In my 36 years on this planet I have come to a very simple realization: I’m absolutely horrific at sports. I’m big and gangly and my arms and legs never do what I want them to. So when you can’t play sports physically, it makes sense to have a go in the wonderful world we call video games. Which has brought me to another realization: I’m not very good at video game sports, either. All this to say that the review you’re about to read on my time in the Mutant Football League is going to be as hilarious for you to read as it was painful for me to write. Did this ruined my enjoyment of the game? No it bloody hasn’t and I’m about to tell you why.

Mutant Football League is a semi-reboot of a classic Genesis title. It was actually one of the only sport games I had in my collection back then, being one of the few sports video games that I played a lot and actually didn’t completely suck at (after an absolute age of practice). So I obviously had to get my mitts on this 2018 iteration and see if it was worth a punt. Not to mention one of my favorite games of the past few years, Bloodbowl, is essentially MFL except it involves dice rolls instead of real time play. I thought it might be interesting to see how the two compared as they’re both a lot of violent fun and…oh, they’re both spoofs on the same sport: American football.

The first thing I need to tell you is that I know absolutely sod all about American football, other than it’s kinda like our rugby just with more armor. Showing me screen after screen of little colored blobs, crosses and lines isn’t very helpful. I’d much prefer the approach of “pick up the ball and run that way, dummy!” I know where I stand with that.

Between every turn there’s a round of playmaking. This will determine what the rest of your team does and is broken into several types of plays, which differ depending on your team. For a sports fan, this is brilliant as it allows for planning and a certain amount of strategy. For someone like me, it’s a case of push-something-that-looks-clever-and-roll-with-it. I know this isn’t the best way to play, but this kind of tactical thinking requires a different kind of brain power than what I’m used to. I’m playing for the action, so it’s not as important to me personally.

You choose from a bunch of starter teams – with more unlockable ones to come for winning matches – comprised of a mix of mutants, aliens, skeletons, robots and the like. Then you go out in an attempt to play football. As you’re playing a team of psychopaths, it’s sort of a massacre-waiting-to-happen first, sport second. From here, American football rules apply. However, while trying to win the match, you’re also trying not to get killed off by your opponent or obliterated by one of the booby traps on the pitch. Excuse me, field. If any players get offed mid-game (and believe me, they will), they will need resurrecting between matches.

To enhance my chances of winning, I’ve been playing Mutant Football League in season mode. I’ve chosen a team called the Croakland Invaders, which is mostly made up of skeletons. I have to admit I’m not faring very well, but I’m having fun being useless so I’m happy to be left to my own devices. You can also choose to go to the playoffs or jump straight into the Mayhem Bowl dependent on what takes your fancy. There is also the option for online play. I haven’t touched this personally yet. I don’t mind being crap, but I don’t want the rest of the world seeing the train wreck that is my play style.

The last person you want to be in the middle of this mess is the ref.

The players have character … when they’re alive.

Nothing about this game is fair.

With a year like 2017, which was filled with heavy hitting new game releases like Nier: Automata, Breath of the Wild, Yakuza 0, Night In The Woods and many more totally engrossing game worlds and experiences, it’s nice to have a “palette cleanser.” Sometimes I need a game that doesn’t demand my time, but rather casually suggests to hang out. For myself, Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth – Hacker’s Memory perfectly fits this craving. It’s not going to wow you with crazy new gameplay mechanics, the visual fidelity feels right at home on a PS3, and the story is a wacky, convoluted mess of futuristic technobabble – yet all these flaws that should sink this game into obscurity seem to only add to its charm.

Hacker’s Memory takes place at the same time and place as the first Cyber Sleuth game. Players will explore the near-future metropolis of Shibuya, Japan, as well as Cyberspace EDEN; an incredibly advanced form of the Internet where users are represented by avatars in an ever-expanding digital realm (think Sword Art Online, Ready Player One, and so on).

The story focuses on Keisuke Amazawa, a former high school student who’s EDEN account has been stolen by an unknown hacker, who then uses his account to commit a crime using his name. Keisuke’s goal is to find this hacker, take back his original account and clear his name. To do that, he becomes a hacker himself, joining a small hacking “gang” called Hudie who will help him follow the breadcrumbs to this rouge account stealer.

Your character will spend a majority of their time sitting on their ass in front of a computer. Just like real life.

This is Fei. She has Princess Leia hair buns and likes to attack people with her signature Digimon, Bumblebee Man.

Ready your walkmans and unsupervised children, because Devolver Digital and Fourattic’s beloved little 80s-themed darling, Crossing Souls, is now available on PS4 and PC.

As a rule, unless you’re some sort of sicko, zombies probably don’t make you feel particularly amorous. Techland is trying to change that with their community event “Undying Love.” From now until February 18th, Dying Light players have the chance to help the community complete 1,000,000 total quests in co-op. Once this goal has been reached, players will receive a sweet crossbow and buggy skin to show off just how lovey-dovey you can be in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.

Zombies enjoying a drive-in movie together. Now I’ve seen everything.

I don’t know any 42 year olds who look quite that good

High fantasy is a tricky genre to navigate and can be full of narrative pitfalls. Often times entries in the genre tread too close to cliche, or delve too deep into their own lore all at once and lose the audience. It takes a strong storyteller to reach into the genre and pull out something genuinely special. Recently, I was able to get my hands on a 60 minute preview build of the upcoming Ash of Gods from the small dev team at Aurum Dust and I walked away feeling a deep craving for more.

Right off the bat, the striking art direction of Ash of Gods impresses. The bold, colorful palette makes the character art leap off the screen and the animation is surprisingly fluid. Ash of Gods’ art felt like a living cartoon, similar in the vein of Dragon’s Lair and more recently Banner Saga; high quality, hand drawn Disney-esque aesthetic abounds. However, don’t let the Disney comparison lead you to draw conclusions that this is a bright and cheery game. The very first cinematic features tons of graphic sword battling on an epic scale that was really a sight to behold.

After the beautifully rendered battle, Ash of Gods shows off a taste of its gameplay in the tutorial. Aurum Dust describes the game as “a turn-based RPG featuring a rogue-like storytelling and CCG elements.” Obviously, this is a lot to take in at once, but the game does a good job of showing off its basic gameplay mechanics quickly and letting the player explore their options.

A standard battle in Ash of Gods takes place on a tile grid similar to tactical RPGs such as Final Fantasy Tactics. On the grid you move your selected character and position them for whatever attack or buff will benefit them the most. You have two bars to watch for on every character, Health and Energy. If a character runs out of energy they are susceptible to 2x attacks so you have to watch out when you sprint across the play area and unleash power attacks. You can choose to attack an enemies health or energy directly, whichever puts you at the advantage depending on the enemy.

In the preview I got to use a few different character classes such as warrior, fighter, archer, assassin, etc. each with a different array of attacks. I was able to put my warriors up front and buff their defense while an archer sat in the back row and pegged enemies with arrows and an assassin was sent around the side of the play area. According to Aurum Dust, the full release of Ash of Gods will include over 50 character classes that have different relationships to each other in battle, for better or worse.

The card game elements come into play in Ash of Gods during the battles. When you choose your load out you can choose a hand of 5 cards to play at any moment during your turn. In the preview build I only got to use 2 different cards, an elemental attack and a buff. Functionally they work similar to spells, but they aren’t tied to any specific character and can be played during any of your characters turns. It was an interesting addition to the experience, but I personally thought that claiming it as a CCG element may have been a bit of an overstep. However, this could be expanded upon greatly in the final build.

Ash of Gods is a very narrative heavy game, as one would expect from a high fantasy RPG. While the orchestral score is very beautifully done and fits the theme of the game, I feel that a solid amount of voice acting would lend a lot of credence to the vast amount of story that is told. The game’s big bad comes in the form of evil deities known as reapers that are seeking to cleanse the land that reappear after years and years of people thinking they had been eradicated. You control a ragtag group as they fight against seemingly insurmountable odds. Not to generalize too much, but it’s a similar setup to Game of Thrones and the Whitewalkers, but there is definitely enough in the lore to separate the worlds.

Speaking of Game of Thrones, Ash of Gods features rogue-like storytelling which means that any character can die at any time. Nobody is protected by a layer of plot armor. I found this out first hand in the last battle I had in the preview, when the character that I just spent so much time learning about was killed due to my poor tactical decisions and was gone forever.

Unfortunately, due to the short nature of the preview, I wasn’t able to get a good sense of how this perma-death mechanic would ultimately play into the overall narrative, but I am for sure interested. It’s a definite risk in killing off a main character, even more so when you could theoretically kill off every perceived main character and keep the story going. Ultimately, my main takeaway from the preview of Ash of Gods is that I need to play more Ash of Gods. As all of these elements tie together in interesting ways, I am infinitely curious to see the finished tapestry.

This preview is based on an early access copy provided by the publisher.

The post PREVIEW / Ash of Gods (PC) appeared first on That VideoGame Blog.

Hearing that Dragon Sinker by the publisher KEMCO was going to be ported to the PS4 and Vita excited me. Originally, the two-year old game was released for mobile devices, and early last year, a port for the 3DS came out. KEMCO has a track record of releasing some decent RPGs, and I saw that Dragon Sinker has a great overall rating within iOS and Android.

As a rule I don’t like survival horror games, or actually horror much of anything for that matter. It’s not that I don’t like the premise. I really love a good ghost story when it’s written well and H.P. Lovecraft is one of my all time heroes. The thing is, this is a different kind of horror. Real horror is something that keeps you up at night because you’re given a very basic premise full of big shady bits that let your brain fill in the gaps. What I can’t stand is jump scares. I want to switch off my console or put down my book and then go and quietly wee myself thinking about it two hours later. I don’t want to feel like I can’t play the game without throwing the controller through the TV screen because I don’t know what’s going to startle me next. As the title I’m about to tell you about seems to be more creepy and less jumpy, let’s come to Past Cure, a rather interesting dark, psychological thriller that has just seen the release of its new story trailer.

So what is it, then? Well, as I’ve just mentioned we’re entering the world of the dark and the creepy in Phantom8 studio’s story-driven supernatural thriller. This is a cinematic experience which challenges players to use mind-bending mental abilities to survive; not to mention a mastery of gunplay, melee ability and stealth.

As the story goes … Ian, a former elite soldier, reappears after years of being missing, somehow changed. The soldier’s brother shelters him in a secluded safe house in a bid to help him come to terms with his memory loss and the effects of the experiments he was forced to endure during his absence. In an attempt to tap into the hidden powers of the mind, Ian’s captors left him scarred by unrelenting nightmares, visions and unstable powers such as time manipulation and telekinesis.

You take on the role of Ian and set out with him on his quest for the truth. Thirsting for revenge, you will embark on a hunt for the masterminds behind this conspiracy. Plunged into a criminal underworld, searching for leads, you will have to use your newly found powers to survive. Each use of these powers will leave you further detached from reality and reveal the presence of a much darker power at work.

This is a game that will leave you wondering exactly what is real. Ian will shift between real world action packed combat and a nightmarish dreamscape in which he will have to use his puzzle solving skills and survival instincts to win out. Past Cure also gives you a degree of freedom in how you play. If you don’t want to go toe to toe with the bad guys with a mixture of bullet and fist, you are invited to take the stealthy approach, where evasion tactics and slick take downs allow you to outwit and outmatch the enemy from the shadows.

If you like a bit of mystery, a playable demo of Past Cure will be getting released on Steam next week. In the mean time, I’ll leave you with a teaser trailer for the game, which will see release on PC, PS4 and Xbox One on the 23rd of this month.

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is a direct sequel to the critically acclaimed CRPG Pillars of Eternity. Fans of the classic CRPGs like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale felt that PoE was a spiritual successor to those games, this being further supported by the fact that members of the development team at Obsidian Entertainment worked on these games at Black Isle Studios. Deadfire is a crowd-funded success riding the nostalgia wave since it was announced last year.

We got a chance to take Deadfire out for a drive (or trip around the lake), and I have to say, I like what I’ve experience thus far from the preview build. While Deadfire carries over a lot of the elements of its predecessor, the big addition is ship combat. The islands of the Deadfire Archipeligo are separated by lots of wet water, making navigation via ship necessary. You’ll be out to sea for a good chunk of time, exploring and charting out some of the islands that are both inhabited and not. But these waters are not tame, as pirates are wandering the high seas looking for plunder and booty. With a nice big ship cruising through these waters, you will not be able to scuttle around undetected – prepare yourself to take these pirates on mast to mast.

Not actual illustration of combat from the game, but this is what it felt like!

EA and DICE. A partnership forged in the fiery pits of hell, if you happen to be a Star Wars fan; the profile of the controversy surrounding the latest Battlefront title has been so enormous that it’s made us all forget about the pair’s other shooter set a long time ago (though not in a galaxy far, far away). That’s right, folks, it’s time for yet another Battlefield 1 DLC. This week, it’s the nautically themed Turning Tides.

As you may know, the Turning Tides expansion for Battlefield 1 has been split in half, with one portion of the release having already been available since December of last year. The other half was made available as of Saturday, hence the frantic stabbing at a keyboard in the early hours of the morning.

Anyway. Let’s take a peek.

Maps

There are – as usual – four new maps to explore and dominate in the Turning Tides roster. The first two, released in December, are Achi Baba and Cape Helles. Both take place in the Dardanelles channel, during the Gallipoli Campaign of 1915. Cape Helles is an uphill struggle from beach landing to enemy trench lines; you’ll spend most of your time running the channels carved into an otherwise barren hillside. Achi Baba, on the other hand, doesn’t feel particularly nautical at all, and instead poses a unique mix of ancient ruins and steep-sided ravine pathways that open out onto objective points.

Arriving more recently are the last two maps of the Turning Tides expansion. Heligoland Bight is an absurdly small map that consists of a tiny archipelago in the middle of the North Sea – expect to be drawn toward the lure of several varieties of naval vessel as you end up bored of running in circles on land.

Zeebrugge takes place on the Belgian coast, with the action squashed into a ruined industrial jetty that juts out into the sea by quite some way. For those of you who have played Battlefield 4, think Paracel Storm with less palm trees; for those who haven’t, brace yourself for that fish-in-a-barrel feeling.

Game Modes

The Turning Tides DLC introduces a twist on the classic Conquest game mode: named Conquest Assault, the only real difference is that the teams are split into Attackers and Defenders (the latter of whom control all points at the start of the game). Oh, and you’ll notice that the first two maps to be released in December have been paired off to form the Gallipoli Operation.

On the subject of Operations: the shiny new Operation Campaign event mode has been released in tandem with this DLC, pairing off chronological Operations and offering a unique Battlepack should you reach the required number of play-throughs within the time limit.

Weapons

Ah yes, the fun bit. There are 8 new weapons that have been introduced as a part of the Turning Tides DLC, across all four classes. If you’re an Assault kind of player, you’ll be interested in the M1917 Trench Carbine semi-auto rifle, as well as maybe the Maschinenpistole M1912/P.16 if you’re into that sort of pathetic pea-shooter. Medics have had more luck, and will definitely want to get their hands on the Farquhar-Hill with Storm and Optical variants.

Support players can unlock the M1917 MG, complete with bipod and huge magazine size; Scouts are spoiled for choice, being able to equip the Type 38 Arisaka Infantry and Carcano M91 Carbine rifles depending on their mood. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys using melee weapons, moreover, you’ll love the new Naval Cutlass and Grappling Hook. Just don’t use them on me, please.

Vehicles

Turning Tides wouldn’t be called Turning Tides unless it were chock-full of nautical machinery. Aside from the new coastal batteries and hefty cannons, there are 2 major additions to the vehicle roster to be aware of: the L-Class Destroyer and the C-Class Airship. Both vehicles carry four soldiers and bristle with explosive weaponry, acting as lethal, miniature versions of the enormous Behemoths that turn the tide of the fight so often on Battlefield 1.

Anything Else?

Turning Tides introduces a new playable faction, in the vein of previous DLC; play as the plucky British Royal Marines and marvel at just how jolly splendid this whole war business really is. A new Elite Class has also been introduced: the Infiltrator is able to activate sprint speed boosts and call in artillery strikes, and acts as a spawn point for all friendly players. Oh, and he’s packing like seven grenades, which is nice.

Of course, there are also a metric ton of new unlocks, specializations, and assignments to keep you entertained once all the major talking points have been exhausted, but I’ll let the official website do the heavy lifting there. If you’d like to take a look at the full list of patch notes check out this official page (and this one for the most recent update); the game has had a definite overhaul in terms of weapon statistics and mechanics, one that is well worth checking out.

That’s all, folks. Keep an eye on the site for an in-depth breakdown of the final DLC for EA/DICE’s Battefield 1, the ominously-titled Apocalypse, but also for news of a rumored new Battlefield game due for release at the end of this year…

Oh. Right. The most recent pack, Turning Tides, was released in part on December 11th 2017 for Premium Pass owners; the second half was released a few days ago on February 3rd. The Season Pass is currently priced in the region of GBP £39.99.

The post Battlefield 1 Turning Tides: DLC breakdown appeared first on That VideoGame Blog.

Introducing the Minigun!

Epic Games has just released the new Fortnite 2.4.0 Update, complete with new minigun and a few other treats! The light-ammo minigun can be found in supply drops and chests in the online Battle Royale. The minigun fires at about the same pace as the SMG but allows for a longer shooting time. This addition should mix things up for you if you have been spending a lot of time in the limited edition Sniper Shootout mode, which is now over. It may soon have a successor, though.

Players will notice an Battle Royale quest referring to something called ‘Blitz mode’. Epic has written in the patch notes that this game mode is not available yet. They also intend to remove the Blitz quest from players task boards.

A few other changes in this update include an option to toggle off the auto-run feature, new items to the item shop (including a shark pickaxe), and a reduction in how often the high-rarity suppressed pistols show up. Sorry pistol fans, you’re going to have to search a lot harder to find it now. Check out the Fortnite 2.4.0 patch notes here for a complete list of all changes!

Known Bug Issues

However, with this new update a few bugs have occurred. More significantly, console players are encountering a resolution issue that stretches the game incorrectly, causing it to exceed the bounds of the screen. Shortly after the patch went live, Epic Games made a post on Reddit confirming they were aware of the errors and were working to correct them as soon as possible. Epic writes, “Fixing this is a priority for us.” There is no confirmation on a fix date yet, but be aware that not all console players have experienced this glitch. Download the update soon! Make sure you login ASAP, as players have access to a handful of freebies as an apology for the downtime.

The post Fortnite 2.4 Update is live with new minigun! appeared first on That VideoGame Blog.