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In the year 184 CE, an uprising of the common people took place in China that would lead to the breakup of the country into three regions. This uprising, known as the Yellow Turban Rebellion, was a peasant revolt in china against the unfair treatment of the citizenry during the last part of the Han Dynasty. This dynasty was greatly weakened by the rebellion which lasted for some 20 years, and in the ensuing chaos the Han was crushed and the country was divided among three major generals into three kingdoms. This volatile period is the setting of Dynasty Warriors 9, developed/published by Omega Force and Koei Tecmo.

Flow attacks are combo attacks that change depending on an enemy’s state so if you place an elemental crystal in your sword you can freeze, burn, etc your enemies.

Villages will offer blacksmiths, shops and other stores to keep your weapons strong and your potion bag full.

You can kill animals for materials to make weapons and armor. Sometimes you will need to hunt them and sometimes they will hunt you.

You can set traps to catch your prey.

Chaining your combos will allow for some cool onscreen effects and will payoff in EXP and items.

Character designs are exquisite and help to differentiate one person from another. Enemy army units all pretty much look the same, however.

As you complete missions, you will get scrolls that will grant you special abilities or will buff up ones that you already have.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege is an incredible game. Not too long ago my playtime in R6 overtook my playtime in Dota 2, a pretty staggering feat. Anyone who’s played the game knows that Siege shines in a few key areas: the incredibly tight shooting, the highly destructible maps, and the intense, adrenaline-pumping matches.

Why then did Ubisoft decide that Siege needed a zombie mode? Well, in a rare show of actually listening to the player base, it was added because people actually wanted it. After having now played about an hour and a half of Outbreak in the Technical Test Server, I can honestly say, it’s really just… okay.

The gunplay in the normal game is incredible. Recoil ranges from laser precise to utterly uncontrollable, but it all feels really good. This is mostly due to the low time to kill on player characters. A good 1/4 to 1/3 of kills are scored via headshot, which can either be achieved through aiming at the head, or by aiming at the body and letting the recoil take you up to the head.

Of course, it’s quite a bit harder to get shot in the head when you and your crew all bring riot shields

The lovely town of Truth or Consequences, NM. The site of the Outbreak event, and winner of most inquisition-like town name 50 years running

Well this is interesting … and actually something that’s dropped in just at the right time. I’ve just spotted a bit of news regarding Golem Gates, a brilliant little RTS that isn’t quite ready for release yet. Why is this interesting? Well I’m actually almost ready to invite you to read a preview of this particular title and now I can beef it up a bit with some more info on it’s story campaign.

Inkle, the indie developers behind the award winning 80 Days and creators of the ink narrative engine utilized by games such as Dream Daddy, have unveiled their latest game Heaven’s Vault. Similar to other titles in Inkle’s portfolio, Heaven’s Vault is a non-linear narrative adventure game. However, Heaven’s Vault offers so much more than that.

If, like me, you often think back on the cancellation of Silent Hills and bemoan what could have been, then you might find survival horror game The Beast Inside to be a welcome consolation.

If you’ve been watching with baited breath the “will they, won’t they” development process of Allison Road, and you just can’t take anymore, then maybe the success of the Kickstarter for this first-person, time-travelling, Cold War mystery will soothe your soul.

And, if you have a few dollars to spare and the love of story-driven horror in your heart, you can get the demo by backing the game with a pledge of $7 or more.

Since the launch of its Kickstarter on February 20th, The Beast Inside, a pseudo-historical horror game from Polish developers Movie Games and Illusion Ray, has already surpassed its funding half-way point. With $25,324 already raised, both backers and developers anticipate reaching their goal of $47,294 by April 1st.

The Beast Inside utilizes the Unreal Engine 4 to tell the story of Adam (a C.I.A. cryptanalyst during the Cold War) and Nicolas (who lived during the American Civil War). Alternating between these two characters, players must unravel the mystery linking them through time as they navigate distinct locales, and contend with the various hostile “entities” that pursue them. In true survival horror fashion, when pursued, players will have the option to either run and hide or to fight, utilizing the interactive environment around them to outwit or outgun their enemies. And, if you’re fiending for some complex mind-games to pad your horror experience, then I’m certain the tout of cryptography-inspired puzzles will have you reaching for your ciphers, just like it did me.

While a $7 pledge to their Kickstarter will get you the PC demo, it’s worth mentioning that higher-tier backers will also receive the beta-version in December 2018, and access to Steam keys upon the game’s final release.

Sounds like music to the ears, right?

Be sure to check out The Beast Inside, and consider backing what seems to be a very pretty, very intriguing new horror game.

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Great news for Switch owners looking to relive some classic shooter action—Natsume has announced that Wild Guns: Reloaded is now available for preorder at Gamestop at a price of $29.99. Though the game first launched on PS4 back in 2016, it’ll be making its Switch debut this April.

If you’re an old-school Nintendo fan, you might notice that this is something of a homecoming. Wild Guns: Reloaded is a remake of the original Wild Guns, a classic first released for the Super Nintendo back in 1994, and Nintendo fans will be thrilled to have it back.

With tons of arcade-style shooter charm, Wild Guns: Reloaded has a great mashup of steampunk and the Wild West. Expect lassos, saloons, and cowboy hats just as often as flame-spewing tanks and giant robots. Players follow Annie and Clint (plus two characters brand new to the remake) as they seek to get revenge on the dastardly Kid gang through intense shootouts and wild boss battles. But this isn’t Wild Guns’ first rodeo, and they’ve got some extras to keep things fresh.

In addition to two new playable characters, Wild Guns: Reloaded adds plenty of other fun treats to help modernize the classic. A Beginner Mode offers unlimited lives for those a little slow on the draw, while the new Boss Rush: Time Attack mode lets sharpshooters try to take on the game’s bosses as fast as possible. Add in local co-op for up to four in multiplayer fun and there’s something for everyone.

If you’ve got an itchy trigger finger (or if all this Wild West talk is growing on you), you can mosey on over to Gamestop’s website to preorder. Wild Guns: Reloaded will be launching this April for Nintendo Switch both at retail and digitally, so keep your spurs spinning, your belt buckle shiny, and any snakes squarely out of your boots.

…partner.

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Let’s start with a ratio: Wolfenstein II : Argo :: World to the West : The Chronicles of Riddick. In World to the West, developer Rain Games has crafted a game that some people are going to love. And while I am here to say that they love a game that is the very essence of mediocre, their opinion holds merit. Already I feel as though I am being far too harsh. On the game and people who will enjoy it. World to the West isn’t bad, it is simply okay. And you know what? That’s okay.

World to the West is now available for the Nintendo Switch, adding to the unending flood of indie games coming to the console. Taking heavy inspirations from the A Link to the Past, the game likes you play as four wildly different characters who are destined to fulfill an ancient prophecy of some sorts. It is charming in parts, which is all to really say of the story, but the dialogue was light and cute. An occasional welcome reprise. The rest of the game – from combat to the game’s structure – is decidedly less enjoyable. They say you steal from the best, but there is a severe distance between this game and that which it tries to evoke.

The beauty of the independent games, or even single-A titles, is that they bring a fresh perspective. I made the movie comparison above because the parallels of making a major blockbuster in Hollywood and making a low-budget independent game feel similar in end results. You’ve played a Mario game, and expect the next Mario title to tread some sort of familiar ground: you’ll collect things, there will be worlds, Peach will in be distress, they’ll make fun of Luigi. A Christopher Nolan film, similarly, will be $200 million, will have some time dilation, and you’ll argue for years about the true ending. These are institutions at this point. But the indie can do weird things, too; it can give us weird windows into a creative vision, play with expectations, and subvert them. This is all “flowery” speak so far. What point am I getting at? World to the West is not Call of Duty, Super Mario, Uncharted, and unfortunately it tried to be a bigger game than it was able to achieve.

Did you just read that I don’t think that World to the West is indie enough? That’s not what I am aiming for. The game is pretty and offers some unique ideas, however the concepts given to the players become too unfocused in the scope of the world. The world, reminiscent of Zelda, is a high mark for the game but ends up feeling vapid. Combat is a mixture of frustrating and boring. And finally, the story moves along at a lumpy pace, burdened by the game’s structure. These are things that could have been either honed in a more focused game. If the past two generations of games have pointed out, smaller games aren’t also short on quality, and indie games don’t have to be considered critically different from their AAA counterparts. World to the West is a matter of the vision exceeding the actual outcome.

World to the West centers around four characters whom have been inexplicably pushed to this adventure because it has been foretold. Nothing snazzy about this pretense. It’s a solid MacGuffin that has served innumerable stories well, and it mostly does for this game. Segmented into Chapters where the first five or six introduce the characters, setting, and unveil the purpose of your journey through this prophecy. The first few chapters where we’re meeting characters and new environments across the world runs at a nice clip, however once the game gets into itself it falls apart at the seams.

Mostly, there aren’t enough threads to keep the story together. The introduction of characters are so compartmentalized that there is no unifying plot line to bring them together. Sure there’s a big bad doing things, but when the four heroes come together, you immediately turn around and send them on their separate ways for the majority of the game.

And there is nothing in terms of objectives outside of you’re at point A, get to point B. Again, this is a serviceable device but the way it is implemented in late game is infuriating. You’ll be playing and exploring as one character until you run yourself into a wall–perhaps literally–because you’ll need the exploratory power of another character (more on that later). This causes you to find a Totem (which double as save points and fast travels) and change characters, which is okay but wanes later in the game when you need to constantly find Totems and constantly switch to characters around the map. From these Totems, you will then be force to move that character through the same locations to get to where your character just got stuck. The way that the game proposes exploration in service of moving the story forward is awful.

“Now, Brian,” you say, “maybe you should play the game for the exploration. Weren’t you the one that pined and got all mushy about Breath of the Wild for its exploration, falling into a world that you would be so engrossed in you’d miss your subway stop by thirty blocks?” Yes. But where World to the West fails to be a shining example of exploration is in the game’s core structure. The world is bright, cheeky, and filled with ups, downs, and turn-arounds that are mostly fun. If you could go through the game as one character, this world would be immensely enjoyable to fly around in. There are secrets hidden all over, there’s plenty of environmental puzzles to solve. Some of them are the simple hop-skip-jumps to get past, while others require a bit more thought. The world and the puzzles to navigate are absolutely the best aspect of World to the West, but it is categorically hamstrung by the mechanics of the game’s characters, and the abilities that each tout.

The game boasts four characters: The Mindbender, the Teslamancer, the Orphan, and the Strongman. Each has their own defined style of exploration and combat, along with their own quirks and idiosyncrasies. It breaks down that each character has unique way to travel through the environment; the Teslamancer can “blink,” the Orphan can skate along self-propelled ice skates (it makes sense in game?). When they’re introduced in their chapters, the tailored slice of traversal is fantastic. It feels great, it moves along at great pace that feels rewarding, and it is simply fun.

Take away that tailored slice and thrust these characters into the world at large. Fine. Until you get to a point where you get stuck and then need to switch characters: find Totem, switch characters, hope that you have a Totem near your first character or hike the same road all over again. World to the West does not deliberately obfuscate a character’s path–there are options available that you can (or eventually can) move each character throughout all environments. However it is excruciating in the endgame, to a point where the game may have been ruined for me.

I will be (minor) spoiling a bit of the latter portion of the game so skip out if you’d like to go in blind. Here we go: When you are sent on the last bit of your adventure, you make your way to an underground area that is blocked off by several layers of doors that need a certain amount of batteries to unlock. These batteries around hidden throughout the corners of the world. The game never tells you that these batteries are at all important to the completion of the game along the way. So, you quite literally run into a wall near the end of the game to go on a fetch quest. And you’re not going out for a few batteries–the first boss requires you to collect a total of fifteen batteries.

You can pay the in-game currency to get some points on your map where the batteries are hidden, but they’re just blips. Which is fine under normal circumstances. But let me repeat: you are physically unable to open the doors without running around for these things. A little bit of direction would be more than appreciated. This is where the game fell apart for me.

All my gripes with the switching of the characters, running around until you run into a wall to then go back and switch characters and run all around again, come to a head here. There is no tailored exploration. The world is open to all four characters, but the batteries that you have to find are not. Try to get as much as you can with one of the four characters. Stall. Rinse and repeat for hours. I don’t understand the padding that developers may feel they need to do–make its budgets. We spent this money, make sure someone gets ‘X’ amount of time with it. Either way, it is there anyway, and it took out all the fun of the game.

Not only did the fun I was having with the game dissipate, but this is where the faults in the design of the game came to fruition. I found myself wondering about all the other games that make you backtrack, the Metroidvanias, the Zeldas; hundreds of games employ backtracking. The ones that employ it while still feeling fresh and great, I felt had something in common: the “badass” feeling. You walk around Hyrule loaded to the brim with high level equipment that no amount of enemies can stop you; your Dash in Castlevania is so powerful you can whip through each room at hyper speed and still kill enemies. Bloodborne will beat your ass into bonemeal, but you’ll eventually–git gud–get that level 10 Ludwig Holy Blade, and laugh your way from Yharnam to his castle.

You never get the God Complex in World to the West. When you’re fighting the same enemies throughout the game, and every encounter is the exact same, adding four to five to six hours of finding batteries is atrocious. To describe the combat more is to say it’s extremely hit or miss. I’ve seen “soft combat” be used to described certain games and I suppose it’s not a bad definition. It doesn’t feel good. Only the Strongman has combos of any sort, and they aren’t particularly effective because you can start a combo and an enemy can walk through it without consequence sometimes. The Teslamancer is really the only other character that is effective in combat. Both the Mindbender and the Orphan use different abilities to subvert or escape combat. The Mindbender in particular has the ability to “capture” enemies and use them in combat. Stuff like biting with a squirrel, riding a baboon creature with large claws–it’s fun, but still doesn’t feel great.

I want to go back to above where I felt that World to the West would have been better with a smaller scope. I still feel that way but I don’t necessarily believe in that concept. Personally, I’m always a shoot for the moon person; go “the underdog” kind of person. Commendation should go to Rain Games for going so big on their second game. They will get better. Their games will get better. And that’s being people who make creative endeavors. At least in a perfect world.

Bringing this game to the Nintendo Switch is a smart move–bringing any game to the Switch is a good idea (wink wink). There are some noticeable frame drops in large areas or areas with several enemies, but from what I’ve seen of the other versions, it doesn’t look to be too drastic. I played about an hour in Handheld mode and the rest in Docked mode. Initially I thought that Handheld mode had a serious performance issue but perhaps it was just at that time, subsequent Handheld use proved to be approximate to Docked mode.

When World to the West is doing things right are in the chapters where you have a quick, defined goal. You’ll run through events like fighting in an underground boxing ring, liberating a group of small orphan boys, and participating in a trials/race competition. The music is interesting in some areas where others I wish there was more. The underground mines in particular reminded me of the Lost Woods theme and I was sent for a nostalgic whirl. Some style choices like the ridiculous amount of vignetting were incredibly distracting in dark areas, and only added to the frustrating that was playing the game.

World to the West, in the end, is a good three hour game that takes ten hours to complete. It’s charming and goofy, but the way the game unfolds, the oddball charm escapes itself and there isn’t enough “stuff” to fill the areas that need to plug the padding. If you had a five foot hose and ran water through it, four feet of it would be springing leaks. What the game proposes itself as in the first half is nowhere near what the game plays as in the second half. Perhaps a second run through of the game would be an entirely different experience. The NieR crowd just screamed “thank you!” But World to the West was such a struggle to crawl through that I think it will be quite a bit of time before I consider dipping back into it. And by then, I’d have forgotten everything to do anyway.

If you got here and are still wondering, I don’t mind The Chronicles of Riddick.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.

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Blue Isle Studios have announced that their massive online sandbox RPG, Citadel: Forged With Fire, is finding inspiration from the wildly popular Wizarding World of Harry Potter with their new Broomstick League update coming on March 7th. One of the most striking elements in whole magical world of Harry Potter is the popular wizard sport known as Quidditch; the soccer-style game played on broomsticks. This Broomstick League update to Citadel: Forged With Fire introduces a new sport to the world that shares quite a few similarities with the magical franchise.

Broomstick League takes teams of up to 5 players each and transports them to a soccer/football-style field. Each team flies about on broomsticks and implements new passing and shooting mechanics to score a goal in either a large main net for 1 point or on smaller horizontal nets for 2 points. There are currently no Golden Snitch auto-win equivalents in the Citadel world, so practice those trick shots if you want to attain those bragging rights.

Since Citadel is an open world sandbox, player are able to build their own stadiums to their liking and field their own teams. This opens up the possibilities for players arranging their own in-universe divisions and leagues for some interesting gameplay dynamics. The brooms and armor used during games of broomstick league are also fully equipable in the main game; allowing you to rep your broomstick team in quests. For Harry Potter heads that have been craving a quidditch experience since the middle of the road Harry Potter Quidditch World Cup game came out in 2003, Citadel: Forged With Fire offers an experience you can’t get anywhere else.

The Broomstick League update hits Citadel: Forged With Fire on Steam Early Access on March 7th. Citadel: Forged With Fire is also currently in development for the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One.

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Today, independent UK developer/publisher Rebellion unveiled a brand new gameplay trailer for their upcoming Battlezone 2 remake entitled, Battlezone: Combat Commander!

This awesome new five-minute “What is Battlezone: Combat Commander?” video offers a thorough breakdown of the gameplay, features and modes included in the remastered PC strategy classic.

Battlezone: Combat Commander allows you to take command of treacherous sci-fi battlefields, all while constructing bases, harvesting resources and ordering units from the cockpit of your hover-tank – in which you’ll also fight in epic mechanized battles! Mixing a classic RTS design with epic first-person tank combat, this game is like nothing you’ve played in the past decade…or two.

The challenging single-player campaign sees you leading humanity’s resistance against the Scions, a dangerous new threat from the far reaches of space. With branching sub-campaigns and the choice to switch which side you want to fight for, you can take control of the Scion forces and their mysterious shape-shifting battlecraft.

This fabulous new remake will also provide substantial multiplayer content, with 8 modes of face-melting action for up to 14 players. Players can also scrap it out in co-op and versus modes, with play available both online and via LAN. Amazingly enough, cross-play between Steam and GOG Galaxy is also fully supported.

And once you finish what the developers have prepared in the main game, you can then tackle the game’s myriad mod content. Battlezone 2 has been a fan favorite for nearly twenty years and members of that community are already creating epic new content for Battlezone: Combat Commander. Imagine jumping into new maps, assets, HUDs, vehicles, custom scripts and much more, both for single-player and multiplayer when you are ready to see what other players have created!

Battlezone: Combat Commander launches Thursday, March 1st for GOG and Steam.

Mercenary Kings is a multiplayer, 2D, side-scroller released back in 2014 for the PC and PS4. Mercenary Kings Reloaded is the expansion enhanced version of this same game, recently released for Nintendo Switch, PS Vita, and the Xbox One with the addition of new content, new playable characters and a new shine. You play as a team of mercs enhanced by a serum called Mandragora Serum, developed by Dr. James Neil. The serum gives them super-human strength and extraordinary regeneration, which they need to combat C.L.A.W., a terrorist organization hell bent on world domination.

The game opens with C.L.A.W. kidnapping Dr. Neil in an attempt to force him to recreate the Mandragora Serum to enhance their soldiers. When the Kings successfully rescue Dr. Neil, they find out that they were too late! C.L.A.W. had already enhanced their soldiers making them more of a problem and that’s just the beginning.

Mercenary Kings has some unique gameplay mechanics that help to modernize the retro side-scroller; the game offers player customization, expansive weapon choices, and perks that add different buffs and abilities. All these features made Mercenary Kings feel like a brand new game that’s also a throw-back to 80’s retro games. The missions could sometimes be repetitive but they all were pretty fun. And to add to what I mentioned about the gun customization, one of my favorites being the Flusher, its a toilet. Or the trombone allowing you to murder your enemies with a marching band instrument. All these fun guns really added to my enjoyment.

I thought multiplayer was a little hard to enjoy because there didn’t seem to be a match-making system that would connect you with players of a similar level, so at a low level, I would constantly find myself with players that were much higher ranked. Which leads me to the second problem with the co-op. Most of the time you wouldn’t be the host and only the host can select the missions, which relates to the first problem. The high-level players I were matched with made the missions we played immensely difficult.

The plot, while humorous, wasn’t a big factor; this isn’t a game designed to be a smash hit for character development. The two new characters – buff lady Frigg and cute robot C-Zar – are a nice addition, though more notable for their speed-defying jumping and fall-slowing thrusters, respectively, than their personalities. Having four characters to choose from in a 4-player game makes identifying sprites notably easier, especially in such a fast-paced game.

The graphics were…good, to be fair, it’s really hard to judge a game designed to be retro 8-bit style. Some of the level designs were fun and refreshing, a nice change of pace from the straight-lined maps side-scrollers are known for. The developers spent a lot of time designing the maps to not be repetitive or annoying I, for one, really appreciated the details.

Tribute Games definitely dedicated many hours and lots of thought into character design and boss design. One of my favorite bosses was Blitzhound K9, which is a tiny dog controlling a giant robot dog that shot rockets out of its butt. Yeah, you read that right. Just one more thing that enhanced my experience in the game. As for the music, I liked it but it drove my fiance insane after a while of listening to it. The music was the cherry on top for me, possibly because it drove my fiance insane or because it was a catchy, 8-bit music.

Mercenary Kings was a lot of fun for me, I enjoyed the gameplay overall even though I did have my problems with it. I liked all the different gun combinations and the different bullet effects. I think that the missions, though repetitive occasionally, were enjoyable. The biggest problem I had with Mercenary Kings is multiplayer. Tribute Games needs to patch a matchmaking system to mitigate the effect of a Level One doing Level 25 mission. Maybe in the future add on some new missions or a game mode, something to KEEP it refreshing. Overall, I recommend this game. Maybe if you’re still on the fence you might want to wait for it to go on sale. But for $20 USD I think you will be happy if you buy this game.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.

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