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What is Firewatch?
LETS GO SPACE TRUCKIN’
Eight Games That Were Pretty Good In 2015
The Best And Worst Star Wars Games
On the release of the new Star Wars Battlefront, Ben runs down his favourite and least favourite Star Wars games and Dan sings about being Han Solo
How Fallout 4 Perfected The PR Cycle
Dan and Ben come together on the eve of the release of Fallout 4 to run down the narrative of the world and how Bethesda nail the hype train and PR Cycle.
Is Assassin’s Creed Syndicate just another open world game?
A Brief History Of Fallout
Is Transformers Devastation Worth Playing?
Transformers Devastation Review
There is something about Platinum Games that I just don’t get along with. Games like 2009’s Mad World and Bayonetta, well, I just can’t wrap my head around them. Then 2013’s Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is, in my opinion, not only full of poor design choices but features a title which makes zero sense. And, yes, before you say it, most of Metal Gear makes zero sense but that word is a step too far! Transformers Devastation, on the other hand, has a story that is sound, a gameplay loop that is accessible, and an art style that will leave the game with an enduring legacy among it’s fans. Also, the name makes sense.
The narrative is assuredly atypical for a Transformers story. When Megatron discovers a way to harness energy to cyberform - rather than terraform - the earth, Optimus Prime and his merry band of his machines take to the streets to take down the evil Decepticons and other space sounding mumbo jumbo. Apparently, the game is part of the Transformers: Generations line of toys, with an art style inspired by the original Transformers TV show, and the story penned by former Transformer comic writer, Andy Schmidt. The voice actors for the core cast of robots also return from the classic TV series and sit alongside video game voice acting stalwarts like Jim Ward, Steven Blum, and James Arnold Taylor.
I say apparently because I have no idea about anything Transformers related. You’re going to have to take in mind that the only connection I have to the Transformers franchise is the second Micheal Bay movie...which is hot garbage and needs to be thrown into the sea. However, if I were to gain the memories of an American child in the mid-nineteen eighties, Devastation would be at the top of my Christmas wish list. It’s a love letter to old school cool. All of the sights and sounds of Optimus and friends that I recognise having seeped into pop culture are there. Even those 60’s Batman style transitions. Transformers Devastation is the closest thing we have at the minute to a playable cartoon and the purest thing Transformers fans have that matches the spirit of the IP.
However, after the stellar approach to the presentation, the rest of the game just seems like mundane. Despite being from one of the better character-action developers in the business I passed a majority of the sections with ease and only dying twice throughout my playthrough of the game. To be fair, the reason they were passed with ease is that much of the gameplay is button mashing with the occasional special move thrown in for good measure. Face buttons let you jump and punch with the bumper letting you transform and attack in vehicle mode. The triggers give you a machine gun to aim and shoot. You’ll be punching robots, shooting robots, collecting stuffs, transforming, driving, jumping and repeating. What doesn’t help is the fact that the game world is small with no distinguishing features. Seeing the same actions and animations occurring and reoccurring again and again and you get sleepy real quick.
What does help is that the game is short. The whistle-stop tour through the unnamed city on earth took me around five hours. To be honest, it’s the perfect amount of time. Any longer and it would have got incredibly tedious. That’s not to say that if you are a fan of the gameplay, there is not much for you to do. Numerous difficulty and obtainable S-Ranks give completionists a reason for another round. If not, multiple playable characters, challenge rooms and a weapon customisation and upgrade system give your time spent with the game a much-needed stretch.
And, well, that's about it. Transformers Devastation doesn’t really have too much too it. Many of the actions undertaken, the gameplay loop, the game world, and the added extras are just… there. They aren’t special and they just don’t stand out. Somehow the game doesn’t stop being a joy. Even for me, a newcomer to the Transformers, my couple of hours with the game was great, a testament to just how fantastic the presentation is. It’s shortcomings may alienate some from playing Transformers Devastation, but all the parts work together to make a pretty enjoyable experience, even if it is just for a couple of hours.
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Is Wasteland 2: Directors Cut Worth Playing?
S-Ranking MGSV: Mission 23. SPOILERS!
Wasteland 2: Directors Cut Review
Our story this time starts back in 1988 when Brian Fargo directed Wasteland. A post-apocalyptic role-playing game for the Commodore 64, Apple II, and DOS and published by EA, the title was critically acclaimed and commercially successful. Despite this, there was never a sequel produced. 1990’s Fountain Of Dreams was close, and Fargo’s follow up Meantime was cancelled. However, 1997 saw Fargo and Interplay produce Fallout, a name that is now in the legendary in the pantheon of gaming franchises. Meanwhile, the name Wasteland is a footnote in the annals of game history as the thing that inspired Fallout. On March 13th, 2012, Fargo and his new studio inXile entertainment launched their Kickstarter campaign for Wasteland 2, a direct sequel to the 1988 game. 61,290 and almost $3 million dollars later and a new Wasteland hit the PC and now, a year after it’s original release, the director's cut is hitting consoles.
Wasteland 2 follows the player as they take on the role of four desert rangers in Arizona after a nuclear holocaust destroyed the planet in 1998. After one of the senior rangers is found dead with signs of violence left on his body, the four player created rangers set out into the desert to find out what happened along with keeping the peace in the wasteland. The game boasts a reactionary tale, apparently accounting for your choices and serving up a different experience with every playthrough. However, as with most titles, the choices are not grey but disappointingly black or white. One example being the choice between saving one of two cities then hearing the destruction of the other. It’s handled kind of decently but falls in line with the rest of the game being a mix of stupidly obtuse and just not delivering what is promised with a surprising lack of polish.
You begin by creating your team of rangers. You can either create each one from the ground up, from rather limited options or pick from some premade rangers with names like Pills or Big Bert. Assigning points to your team can also be a bit of a pain, you don’t get that many points for a huge amount of skill trees, meaning that you will have to forgo some skills making some situations unavoidably frustrating.
After being set out into the world, you interact with it in two ways. When you in the town, you’re running around with an isometric perspective interacting with the world and NPCs just like you would expect. You’ll be chatting to people, shopping, taking on quests, being generally bored. Most of the quests involve simply moving from one place to another and talking to someone; no better than a job at a post office. Some of dialogue is interesting with a modicum of charm, but thumbing through endless dialogue options is tedious. Then when you leave towns, rather than a fully built open world, you’ll be an icon running around on some brown with no idea where you’re going. Even without a fully free roaming open world, it’s poor. Moving around the world is slow, with nothing in it but hidden crates. I adore the alternate history, post-apocalyptic setting, but found myself thoroughly disinterested.
Much of the game is combat focused, a practice that is obtusely explained and an exercise in frustration. It’s a turn-based, cover-based system featuring repetitive encounters and poor artificial intelligence. Every fight feels exactly the same, with endless random encounters in the open world which just exaggerated my exasperation. The long and short of it is you are either thumbing X throughout the fight or dying and restarting because the enemies are capable of performing out of this world feats. By the later levels, your still performing the same tasks as you were at level one. If you even get that far in the game, that is. Honestly, I had to struggle through much the tutorialising that Wasteland 2 sends your way. Scrolling through pages and pages of text is, one, not at all fun, and two, an awful and unengaging way of teaching mechanics to players, especially when the default controls mapped on the DualShock 4 are overly complicated.
The question remains if you are still game for Wasteland 2 despite my complaints, why bother grabbing this new ‘Game Of The Year’ edition for your console. Well, Wasteland 2 is now built in Unity 5, which means improved lighting, shading, and textures. Still the game manages to look like it was built after right after Fallout 2 rather than just before Fallout 4. With the game coming to consoles, you’ll be getting gamepad support on PC. On top of that there are some balance changes, new voice over, along with a perk system and precision strikes in combat. To be far, it’s a compelling upgrade for those already with the game and, credit where credit is due, it’s going to those owners for the low, low price of nothing.
To be fair, with almost 70,000 people backing the sequel on Kickstarter, there has to be a market for this type of game. However, Wasteland 2 never grabs you like other games do. A tease of a promise of a glimpse of something special is laid in front you by the marketing and promo materials but I just ended up sad and disappointed as I began to pay more and more attention to the man behind the curtain. If you are the right type of genre fan you’ll be able to overlook the flaws the game has to appreciate it in a much more positive light than I. Super Meat Boy, Shovel Knight and games of a similar ilk respect the past by using it to inform certain design decisions then using the progress of the last decades to make them modern-retro classics. If you’re looking for something needlessly complex, obtuse, obscure, and irritating, you’re looking for Wasteland 2, you’re looking for a game lodged back in the 1980s. A time where manuals were thick, patience was long, and attention spans were not necessarily as distracted by other things. In the passing years, it’s spiritual cousin Fallout has morphed one of titans of the RPG genre, while Wasteland 2 is a relic that is stuck, in almost every way, 20 years in the past.