What are you playing now?

[marks]

Playing RO2 singleplayer only is like playing TLOU multiplayer only....

[Vilham]

Fallout Tactics, haven't played much yet.

[blackdog]

Last night I test drived Alien Rage and played a good chunk of Mirror's Edge.

 

The former is your average "clone" shooter, like we used to say back in the days of Quake and Unreal. I remember buying it thinking that it had good graphics and seemed solid from the videos. Graphics is a great deal of noisy grey sameness I must say, reminds me a lot of Prey: confusing environment with a few eyecatching sparkling setpieces... but at least shooting it's ok, weapons handling feels alright and bullets behave a bit differently than usual shooters (they fly slower). Like Prey and Q4 there's basically no Z-axis play tho.

 

Liking Mirror's Edge a lot, one of those games that really makes you want to replay to get everything right and smooth, there's quite a satisfaction in getting a section properly... although I must say that whether in the first few chapters it seemed to have an overload of "over here!" red props, further down navigation gets confusing sometimes.

Spent the last hour before turning the computer off on the first few time attack maps.

[D3ads]

I am currently playing...

 

SINGULARITY!

 

Finally got hold of this one four years after release, I was put off by it when it was originally shown due to the some of the cliches I was seeing and a lot of funky coloured lighting which didn't really fit the setting for me. Since several people at the Core worked for Raven back in the day, I saw an art dump about a year later and liked the amount of detail that was put into it like the propaganda posters and general environment work but I still didn't get it then and largely forgot about it for several years. I've corrected that now for Crimbo and have been playing it at some length so far. The big question is; what does our resident Russia Expert™ think of it?

 

First of all, I'm impressed by the attention to detail in the setting, it seems as though Raven did a lot of research on the theme they were going for, perhaps even going on location for some references. The cliches aforementioned are there, but mostly they make sense anyway, Soviets certainly liked to have statues of Lenin everywhere (as demonstrated by the amount that fell all over Ukraine recently). The propaganda posers and films are great, having seen some Soviet movies about the West during the Cold War, they hit the mark right down to the rhetoric and the style of artwork used. I have to frown at the faux cyrillic stuff that rears it's ugly head though, I think it's obvious what a sign reading "КАТОРГА-12" says rather than having nonsense like "КАТФЯGA" (KATFYAGA...?!). Also the English translations on some notices and banners are out of place, sure you want people to be able to read them but it's unrealistic since no "English speaking capitalist pig dogs" would set foot on the island.

 

Gameplay wise, to begin with it was just a straight shooter (some dodgy hitboxes, I shot a guy in the head TWICE and he still carried on shooting me in the face...wat) and then eventually you get the centrepiece of the game, the Time Manipulation Device or TMD and things get interesting. I must admit I spent a good 30 minutes renewing and aging things, it's a bit gimmicky since you can only age things that have had contact with E-99 but the animations are superb and really capture the process perfectly:

 

 

At one point I had to age that crate, stick it under a garage door and then renew it so it pushed the door up enough to be able to crawl through, pretty clever stuff.. I look forward to more of that sort of thing. the TMD also upgrades such as being able to force enemies backwards or age them so they go into slow motion and you can kill them easily. You're also able to pick objects up and hurl them at enemies, certainly useful when the mutant Spetsnaz try to throw an explosive barrel at you and you catch it and throw it back at them... how does that napalm taste, tovarisch?!

 

There's a lot of nice touches to the environments, such as being able to open draws to read hidden notes, play with telephones, typewriters and microphones and listen to audio recordings of the Island going to Hell, and some creepy kids toys audio that will unsettle you if you press them... The school is particularly nicely done, similar to F.E.A.R. 2'S elementary although much much shorter. There's a good contrast between locations as you time travel between one point in two different zones, the difference between old and new again.

 

The storyline is a bit skew whiff, at one point you go back in time and save some guy who ends up being a tyrant and killing one of the good guys so you go back and kill them. Perhaps I had the option to let them die originally or something I don't know... it just seemed a bit rushed. There's also some chick who's British but wears an Orthodox cross round her neck.. *shrugs*

 

So all in all, so far so good really, I shall report back on what happens next when it uhhh... happens.

 

Edited December 27, 2014 by D3ads

[D3ads]

...who the fuck came up with the phase ticks?! They swarm you instantly and you die in about 10 seconds no matter how many you shoot or whether or not you stun them! This is really bollocks, I was enjoying things up till this point (and kind of the point where the spetsnaz mutants kept spawning over and over again).

Edited December 27, 2014 by D3ads

[D3ads]

So after about 40 attempts, I finally managed to escape from the Phase Tick lair... Note to developers: Enemies that are difficult to hit, respawn constantly and can kill you in about 15 seconds ARE NOT FUN! Please stop doing this. Also, I think I've ranted about invisible walls enough for people to know how much I hate lazy design and this is a good example:

 

 

There's obviously plenty of room to pass through this space, but no.. there's an invisible barrier that stops me... is it too much to ask to put a book shelf in the way or some boxes...? /rant

 

Anyway, things have gone a bit Half-Life... I mean more than a bit.. Kathryn is Alex, Barisov is a hybrid of Eli and Kleiner and he has a lab which looks somewhat similar to Black Mesa East and there's a large tower in the distance which keeps getting closer and closer. The elite spetsnaz that have turned up even look a little like the Combine and there's even some kind of giant mutant that looks remarkably like the tentacle from the Blast pit in HL1! Watching a video which shows newspaper clippings (made up of jibberish literally, did someone forget to write some actual words?!), turns out shooting the guy you previously saved made no difference and the world is still under Soviet control and thus royally fucked, actually I didn't know it even was under Soviet rule but w/e.

 

I've moved through an industrial rail yard that looks a tad OTT and probably belongs on the planet Stroggos, some smelly sewers covered in moving fungus populated by things that can't see you but almost always hear you no matter how hard you try to keep quiet. Speaking of which, I get the ability now to turn any Spetsnaz into those creatures, thus causing chaos and panic among thine enemy, heh. At one point I meet up with Kathryn again only for her to be captured and I have to chase after her captors or be faced with a "You lost Kathryn!" message, otherwise translated into "Fuck you, you're not doing what we tell you!" what is this? Call Of Duty??

 

Things get pretty intense when you board a train, I wont spoilt it but suffice to say, A had BIG problems. A little running around the docks once I've got there and suddenly it's 1955 again and I'm confronted with a large swathe of Soviet soldiers... ZA RODIN... uhhh.. I mean... "Eat lead, dirty commies..!"

 

Edited December 28, 2014 by D3ads

[blackdog]

This is a walkthrough lol

 

~

 

I'd be playing FC4 if it wasn'f for a fucking critical bug that crashes the game at the first checkpoint

[Vaya]

Shadows of Mordor - Great game apart from some enemies/captains requiring 50 decapitations to die.

 

I think they should of led with the lush second area rather than the first though. Those grass physics <3

[Vilham]

Played wolfenstein today, really good game, probably the best shooter I played this year, there weren't many though tbh.

[DrywallDreams]

Just finished Wolfenstein the other day.  Hated the ending, the rest was so good!  The ending was real predictable and boring, while the enemy encounters were plain frustrating.

 

Also just finished FRACT OSC, which was pretty good.  The world was rather confusingly layed out, though it looked nice.

 

Picked up Shadow of Mordor in the Steam sale, once my SSD gets here I'll be playing that.

 

First in 2015  I'm pretty sure I've finished more games than in 2014 already.

Edited January 4, 2015 by Marcem

[D3ads]

So the final exploration of Kotorga-12 has ended and at this point I realise I forgot to talk about the weapons available! There's your usual generic handgun and automatic rifle (a futuristic AK which looks a little too spacey imho), a fantastic gattling gun which tears through enemies like butter, plus grenade and rocket launchers which let you control the projectile once it's fired. You can also do this with a certain scoped weapon, winding that bullet to hit your foes whereever they are or straight into an explosive barrel that a bunch of soldiers are firing next to. There are some handy Liquid Nitrogen canisters scattered about the areas that freeze any enemy in the vicinity and allow you to shoot them into pieces T2 style. In a similar way, some electrical conduits can be pulled off the walls and fired into enemies to electrocute them.

 

I had a lot of fun towards the end when the TMD got upgraded to super kickback mode so you could essentially eviscerate enemies by zapping them with unlimited battery power, though sadly this was shortlived. Once you get to the final showdown, there are multiple paths to take with different endings, which is refreshing in an FPS. All in all, I had quite a blast with Singularity, it's got it's flaws like anything but it's very playable. It's also the most accurate representation of Russian/Soviet built environments from a developer outside of the former USSR. I give it 7.5 Red Stars out of 10.

 

[Steppenwolf]

Been playing a bit of Assassins Creed: Unity recently. Got it for free with my new gfx card. Words can't describe how awesome the art is in this game. Hands down together with Alien: Isolation the most inspiring game for an artist right now. Also runs surprisingly well considering the bad things i heard about it. The worst bugs seems to be fixed. Crashed only once on me and haven't seen any game breaking bugs otherwise.

[KoKo5oVaR]

I've been playing Halfway which surprised me to be an excellent tactical rpg, kind of a simplified xcom, lovely pixelart graphics, cool atmosphere and nice story. Until i've reached midgame and stopped because somehow everything went all panzerklein on my face, if you know what i mean. So it's a well fitting name for the game.

[Sentura]

I had the exact same experience with it. It just stopped being fun. Also what is up with no hitrates above 50% for most characters?

[Warby]

just finished shatae lovely all around

 

also just cause 2 possibly the best open world game if you like emergent gameplay and fucking around

 

and I played some red alert 3 to familiarize myself with their tech cause i am helping this guy port zero hour to the newest publicly available cnc engine:

 

 

 

 

next in line to be played:

-blood dragon

-broforce

-metal gear rising revengence