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v1 nice effects good kuck

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v2 blur and good effects

Slime Rancher is an adventure simulation game where players explore a distant planet called the Far, Far Range full of living slimes. Slimes can be kept domestically and the crystals they generate can be used for profit and scientific pursuits. Learn the secrets of the planet, wrangle an ever growing slime herd, and follow the stories of other slime ranchers. The main foci of Slime Rancher are exploring the multiple biomes and collecting slimes. The slimes in the first biome pose very little threat and traversing the landscape requires less use of the jetpack. Players have to collect and care for the slimes to afford upgrades. Upgrades on the ranch allow for easier care of more and more slimes, while personal upgrades give bonuses like additional stamina and health and longer jetpack usage. By exploring hard to reach places with the jetpack, players can discovered secrets to progressively unlock more of the map. With each new biome comes new slimes, new plants, and new science resources as well as progressively more vertical terrain. For a game that focuses a lot on exploration and finding fun secrets, I felt the map really let me down. It marked special Gordo slimes and some of the science technology, but it felt pretty useless for keeping track of how to navigate vertical terrain, where interactable items were, and where doors were located. I thought a lot more could’ve been done to improve its detail and to mark objects of interest. I found myself backtracking a lot trying to find things that were “somewhere in this area”. I’m also a person who likes to explore all the nooks and crannies when I first enter an area, so I found tons of the capsules before I could open them. Then by the time I could open them, I had no interest in crawling all over the map again because I was nearly done with the game One of my favorite parts of Slime Rancher was building up and automating my ranch. I obsessed over my drones, how to combine my slimes, and how to optimize food production and corral location. I wish I’d gotten into some of the warp technology sooner, but it was super helpful once I started unlocking it. On that note though, I will say that it annoyed me somewhat that there was no indication for how to trigger unlocking certain technology. I felt like I just had to keep “doing stuff” until I did enough stuff to trigger unlocks. For the science technology, a lot of this stuff was not on my natural path through the game. Perhaps because of my late entry into the science technology, I found I was having to stop to grind for gold in the mid game. I was needing more gold to unlock additional areas and upgrade corrals for my more dangerous slimes. Another cause for my gold woes may also have been that I didn’t realize there were multiple mini-quests that would trigger after helping out some of the other slime ranchers. Players can learn the stories of fellow slime ranchers and follow notes left by the prior owner of the ranch. Learning about the other characters was fun, and made the reaches of space feel much less lonely. I also liked receiving letters from home, although the game doesn’t allow the player to choose any responses. Overall I found Slime Rancher to be a fun and cute adventure game. I enjoyed finding secrets (even if I couldn’t open them or find them again) and improving the automation of my ranch. I loved the different biomes and slimes and could only ask for more and more! I would recommend Slime Rancher to any players looking for a fun adventure game where they can find satisfaction in managing their ranch of bouncy, colorful, (sometimes dangerous) slimes.

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw ($29.99 on the Epic Games Store) is a sprawling, open-ended game of space trading and combat that is aggressively uninterested in teaching you how to play it. Most modern video games start with some kind of tutorial that explains their mechanics in excruciating detail, because other developers are worried that you might miss something important. Outlaw has no such concern. Five minutes into a new game, it drops you off in deep space, equipped with little more than a couple of control tips, and leaves you alone to sink or swim. It’s in the spirit of the deliberately user-unfriendly PC games of the ‘80s and ‘90s, which wore their impenetrability as a mark of pride. There’s a lot you can criticize about Outlaw’s gameplay or mechanics, but if you dig into it, it already addresses most of its own major issues. You just have no obvious way of knowing how. In Outlaw’s defense, its director Travis Baldree has made his own video tutorials via streaming and YouTube, one of which (below) is linked to Outlaw’s page on the Epic Games Store launcher. That, in turn, highlights that Outlaw is an expansive, ambitious game, particularly for an indie project, and you can have a lot of fun with it once you know how. You need to do your (space) homework, though, or most of what Outlaw has to offer is hidden beneath a waxy layer of unnecessary boredom. Outlaw, developed by Double Damage Games, is a prequel to the 2015 sleeper hit Rebel Galaxy. The “double” in Double Damage is Baldree and Erich Schaefer, two of the co-founders of the late Runic Games (Torchlight), and who expanded the company to five people to work on Outlaw. The team is split between Seattle, San Francisco, and Lewiston, Idaho. Double Damage has been working on Outlaw for around three years. “We didn’t start on it right after the last game,” Baldree told me. “After Rogue Galaxy, I had a good six or eight months of working on the console versions, and recovery and just dealing with stuff. Then we actually prototyped a totally separate game, and it was cool, but somewhere along the way, I thought, okay, I’m not tired of Rebel Galaxy anymore. I’m going to prototype something and see if we’re excited about it, and we were.” Then Baldree contacted Howard Day, an art director whose work he’d followed online for a decade. “He’s also a big old-school Wing Commander fan, like me, and he did all the initial artwork for [Nightdive Studios’] System Shock reboot that they Kickstarted,” Baldree said. “When we brought Howard on, it solidified it.” You play Outlaw as Juno Markev (Lani Minella), who appeared in the first game as the player character’s elderly aunt. In Outlaw, set almost 40 years earlier, she’s middle-aged, married, and trying to leave her smuggling days behind her. When her husband ends up dead, Juno comes out of retirement to track down his killer, a pirate nicknamed Ruthless. After their first encounter, shown at the start of the game in an animated sequence made by Titmouse, Juno ends up marooned and penniless in the backwater Dodge Sector of the galaxy. She calls an old contact, borrows a battered cargo ship, and starts over from square one. “It was a big change to have the player actually be a character this time out,” Baldree said. “It lets us do a lot of stuff we didn’t have the time and resources to do in the previous game. It was easier to write in a lot of ways because there’s a protagonist. You’re a faceless nobody in the last game, which was made in too little time, running down the clock on the bank account. More effort was put into this one.” Your primary goal in Outlaw is to track down Ruthless for a rematch. You gather intelligence and resources by working odd jobs and doing favors on both sides of the law, as a bodyguard, mercenary, smuggler, cargo pilot, pirate, bounty hunter, and/or slave trader. The original Rebel Galaxy was a naval combat game that happened to be set in space, where you flew a procession of frigates, lining up broadsides and pecking away with automated turrets. In Outlaw, you fly smaller, faster spacecraft, and are no longer limited to a single flat horizontal plane. The combat is now straight-up dogfighting, full of missile locks, aerial maneuvers, blaring heavy metal, and all the clashing cinematic sound effects that you shouldn’t actually have because you’re in space. In the early game, Outlaw is as hard as it’ll ever be. You’re better off avoiding every fight you can for the first few hours, as the starting ship isn’t much more than a shoebox with wings. The combat is built around evasion, response, and quick reactions, none of which are readily possible until you’re actually in a decent spacecraft. Once you can afford a better ride and a few upgrades, so you can actually hope to survive all the cool space battles, Outlaw (I refuse to say “takes off”) improves dramatically. There aren’t many games out there, in fact, which are as much of an improvement on their predecessor. The first Rebel Galaxy was a rushed project — “the last game was just seat-of-the-pants, contracting people to get stuff done as fast as humanly possible,” Baldree said — and relied heavily on procedurally-generated content. Every person who played Rebel Galaxy got a different set of planets and systems, with a high chance of running into random pirate encounters that they had no realistic way of surviving. In Outlaw, the game’s universe is now hand-built, with a lot more thought put into its design and aesthetics. There are still random encounters, but they’re scaled now by the system you’re in, so it’s easy to stick to the less dangerous parts of the Dodge Sector until you’ve got a ship that can handle a real fight. You can get out of your ship as Juno and check out the interiors of various stations and habitats, each of which have their own persistent sights, maps, markets, and NPCs, and all of which feel more worn down and lived-in right from the start. Outlaw’s version of deep space is good and grimy, like 1970s science fiction; it’s full of CRT monitors, neon signs, blocky text on black screens, and dark bars full of Jim Henson rubber aliens. When other pilots contact you, it’s on a flickering green monitor like an old closed-circuit TV. Each of the ships you can purchase looks beat-up and scarred, because you’re out on the fringe of explored space and nothing here is new. The soundtrack is a particular high point of the overall experience, with more than 24 hours of licensed music split across seven in-game radio stations. I can already tell I’m going to end up with a couple of new favorite bands from playing Outlaw. What I’ve lost more time to than anything else, though, is 8-Ball. For some reason, this space combat/trading game has a simple but fun pool simulator as a tavern game, alongside slot machines, dice poker, and an arcade machine that is clearly and legally distinct from Asteroids. I have blown a lot of my repair/upgrade budget in Outlaw on “just one more game” of 8-Ball, and am genuinely tempted to see how far I can get by pool-sharking across the galaxy. The sticking point, though, is still its lack of player guidance. There are a few little problems other than that, like how the mouse-and-keyboard controls are actually pretty bad, but the lack of any kind of in-game tutorial is easily Rebel Galaxy Outlaw‘s biggest problem. I like Outlaw, and it’s a lot of game for $30, but it outsourced its own manual to its community. There are entire mechanics and features in Outlaw that you might never find on your own, and some of them are crucial to the experience. I’d never have made it out of the first system if I hadn’t read about asteroid mining on a message board, and I only figured out how to throttle back the ship’s engines because I heard someone else complaining about it. I had to consult two different out-of-game sources to figure out the mechanics behind the single best money-making endeavor, in a game where you spend most of your time scrambling for cash. You can go on gaming websites right now and see people complaining about how Outlaw’s early game degenerates into a boring grind for cash, as you make penny-ante cargo runs to fund your first couple of upgrades. Ordinarily, you could chalk that kind of thing up to user error, but in Outlaw, they aren’t exactly wrong. They just aren’t used to a modern video game that hides its central mechanics like this.

Trials games have never really rested on plot before to speak of. The challenge has always involved you, the bike and just how good you could get at balancing it across tricky courses. OK, Trials Fusion technically does have a plot, but it didn’t matter at all in any way. Trials was and is and should always be about the precise biking action, and learning the way that it approaches bike physics. Not quite realistic, but consistent and fair, so that when you failed, you knew why. More to the point, you were compelled to try again and again until those elusive platinum medals were all yours. Trials Of The Blood Dragon has a plot, or to be more accurate, it has several. Not content with mashing up Blood Dragon and Trials, RedLynx has also picked a slew of action tropes, plots and memes and crammed them all together. Trials Of The Blood Dragon tells the story of Roxanne and Slayter Colt, the kids of original Blood Dragon protagonist Rex Power Colt, as they fight the fourth Vietnamese war (no, really) by way of everything from Indiana Jones to Power Rangers to Hotline Miami. If there’s a cheap action or gaming gag to be made, it’s probably been made, and then slathered with video of sharks with laser beam eyes along the way. It’s something of a discordant mess that rests on the old Zucker Brothers idea that if one satirical joke doesn’t stick with you, another will be along in twenty seconds that you might just like. Some are clever, some are trite, but throughout you’ll be hammered by them repetitively, because Trials games encourage repetitively attempting levels for better scores and fewer failures. Very few jokes benefit from you hearing them fifty times. The gags in Trials of The Blood Dragon certainly don’t. The biggest problem with Trials Of The Blood Dragon is that it really doesn’t know what it wants to be, beyond desperately, achingly needing more polish. The straight Trials-esque sections are fair enough, but then after so many Trials games, they absolutely should be. The inclusion of a gun to your arsenal doesn’t change the experience all that much, and not that much that’s either clever or well-orchestrated is built into the straight vehicle sections. Trials masters won’t find too much that’s challenging here. If all you want to do is burn through the plot, the fact that you can continue endlessly will mean that you’ll make it through the vehicle sections eventually anyway. The Blood Dragon-inspired sections are another story altogether. You could be forgiven for thinking that a mashup of Blood Dragon and Trials would involve hopping off the bike for some first person shooter action. Instead, RedLynx opted to use the Trials engine to make a floaty, irritatingly imprecise side scrolling platform game. Presumably the idea was to make it challenging so that you’d be compelled to play through for ideal scores, same as any Trials game. That only works when you can identify the cause of failure as your own skill, but instead the platform sections just have bad controls, deathtraps you can’t spot until they’ve killed you at least once and the worst AI seen in enemies since the days of the Vic 20. It’s a challenge to get through the platform sections to be sure, but that’s due to sloppy design and the sheer awful grind of these sections. Even Blood Dragon fans looking for some fun explosive shooting action will be left unimpressed by the weak pea shooters you’re given to dispatch your foes. You know those games that you’ve never previously heard of that always seem to sneak into the "free" lists of monthly Games With Gold or PS Plus subscriptions? The platform sections of Trials Of The Blood Dragon are like the worst of those you’ve ever played. To make matters worse, they represent the majority of the game, so you’re essentially forced to play through them to make it to the bike sections you’re likely to enjoy. Several hybrid levels feature both bike and platform action, so if you do want the highest scores, you’re going to have to endure their abject mediocrity (and I’m being kind calling them just mediocre) many times. Blood Dragon was never that serious to begin with, and was a spinoff of an existing franchise anyway. Ubisoft hasn’t done too much to Blood Dragon that, frankly, it wouldn’t do to itself. Trials, though, has a passionate community, and it’s one that deserves better than this. If you’re utterly desperate for new Trials levels, you’d be better off building some tracks yourself, or hitting the community up for some, because while there is some limited fun to be had with Trials Of The Blood Dragon, it’s almost entirely undone by how poor the non-bike sections of the game actually are. Trials Of The Blood Dragon isn’t terribly expensive at around $20 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC, but even at that price it’s not good value.