 fps. Meanwhile, using an i7-5960x and Nvidia Titan X, we had no problem maintaining a consistent 60 fps at 1080p. Framerates tended to be more stable compared to another recent heavyhitter, GTA 5. Overall, on a two-year-old system 60 fps should be manageable with some settings adjustments, and while the game really sings at high-to-ultra settings in 1080p, the differences between those settings tend to be subtle. On a high-end laptop I only had framerate issues in specific locations around Velen, where unusually thick foliage and water effects culminated in drops to around the 45 fps mark. Compared to the PS4’s wavering 30 fps and frequent, pre-launch slow downs, it’s a huge improvement. The Witcher 2 still has a reputation for pushing PC graphics to the limit, and while graphics in The Witcher 3 are undoubtedly impressive, it’s not the Crysis many expected it to be. The fidelity matters less here than the scale. As storms approach, and gales rustle and bend tree branches, and as the deers run for cover, it’s hard to dispute this is a gorgeous game. The lighting and weather effects are breathtaking. It’s difficult to resist stopping to stare into the distance. Still, on a granular scale it’s unlikely to endure as the graphical showpiece its predecessor was. You don’t have to look far to find low-quality textures. Foliage is thick and abundant, but leaves are flat 2D textures bisecting to create the illusion of 3D. Clothing still looks thick and lived-in, but not dramatically better than Witcher 2. Facial animations and non-mocapped character animations don’t push any new boundaries and occasionally look awkward or stiff. Skin pores and facial expressions are fine, but even mocapped faces lag behind the most impressive contemporary facial animation. These aren’t criticisms so much as observations that The Witcher 3 isn’t the great leap forward some might have hoped. Designing open worlds like this doesn’t come without compromises. It’s disappointing that it doesn’t live up to the potential showcased in the first trailers, but we can only enjoy what’s in front of us for what it is. It’s the storytelling and art direction that impresses more than the raw details, and these are the reasons The Witcher 3 consumed me. I felt more engaged with the Northern Realms than I ever did Skyrim, and even as the narrative advanced and tension mounted—and even when I felt I knew the lay of the land pretty well—I was still compelled to take it slowly and learn. For a game boasting all of the political treachery and turmoil common in the genre, The Witcher 3 succeeds because it puts people first. More compelling than Geralt’s lofty, heroic journey are the stories about the humdrum, circumstantial horrors of the helpless as they watch their world crumble. I’m looking forward to returning to The Northern Realms and visiting all of its villages and ruins. That’s where the heart of The Witcher 3 lies: not in its hero, but in the complicated world it brings to life.

Over the years we have seen a lot of sidescrollers that put a focus on being a successful and joyful shooter, but many of these games are somewhat lackluster. It’s hard to think of one actual shooter in a sidescrolling style that was very fun to enjoy for long periods of time. Perhaps I am an old fart by now, but the one I enjoyed the most was Soldat, a game that first came out back in 2002. Cobalt WASD is a game that tries to make the concept somewhat similar to shooters we know today, with a bomb defusal style of focus to make the game both very fun and tactical to give it a little competitive edge over the others. When you think about most shooters, only some have actually tried to bring in some actual sense of strategy such as bringing the right gun for the right time style of play. Only Counter Strike has actually put in a system that makes the player think twice on how to run his equipment and get the most out of his loadout when going against his opponent. Most other games you simply take the gun that you enjoy the most, and there aren’t any repercussions when dying or losing the round. Cobalt WASD tries to tackle this idea as well, and thus on every start of the round the player is given the option to tweak his loadout and to buy upgrades like weapons, armor, and abilities to utilize in the battle. If you survive, everything from that loadout is kept and taken with you to the next round. When you die, however, you lose everything including all the money you spent on it, and have to ‘build’ your character from the ground up. Cobalt WASD is a sidescroller, but that doesn’t mean the game isn’t as exciting as any other shooter. The player moves at a relatively fast speed, combined with faster rolling and jumping to make the game vertically more pleasing. The player can also get abilities like a grappling hook or even a speed boost to keep the player on their toes at all times. Kitting out your character also makes you a lot harder to hit, be it because of your speed, stealth, or even a equippable shield to surprise your enemies with. The weapons also greatly affect gameplay, since each weapon, be it either a gun orn melee weapon like a spear, excels in different scenarios. Every encounter feels unique on its own, but is so fast paced that you can barely stop to think about it. By the end of the round you are in awe wondering how you are still alive or what went wrong in that specific round. Unfortunately the game doesn’t have a whole lot of depth and content to it. The concept of the game is very simple, and the main focus of Cobalt WASD is set on making it just a well shaped and fun all around shooter with the gameplay as its key focus for players to stick around. While I am a big fan of its style and the fast rounds this game has to offer, there is only one reason why I do not dedicate a lot of time to this game. After an hour of playing, the game becomes really stale and you simply start craving something else. Every match you play feels somewhat the same. Despite each fight being unique in its own way, by the end of a session you do feel like you want to play more because the game is simply so fun but small. I would love to see more game modes to keep the game a lot more interesting, be it either in a capture the flag style mode, or even in a mode where you have to survive against zombies or the like. Perhaps even just bigger maps, with bigger player numbers on each side to make the game feel like it isn’t so small and simple. There aren’t a ton of players playing the game, and the community for the game simply hasn’t taken off. With the game is published by Mojang, I am sure enough players will eventually flock to the game if the required amount of advertising is given, but the game still feels like it needs more to stay relevant and I am very curious to what the future will bring. In its current state the game is a very simple search and destroy game that I thoroughly enjoy playing, but it does feel like it is somewhat of a mini game. While it is fun to play with friends or against complete strangers, and even the computer. It does wear you out over time and make you crave for some more, and I really hope they will tackle this problem so that players have more of a reason to stick around. The concept of Cobalt WASD is actually something great. Over the years we have seen many side scrolling games like this game, but only a few of them were actually still entertaining in the long run. I am still undecided on how Cobalt WASD will actually succeed over time. As of right now it feels like a small indie game that you just launch to occasionally play a game or two. It doesn’t really give you the depth to keep you sticking around. I would love to see some form of competitiveness thrown into the game, because who doesn’t like any sense of achievement climbing through the ranks, slowly getting ranked up with and against players of your own level? It might still be too soon to think about features like these, especially with its current po[CENSORED]rity. Cobalt WASD is on the right track to being a very fun shooter that is definitely different from the stereotype shooter of what the industry has to offer today, but it still has to find its niche, its own style to keep the lights on.

welcome.

Among VR gaming enthusiasts, Raw Data is seen as a true innovator. The game first released into Early Access back in the early days of the technology and has been at the forefront of various game mechanic and tech changes. Now, over a year later, the game is launching as a full and finished title. It still has all of its interesting and fresh ideas baked in, though VR gaming has been changing rapidly at the same time. The finished product is a fantastic summary of VR gaming’s first year of releases, and offers a more refined and streamlined gaming experience than almost any other VR game. Raw Data is one of those rare VR releases that features a story and campaign. Don’t get your hopes too high though, the devs at Survios put effort into this world, but the story you’ll experience in the game’s single player mode won’t be all that intricate. It involves the main character infiltrating Eden Corp., a massive interplanetary corporation that is seemingly killing its own employees and random civilians for some nefarious purpose. Across ten missions the player will fight off waves of robot enemies as they extract the “raw data” hidden within Eden Corp’s mainframe. The main pieces of story come from interactions with Adam, a somewhat helpful AI that has been hijacked to serve the rebels’ needs. While the story won’t get too deep, the dialogue is actually quite well written, offering humor and fun within the dystopian environment presented in Raw Data. What is impressive with the story, outside the barebones plot, is that Survios seems to have crafted an entire universe for this game. They’ve already released some comics and other media, and it’s clear that a lot of thought, planning, and work went into crafting the world of Raw Data. Hopefully the team can continue expanding on this in the future, as it’s the type of scifi universe that many gamers enjoy. *-Raw Data isn’t VR’s killer app, but it’s about as close as we’ve gotten so far. But enough about the story; VR games live and die by their gameplay. Here is where Raw Data truly sings, as the game works well to sum up the first year and a half of VR gaming. Raw Data was responsible for a lot of VR innovations, especially around movement and shooting mechanics, and seeing them come to their full fruition is great. This does mean that there’s not much here that feels fresh and new though, if you’ve been playing the Early Access version, or the other VR shooters out there. This is a game that does them all exceptionally well though. Yes, this is still a wave shooter, which has become the main staple of the VR space, but it’s a really good one. Each level puts players into new and different environments. They can move about them as they wish, either using teleportation or the Vive touchpads (not sure how it works on the other VR platforms). The teleportation works so well and offers one thing that most others don’t. Players don’t just disappear and reappear where they wish, instead they move quickly and see the travel the whole time. This helps nausea, confusion, and creates more seamless and realistic gameplay. Adding onto the standard wave shooting gameplay is a bit of tower defense. Players can place turrets at key junctions, spending in-game currency to deploy them. These help section off the battlefield so the player can focus better, but they can be destroyed, and will only offer a brief respite. Special moves also mix things up, delivering powerful blows, or long range attacks. The bullet time move is a personal favorite, but each gives the player choices for when things get hectic. Raw Data’s shooting is simply blissful. With four different weapons to choose from, each has its benefits and detractions. The dual handguns will likely be most players favorites, and they simply make you feel like an action star. Popping shots off into robot enemies has never felt this good. The shotgun is another favorite. Its main draw is that you can use both hands for aiming and pumping new shells, or just use one and reload with a flip. The bow is a VR necessity and Raw Data’s is one of the best. The tracking shot, which will draw future arrows to the target, is an especially nice touch. And for the experts, the dual swords will make you feel like a ninja (or Jedi), but will require you to get up close and personal. Action games are best when they make you feel like a badass, and Raw Data does this from start to finish. The only times that it doesn’t are when the game hiccups in some way. For example, when finishing up the first mission I experienced a bug where the final enemies didn’t spawn properly, causing me to stand there and wait for them to show up. Another instance had a similar break in the action, as the wave wouldn’t complete. These are rare though, and will hopefully be patched up once the game is out in the wild. On top of the campaign, Raw Data offers some multiplayer options to enjoy. Unfortunately, with the low player count of a VR title that’s in Early Access, trying these out is rather difficult. When I was able to though it seemed like a nice add-on to the campaign, allowing some variety when you get tired of going for a new high score. Still, if multiplayer is your focus then you’ll likely want to look elsewhere, as it’s not the main selling point for this game. *-The Verdict. Raw Data is like the final solid release of VR gaming’s first wave, and the beginning of the second. It’s gorgeous and features a large, expansive world, but it does still offer the same wave based shooter gameplay that has dominated the VR space. It does it much better than most of its competitors though, and the added touches of turrets, multiple weapons, and special abilities really bring it to a new level. Combined with fantastic movement mechanics that amp up the action, Raw Data is a must play for VR enthusiasts. This isn’t VR’s killer app, but it’s about as close as we’ve gotten so far. - This article was updated on:March 8th, 2018.

Name Game: Stellaris Price: $39.99 - $9.99 The Discount Rate: -75% Link Store: Click Offer Ends Up After : 25/10/2019

"They have no idea I'm here," says GamesRadar's Lucas Sullivan as he sneaks up behind two enemy gods in my lane. I'm casually killing minions in front of my tower in Conquest mode, Smite's take on the 5v5 Multiplayer Online Battle Arena codified by Dota and League of Legends. On a strategic level, Smite plays almost identically to League, but it tucks the camera in close behind the back of my character—a god pulled from the pages of Greek or Hindu or Egyptian mythology—and feels more like a third-person action game as I cast magical abilities with the keyboard and sling attacks with the left mouse button. "They have no idea I'm here," Lucas repeats, giddy, as he moves into attack range behind our opponents, kills one with a flurry of special abilities, and is on top of the next before I can even move in to help. Two free kills. An easy gank, in MOBA terms. They never saw Lucas coming because they never turned around. And if you never turn around in Smite, you're probably going to die. By taking away the lifesaving peripheral vision of a top-down camera, Smite transforms the MOBA into a game of close-range kills, clutch dodges and precision skillshots. In an overcrowded market full of overly similar games, Smite distinguishes itself from other MOBAs not with what it adds to the formula, but with what it strips away. *-Same MOBA, new angle. I spent somewhere north of 1000 hours playing League of Legends before giving it up. I relapsed a couple times like any good addict, but I've been clean for the better part of a year now. Smite manages to scratch the same competitive itch as League while simultaneously feeling like a very different game. I'm getting that tug of addiction again without the familiar feeling that I've done it all a thousand times before. That said, Smite does slavishly adhere to the MOBA template: Two teams of five players face off on a map built with three lanes, separated by an intertwining "jungle" filled with agnostic AI enemies that grant XP and buffs to speed, magic, or damage. Minions march inexorably down each lane. Players kill them to earn gold, buy items, and level up. Teams begin to group up and fight together, relying on characters of different roles to perform specific functions. Tanks like Hades and Athena stun and taunt the enemy team. Carries like Neith and Anhur pump out consistent damage. Assassins like Loki and Bakasura lunge in to get kills. The team that wins fights pushes up the lanes, destroys towers, and eventually takes down the enemy Titan for the win. A quick match will be over in 25 minutes. A long one will drag on for an hour. Smite's matches trend towards the shorter end of that spectrum, which I find welcome in a MOBA: they're long enough to invest in but short enough to avoid being exhausting. Smite's third-person camera sends ripples of change through the MOBA infrastructure. Most attacks in the game are "skillshots," meaning they have to be judged, aimed, and timed for range and speed. Judging distance in three dimensions is far harder than it is with a top-down camera. In League of Legends, many champions can land basic attacks and devastating abilities with a simple click. They can't miss. In Smite, almost everything can miss. In a match I played as Vulcan, the Roman Smith of the Gods, I had Egyptian goddess Neith dead to rights. She was down to a sliver of health when I launched my Ultimate ability, a heavily damaging rocket that drops an AOE damage circle as wide as a lane. There was no way she could flee the circle in time. But at the last second, she used Back Flip—not to jump out of the circle, but to be up in the air when the missiles landed. She got away. Aiming and landing attacks is instantly challenging and gratifying. Each attack landed, whether it's Egyptian god Anhur's javelins or Poseidon's blasts of water, feels like a minor victory. Each attack anticipated and dodged without peripheral vision feels like a major accomplishment. Smite's combat is so fun I ended up spending more time playing its action-focused Arena mode than the MOBA Conquest. Arena is essentially team deathmatch with accelerated leveling—if Conquest is Smite's version of the gods participating in a noble game of grand strategy, Arena is its mythologically jumbled barroom brawl. Each kill peels points away from the enemy team's score, and the whole thing is over inside of 20 minutes. Arena's a great way to test out a new god and learn how their abilities work, but it also proves how much work the action half of this action-MOBA hybrid does to keep Smite engaging. Smite also has an equivalent of the chaotic ARAM (All Random All Mid), a po[CENSORED]r mode born out of custom MOBA matches that eventually got its own matchmaking queue in League of Legends. And Smite has a goofy daily mode that's good for a laugh, such as a 5v5 match of everyone playing Greek god Chronos. Chronos' ultimate ability lets him turn back time to reverse all damage he took for the past eight seconds. 10 people doing that simultaneously is a nightmare scenario that would send Doc Brown into a space-time continuum fit. ARAM is the go-to not-so-serious mode in League of Legends. It's like a sloppy real-time strategy match. Smite's ARAM feels just as throwaway, but Arena's combat focus gels perfectly with the third-person camera. Arena feels more like a simplified MMO PvP mode. It's more fun, makes better use of its gods' variety of skills, and it's still easy to shake off a loss when a match lasts 15 minutes. *-No trouble with the curve. Despite the demand for precise skillshots, Smite is more approachable than League of Legends or Dota 2. Fights are frantic, but most gods have generous escape abilities to leap out of combat or chase a fleeing opponent. Hades, one of my favorite gods, has an ability that drops him underground and warps him to a target location where he pops back up and deals damage to any enemy nearby. Early game, while I'm laning, I'll use the ability to close in on squishy gods, then throw out Hades' silence ability and AOE attack to do some damage. Late game, it's a great way to initiate team fights. Because Hades is a tank, I usually live long enough to survive until the ability's cooldown is up, and if I'm hurt, I'll pop Death From Below again to flee from the battle. Hi-Rez smartly targeted some of the MOBA genre's lingering ambiguity and stripped it out to soften the learning curve. I picture their designers sitting around a table having a eureka moment: "What if we just made everything a little bit easier to understand without ditching the complexity?" Experience and gold are shared within a short range, so getting the last hit on a minion to kill it isn't a critical part of the laning phase. Last hits still net more gold. Jungle minions drop their buffs onto the ground so any teammate can pick them up, instead of granting it to the last hitter. One of the side lanes, traditionally reserved for a powerful solo champion, is noticeably shorter than the opposite side, subtly beckoning a solo laner while also making that lane slightly safer from ganks. A robust voice command system adapted from Tribes: Ascend simplifies callouts like "missing in action," "retreat," "defend right lane," and so on. In my time playing Smite, players have regularly used this system to communicate, which makes teamwork with strangers surprisingly effective. General items, activatable items, and consumables are separated out and serve different functions. Active items that refill mana or place wards every 90 seconds save money and encourage staying in lanes longer. Smite even welcomes newcomers with tools that circumvent the challenge of learning item builds and ability orders. Auto-buy and auto-level are enabled by default, spending gold and experience on a set path for each champion. I turned the systems off to force myself to learn my way around the item store and each god's abilities, but they're not just tools for beginners. The auto-buy paths for each god can be customized in Smite's launcher to adhere to whatever order you prefer. *-Genuinely free to play. Smite's free-to-play economy is, likewise, refreshingly streamlined. There are no rune pages or masteries, nothing to spend money on that affects gameplay balance. Real money and in-game currency are only used to buy new gods, skins, and voice packs. And if you don't want to grind out games to earn new gods, you don't have to. A $30 god pack buys every god in the game—there are 51 as of this writing—and every god Hi-Rez ever releases in the future. In League of Legends, new champions cost about $7.50 a pop. All of Smite's gods cost 200 gems, or $4. $30 for the whole pantheon, present and future, is an absurdly good deal for a free-to-play game. I love that I don't have to spend dozens of hours—or dozens of dollars—earning in-game currency to spend on items that incrementally buff my characters. It's rare for a free-to-play game to truly put balance ahead of profit. Smite does. Still, the meta leveling progression is missing something. Leveling an account to 30 simply grants access to ranked league matches, with no unlocks or rewards along the way. Why not let me jump into ranked play earlier, if I want to? The leveling system feels like a leftover F2P element that doesn't fulfill its original purpose. By level 10, I felt like I knew Smite well enough to dip my toes into a ranked match, even if I would've been stuck in the lowly bronze league. The 30-level arc isn't there to stop me from having fun, though. It's to stop me from ruining other people's fun in ranked play—to ensure I'm not going cluelessly die over and over again like a chump and waste 40 minutes of my team's time. Hi-Rez could've come up with a better way to gate access to ranked play, but the 30 level system does, at least, preserve the competitive balance of ranked games. In the dozens of hours of Smite I've played, only other human beings could sour the fun. You know these people: the ones who drag down your team but blame everyone else. The ones who ignore pleas for teamwork. The ones who leave mid-match, crippling your team in 4v5 fights. The ones who claim "mid" or "solo lane" because that's the most fun for them. They're playing Smite, too. But there don't seem to be as many of them. Perhaps thanks to the voice command system, Smite has one of the least vitriolic competitive communities I've played with. MOBAs are vastly complex games that demand skill and study and patience. Mechanical execution will win fights, but strategy and coordination win games. Smite demonstrates a rare willingness to teach, with tools and genre tweaks that show how thoughtful design can cut through the barrier that makes MOBAs so intimidating to learn. The high skill cap is still there if you want to reach for it. It may not sit on the tallest, Misty Mountainest peak alongside Dota 2, but Smite's skill ceiling balances the approachability of action RPG combat with deep MOBA strategy. The gods are surprisingly diverse in abilities and playstyles, and though balance is always a moving target, almost every god shows up regularly in online play and is capable of deicide in the right hands. Perhaps the strongest endorsement I can give Smite is that I keep trying out new gods instead of sticking with one that I can play reliably. In League of Legends, I spent a long, long time mastering one champion that I loved. In Smite, I'm finding something to like in almost every god I play. Learning dozens of movesets feels like an excuse to keep playing rather than an intimidating knowledge gap to struggle against. I don't think I've truly mastered any of the gods yet, but I have, at least, learned to watch my back.

Name Game: The Wizards - Enhanced Edition Price: $24.99 - $14.99 The Discount Rate: -40% Link Store: Click Offer Ends Up After : 23/10/2019

welcome.

*-INFO.. By Daniel Starkey on May 16, 2016 at 12:39PM PDT Serenity and wonder fill my ears when I first open Stellaris. Pulling from the same lived-in future aesthetic of games like Mass Effect, Stellaris opens with an invitation. It wants you to explore, it wants you learn, to unearth secrets your galaxy has held for millennia. As I do, astral outlines and nebulae dot my galactic map. Carved out into large chunks are the cosmos' remaining empires. The Kalaxenen Order. The Sibulan Core Worlds. The Bruggan Consciousness. And my own nascent superpower--the Reaper Commonwealth. We'd coexisted with our neighbors peacefully for centuries, but we were out of space and desperate for some breathing room. Our scientists yearned to comb through the rest of the galaxy's hyperspace lanes and long-forgotten ruins. And our priests were compelled to spread the will of the divine. So the galaxy erupted in war. War always seemed to follow me in Stellaris. That's partly because it's hard to expand indefinitely without frustrating someone, but also because there's a few hitches hiding within the layers of Paradox Interactive's latest grand strategy game. If you've ever played Civilization or any of its 4X descendants, you'll be familiar with Stellaris' basics. You helm a new civilization at the start of its journey. You can choose how they'll govern, what their guiding principles are, and how they'll develop technologically. If you choose to play alone, each of your opponents will have a randomly generated set of traits all their own- ranging from despotic fantastical pacifists to xenophobic materialists. Human players are just as likely to come up with creative personality combinations too. When you start a match, you're dipping your toes into an ocean of possibilities, eager to yield as your people explore and grow. That principle is reflected in Stellaris' pacing. Before locking down your starting solar system and working to build out its infrastructure, you'll scour neighboring stars for potential colony sites and resources. Then move in with settlers and engineers to start exploiting virgin territory. Along the way, you'll find all manner of long-lost technology, pre-industrial civilizations and other space-faring races. Each often comes with a "quest" line of sorts that develops into its own narrative thread. On one of my first planets, I discovered an advanced subterranean people. I had to decide upon a diplomatic strategy for them, whether I wanted to give them access to technology, and if I'd be willing to bail them out if they ran into trouble. It was a small piece of Stellaris, but my relationship with these people became one of my most valued. In time, they paid me back for all the favors I'd done, and supported the empire at large. But even if they hadn't, I felt connected to them. I caught myself roleplaying my interactions with them, trying to live up to my empire's own benevolent spiritual collectivist beliefs. It's this kind of ongoing, deterministic narrative scaffolding that forms Stellaris' backbone. Where most other strategy titles are content to focus on conquest and victory, Stellaris wants its relationships and the story you weave as your people grow to be the focus. That runs straight to the core of Stellaris, too. As you encounter new species, you'll be able to integrate them as citizens in your civilization. And you'll have to balance their prejudices and ideologies against those of your own citizens, decide whether they can vote, and even help them settle new planets that might be tough or inhospitable for your own race. These dynamics can have massive effects on intergalactic politics as well. If you enslave or purge (read: genocide) another race, other civilizations will remember your sins and hold centuries-long grudges. These dynamics start coming into play when you hit the mid-game. After you've got your basic group established, as your borders and those of your neighbors start grinding against one another, you'll have to find more creative ways to keep up the early game's strong momentum. If you're not careful, you can be boxed in by ancient and powerful civilizations. Grand strategy games often devolve into war at some point, but conflict with these giants is a quick path to eradication. Instead, it helps to build a multi-racial empire with several disconnected settlements. When one front stalls, you can push another and keep your po[CENSORED]ce moving so that there's always something to do and someone to manage. It also helps to play on a map with few other empires so you can grow a quite a bit before you start running into problems. It's not easy, and it's a bit strange that you have to finagle the game into maintaining a solid pace, but those problems also stem from some of Stellaris' best decisions, even though they don't always work out the way they should. For example, research in Stellaris works quite a bit different than in most 4X games. There's no static tree you climb, moving from agriculture to calendars and then to crop rotation. Instead you'll receive several "cards" from a deck of possibilities. Some, like sapient artificial intelligence, are rarer than others and represent major leaps forward in tech that can also help you break away from the pack. Others are weighted to show up more often to give everyone the same basic tools to start with. In theory, this keeps any one game from feeling too similar to any other. That works to a point, but it also means that you can pass up some critical piece of infrastructure tech and you might not see it for a while, or if you're unlucky, never again. It forces some tough decisions that, while engaging, don't always make sense. There doesn't seem to be any real reason that I have to lose out on colony ships for a better research facility. On balance, though it's a welcome change, and I got more out of it than I lost. Technology plays into galactic diplomacy as well. Some hyper-advanced civilization may find your development pathetic and offer to bring you under their wing as a protectorate, giving you major bonuses to research and a benevolent overseer that can keep you safe from the big bullies on the block--or at least try. The catch here, is that if you develop past a certain point, you become your overlord's vassal. With that, they can, in time absorb your civilization completely. Or, you can request--and likely fight--for your independence, often at a time when their resources are spread thin with another war or even a recession. It's here--with warfare and diplomacy--where Stellaris takes the most risks, and their payoffs can vary from match to match. Those with pacifistic civilizations might try to form strong bonds with others and form powerful peacemaking coalitions. Others will, no doubt, flex their muscles and conquer all the can. Bringing everything from psychic warriors and specially designed war ships to bear down on their foes. And while these two outlets for Stellaris' systems each work well on their own, their dependent upon so many of the game's other novelties that they don't fit together all the time. _Stellaris is strange in that it wants you to play on its terms, but within that you have amazing latitude. The semi-random nature of research means that you won't always be able to guide your people to what they need. Plus, negotiating federations can be difficult when meeting new races depends upon you breaking out of your starting area--something that can sometimes be impossible if you're surrounded by super-hostile enemies. When it works, though, an alliance can help you leap ahead and match your elder rivals. Trade with someone who pities you can provide a massive influx of cash to fuel your economy, and, within short order you might have a diverse enough po[CENSORED]tion to colonize a dozen or more extra planets. That, in turn, gives you more people to crew ships, drive research, and more complex internal politics to manage. But that's just it, it's based on chance. You can tilt things in your favor and increase the likelihood of a more exciting game, but that's never a solid guarantee. Stellaris is strange in that it wants you to play on its terms, but within that you have amazing latitude. Its emphasis on exploration is exhilarating. It makes each run feel inviting and special. But that doesn't always hold. Some games run through to the end and hit all the right notes at all the right times. Others are best left running in the background as you crunch for better technology so you can break free of your narrow corner in the galaxy. This could be helped if you could sneak, or stealth ships through enemy territory to colonize far-flung worlds. Or, if you could have finer control of research. Or, if you could overwhelm enemy fleets with superior tactics, despite a massive technological disadvantage. Instead, you're at Stellaris' mercy. It is fortunate then, that more often than not Stellaris doesn't just work, it excels, but that makes its breaking points feel that much more agonizing because it wouldn't have taken much tweaking to smooth them out.