Reviews

Torment Tides Of Numenera was an impulse buy. The box and blurb promised a deep story and old style RPG trappings. The game itself delivers on all these fronts but like a complex fantasy or sci-fi series, it is not for the faint-hearted. I’m currently working my through the Malazan 10 book series by Steven Erikson and what drew me to this was it being described as the hardest literary challenge you can set yourself. The first few hours of Torment feel exactly the same. Literally hundreds of themes, constructs and lore are thrown at you with little or no explanation. In fact, it is possible to die from your first conversational choices in the game. The selling point of Torment is that situations can be talked around instead of resorting to combat. This is clear from the first few interactions when you eventually land on the planet. You play the last castoff, in essence, the last bodily vessel of the antagonist in the game ‘The Changing God’. When the Changing God gets tired of a vessel he casts them off and moves to a new one leaving a strange consciousness and fragments of memories in the empty vessel. You are this empty vessel identifiable only by a tattoo all your kind share. Needless to say, this is a good starting point for the storyline of the game but rather than let you get straight into the game the story throws another few plot points at you as a way of character creation. When you are falling to earth you are trapped in a palace of your own mind and have to negotiate your way through this. Your questions in this phase form the character creation section of the game making you choose between the normal warrior, wizard or rogue classes not that you’d know it from the decisions you made. I made the kind of choices I usually do expecting to be classed as a rogue yet ended up a Nano, the game’s version of a mage. Nevertheless, you are intrigued enough by this stage to go with the flow and then you have your first encounter with an enemy called the sorrow. It hunts you in your mind from what I can tell so far and will be a constant threat throughout the rest of the game. Despite the excellent plot and branching storylines, there are a few things people should know before diving in. The game itself is very poor at telling you where you should be going and what is a priority. There is no ability to set a marker to head in the direction of the next quest for example, or at least none I have found so far. Also using you or your companions abilities uses up points in one of the set fields. These points don’t replenish unless you sleep and recharge yet there is nowhere obvious to sleep in the first few hours of the game. This can lead to much confusion and wasted time as you naturally take on many quests at the beginning but waste your points on unimportant ones. One early quest had me convincing a young boy not to spend money on cosmetic or physical augmentation and instead focus on education. While a worthwhile and enjoyable task on its own merits it doesn’t seem to have got me anything other than some XP. Maybe further down the line, this boy will return but he hasn’t as yet. Another issue is the poor graphics in the game. The world design and character models are nice and unique yet they are from such an isometric zoomed-out viewpoint that it is hard to truly appreciate them. If you use the right stick to zoom in then they become blurry and even ugly. Even worse than the look is the sound quality. The music is nice and stirring and the relevant shocks sound well yet other than this there are periods of complete silence. Only some of your companions words are voice acted and the rest is via dense pages of text. While some may prefer this it is hard to take everything in when you are reading it against a backdrop of silence. When you are presented with 6 or 7 conversation options at the end you often find yourself asking the question again as you have lost interest and don’t want to pick the wrong option. There is also the matter of the horrible menus you have to navigate through. You access these by hitting up on the d-pad and not through the start menu or the touchpad on PS4. When you get in there you have a functioning view of your items but no real idea about the skill trees or the aforementioned Tides that your decisions are putting points into. Unless you dig into the lore and pay real attention you could find yourself wandering around the starting area out of points and out of ideas what to do next. Despite all this, there is a very deep and brilliant storyline to be found in here and the genuine ability to deal with confrontations in any way you see fit. Being the number one funded RPG on Kickstarter at the time and the successor to Planescape the game will attract much attention. You just need to be aware what you are getting yourself into before you begin. It is a deep, old school, isometric RPG that requires time, patience and dedication. If you are in the mood for this then Torment offers something unique on modern consoles.

The Far Cry games are among some of my most favourite games yet as the series edges closer to reality it becomes slightly uncomfortable to play. Originally when you were on a B-Movie version Of The Island Of Doctor Moreau in Far Cry Instincts that straddled the Original Xbox and 360 things were simple. Bad guys, you with your animal powers and the ability to take them down in multiple ways was a recipe for endless fun. As the series progressed and the supernatural elements disappeared you realised you were causing some significant humanitarian damage to different parts of the earth. In saying that the game always pulled you through with memorable antagonists like Vaas and Pagan Min and Far Cry 5 is no different with the Joseph Seed cult/preacher character. Yet in this day and age is the ability for sadistic violence enough for fans of the series? The game is set in a fictional area of Montana, rural, middle-America smack bang in the area where us Europeans immediately start humming duelling banjos and making Deliverance references. It is a stereotype but strangely enough, it is the first time I can think of Modern America being the subject of the stereotype. It generated a lot of heat when it was first shown and the feeling of moving through Montana is both familiar and jarring. It feels like a one-off setting for a game rather than the whole setting and this takes a while to disappear. Technically there are a few graphical glitches and pop-in that a launch day patch should resolve. You play a Deputy tasked with investigating Joseph Seed and his religious cult Eden’s Gate. Needless to say, things go very wrong very quickly and you are left fighting for survival in the typical Far Cry formula of unlocking vistas and levelling yourself up. What’s new this time is your companions. From the Dog to the sniper and the crop-dusting pilot who can drop airstrikes there is a motley bunch of supporting characters to choose from. It certainly makes this game have a different feel to the previous games but ups the ability for comedy violent situations even more. In keeping with modern games, Far Cry 5 is made for streamers and YouTubers. Explosions go off, your dog attacks enemies while fire explodes behind them the plane carpet bombs a sniper tower all while you sit and watch. It could be Commando the Movie if Schwarzenegger had never left his home cabin. It is perfectly set up for people to do interesting walkthroughs and take down outposts in a host of different ways. If you learn the guards patrol patterns it is entirely possible to go from one guard to another and stealthily take down the whole place. Hit share and bang you have streaming gold. If only it had been so easy back in the days of the original game. Your wingsuit is still a good companion and now skill upgrades are more tailored to feats you accomplish in the game rather than solely XP and crafting. Travel a good distance in the wingsuit and upgrades become available. It is just another quality of life that makes you keep coming back for more as you grind towards your next milestone. Added to this is the new Arcade mode which wasn’t available to reviewers. It will allow you to edit your own maps with assets from Ubisoft’s other big games like Assassins Creed. Personally, I can’t wait to set up a picture-perfect version of Crusade Area Jerusalem and see how those annoying Templars deal with automatic weapons. More likely though it will be a showcase for other players who are more creative and have more time on their hands to extend the life of the game beyond the 30hrs or so it will take to complete the story. You can of course team up and do the whole campaign cooperatively with a friend online. Again this seems set up to encourage streaming and let’s plays and this is to be expected in games now. I still have to come back to the title of my review and opening paragraph. With the current climate and gun arguments in America a game like this that has so much unscripted material and potential that some elements are a bit too close to the bone. It is to be applauded that Ubisoft keeps pushing the boundaries by making a western developed country the setting but the political message of the game is not what it appeared to be on the reveal. On reveal it looked to be a commentary on the growing conservative popularity in America yet when playing it falls into the typical video game traits with a crazed boss and his four henchmen acting as sub-bosses in typical video game fashion. If Seed had been as charismatic as Vaas or Pagan Min in this setting then the message could have been difficult and I haven’t reached the end yet so there is still time for this to develop further. Unfortunately, I can’t help but feel this is a missed opportunity to go darker from Ubisoft in this setting. As it is the comedy explosions and violence you can set up and your well acted and often funny companions take the sting out of what could have been a dark exploration into this modern America. As it is we have the same Far Cry formula and level of Ubisoft polish as well as the promise of genuinely interesting divergences in the season pass from Zombies to Vietnam and Mars. Far Cry 5 is looking to be in your console’s disk tray for the foreseeable future.

I desperately wanted to like Kingdom Come: Deliverance since I first heard about it and what the developers were looking to achieve. A historically accurate RPG set in Bohemia in the early 15th Century. Having studied history most of my life it seemed to be a perfect fit. When I began to play it however it was missing one key ingredient many people play games for – enjoyment. The game starts off with a small tutorial section in your local village where you play the son of a blacksmith. Life is simple and you set off to gather some ingredients to help your father make a sword for a local nobleman. It is quaint and likeable but immediately you begin to encounter problems with the game itself. While there is guidance, it comes in the form of detailed full-screen pages that you have to read all of to understand how to eat, sleep and basically just exist in the world. While there is nothing wrong with this method, I found that the practicalities of doing this simply didn’t follow the instructions. One of the first things you had to do was go and collect some money owed to your father from a bad debtor. He was easily located but the conversation options led me to a fight. Amazingly for the first encounter in the game, this fistfight seemed to last 15 minutes as random punches, kicks and parries landed from both sides. After it was over, I was able to wash the blood off myself in a nearby bucket of water and go to the next stage of the task. This might be realistic and sound like fun in the game but in practice, this didn’t set a good impression on me. Firstly the fighting mechanics were awful. In a game like this I’m not expecting Fight Night levels of nuance but in Kingdom Come: Deliverance you pick an attacking direction and then just swing your limb in that direction. Even the town drunk was able to dodge or grab my attempts and hit me with a counter. The fight turned into a boring war of attrition that somehow I won. After something like this the first thing many people want to do is save it so they don’t have to go through the chore of it again. Saving in Kingdom Come: Deliverance is another misstep. Despite the recent patch that lets you save and exit the game at anytime the only other way to save is to drink the limited Saviour Schnapps drink or go to sleep. In the example of the fight, I just wanted to save immediately after then carry on my journey, hopefully never to repeat this section. Instead, as I hadn’t got the Save Schnapps yet I had to play on. It didn’t feel right to go for a sleep in the middle of the first fetch quest of the game. If I had died or ran into a bug in the game I would have had no choice but to do it all again. Luckily I was fine in the tutorial, but soon after this exact problem happened many times. Of course, the game soon takes a dark turn with the invasion of the village and tragic circumstances for your character. The next section of the game is thrilling and gave me genuine hope for the rest. You have to escape on horseback with soldiers in hot pursuit. After this great but clunky section, the game starts proper and unfortunately, it seems you have to do the tutorial section you needed earlier now. In this section, you are taught again about eating and given a basic quest scenario to teach you about the game. Unfortunately, the best solution to this scenario includes lockpicking. In Kingdom Come: Deliverance lockpicking is simply awful. Even after the latest patch, it can be almost impossibly fiddly for no apparent reason. Looking at forums it seems to be a console specific problem as PC can use a keyboard and mouse. With analogue sticks, any lock you pick is a complete fluke. Despite this, you only need to do it once and you can save before it with the newly acquired Schnapps. Despite this after sitting through the loading screens ten times while you do it begins to grate. Soon after the game seems to begin properly and you are given a fighting tutorial and of course a lockpicking one. Are they serious? Without ruining the plot you have had to do numerous instances of both before you are given the necessary tutorial to get through this. It is sloppy and sets a bad impression which nothing after serves to reverse. The game seems to take a perverse pleasure in making everything you do as boring and awkward as possible. I get the realism factor and that life in the middle ages wasn’t a bed of roses but this is a game and meant to be used as a form of escapism for people. It shows a lack of user-friendliness that is staggering. Having to eat to survive is a great mechanic if deployed well but being stranded in early game because of poor signposting with only a pretzel to eat just screams of a lack of playtesting. One section had me looting dead bodies for food early in the game which was a complete break in character. No matter how noble you tried to be you ran out of food on the journey to where these corpses were and are forced to scavenge. It just isn’t enjoyable. Despite my misgivings, this has been a sales success and is sitting at an inflated price online and in most stores. It is a great premise and has some good ideas but the core gameplay loop is one of underachievement and lack of fun. If you are looking for this kind of game you should only try The Witcher, it is much cheaper and much more polished. Unfortunately, the wait for this kind of game goes on.

There are a few reasons why I bought Metal Gear Survive. Being a huge Metal Gear fan this was always on my radar and any chance of the series carrying on after the departure of Hideo Kojima from Konami needs to be looked at. However, the main reason I finally decided to give it a go was the absolute hatred that this game inspired on the internet. Because I love an underdog story I decided to play it as well as just adding it to my Metal Gear collection and I have been pleasantly surprised by the result. The storyline of this is typically Metal Gear. Set just after the events of Ground Zeroes and probably alongside The Phantom Pain, you play a completely customisable soldier who is sucked through a portal into another dimension. Of course, there is a shady government conspiracy behind this but I haven’t got far enough in the game to join all the dots together. The game itself is a strange hybrid of a survival game and base builder but as the title suggests the emphasis is very much on survival and it isn’t easy. Your main issue when you first set up your base camp is simply staying alive. You have two meters on your screen, but in reality, you need to know you need food and clean water to survive on this hostile planet. Matt Damon actually had it easier in the Martian. This will put many people off the game. It is very easy to just die from thirst or hunger in the early game. The only guide I can give you here is to build up a small reserve of food. There are a few animals at the back of your camp that can be killed then cooked at your campfire. There is also dirty water which should be collected but this may give your soldier a stomach problem that needs medicine. The early game is full of these checks and balances that you must overcome before the missions become achievable. Luckily the game has been patched since launch and there are daily rewards when you log in that makes it a bit easier than it was on release. When you get past actually staying alive you have the mission structure itself. You have to find the whereabouts of the previous inhabitants of your home base and rebuild their AI assistant. To do this you need to venture out into the barren landscape of Dite and contend with the dust and the zombie-like wanderers. These are the main enemy of the game and while stupid are deadly in numbers. This basically sets the scene for the whole game, you have to do numerous fetch and carry missions to get to the next story beats and expand your world map. At first, you only go to bases and structures close by but after discovering an oxygen tank you can venture into the uncharted dust area and beyond while your oxygen levels last. The game is no more or no less than this basic premise yet even so there are moments of inventive gameplay to be found. The main thing that impresses me about the game is the fence mechanic. Much like Fortnite, you can build simple structures on the fly. This is essential when you need to survive a sudden ambush by wanderers. With your trusty crafted spear, you pick a bottleneck in the environment and put the fence down before the wanderers get to you. Then as they try to fight their way through the fence you stab at them through the gaps. It is brutally simple and logical and a real highlight of the game. As you progress and get better weapons and firearms you can trap them in a fence then take them out even more efficiently. It never loses its simple satisfaction or sense of urgency as the game progresses and coupled with the constant struggle for food and water you have an intriguing and difficult gameplay loop. Despite this, the game has been almost destroyed on the internet for a variety of reasons. The main one being a defence of Kojima and his treatment by Konami. There is simply no reason for the hatred that this game has received. It is a budget title with decent gameplay and an intriguing story that provides a sizeable challenge to anyone that picks it up. Unfortunately, it has done itself no favours. You have to pay real money for an extra character slot. In this day and age, that decision is always going to be met with ridicule. This is a game that really needs that extra slot or at least the ability to copy you game to another in case you make a catastrophic mistake and run out of food. There is also the painful difficulty level to consider. One early example is going into a pack of wolves looking for food. Without a decent weapon, you will get killed by the animals that you went to prey on for food. As it is something suggested by the AI it shouldn’t really be as difficult as it is. There’s also the matter of the games title. While it tries to cling to the Metal Gear heritage, it clearly isn’t a Metal Gear game. It may have been worked on as an add-on or even paid DLC but other than the cutscenes and menu screens it could have been simply called ‘Survive’ and would surely have garnered a better response from the public. These are questions we will never know the answer to but if you know what you are getting into you will find a great deal of challenge and satisfaction in Metal Gear Survive if very little fun at a budget price.

Guild of Dungeoneering is a well-crafted and good quality indie-game. The visuals and audio are charming, and make the game very appealing. But the gameplay suffers hugely from randomized elements all throughout. And while you can overcome these challenges with experience, in the early-game these randomized elements rarely feel fair, and lead to a lot of frustration.

Guild of Dungeoneering is a rogue-lite, turn-based dungeon crawler. The game consists of levels (dungeons), which the player can send a dungeoneer into. The player creates the dungeon themselves, by laying down 'tiles' they get from cards, and placing treasure and monsters on top of them. The dungeoneer then moves, based on the content around them. As soon as the dungeoneer meets a monster, they enter a fight. In these turn-based fights, the player and the monster play cards from their hand, which have defensive/offensive abilities. If the player survives the fight, become stronger, and can move on. If they don't, the level is over.

The game is fairly easy to play, and can be played in short bursts. Every dungeon only takes between five and fifteen minutes, and the visuals and audio provide a consistent and humorous tone that suits the game well. Hoever, after two hours of play I abandoned Guild of Dungeoneering.

At that point I realised that I was not having fun, and that with every dungeoneer I lost, I got more frustrated. This was largely in part to the fact that most losses seemed unavoidable. Simply getting the wrong cards, tiles or equipment for your situation happens too frequently, and will cost many a dungeoneer their life. And although the game explicitly tells you that your dungeoneers will die, and that this is to be expected, that does not make it any more fun. In the beginning, the novel idea of making your own dungeons, and playing through them stays engaging, but it quickly loses its charm. The game lacks a sense of progression. Although there are plenty of 'guild expansions' to buy, he player isn't offered any tangible goals which will help them face the odds in the dungeon. 

This accumulating frustration, together with a lack of goals, and progress, eventually lead me to stop playing Guild of Dungeoneering. The game offers a lot of quality content, but falls apart in the core of it's gameplay. From my point of few I cannot wholeheartedly recommend this game, although it is definitely worth trying out.