Steven Ritz
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COGConnectedLatest Reviews
I generally like sandbox games. I don’t love them, but I like the idea of having control of what I can build or do. Yet sometimes a game becomes a little too ambitious and doesn’t always give you enough toys to play within the sandbox. Boundless is a recent entry into this genre, and one that falls a little short of meeting those lofty goals it sets for itself. Boundless has been in early access for the last 4 years and has a lot to show for the official release. Still, sometimes a player driven world leaves newcomers feeling a bit underprepared.
The multiplayer is where the longevity of the game lies and I’m hoping it carries on much longer than the first Titanfall. Many of the concerns people had in the first game have been addressed, namely the number of titan chassis available. Three titans has turned into six, each with a distinct loadout this time. You can customize how your titan looks as well as some passive, but the active abilities are now all tied to a titan class. At first glance this may seem needlessly restrictive, but it makes for a better gameplay experience. You can now tell exactly what an enemy titan is capable of by the way it looks, allowing you to make better strategic decisions. Well, that’s the theory anyway. I tend to rush in head first and swing my giant mech sword with limited success but hey, I’m not going pro. My teammates won’t even notice a lot of the time since deaths aren’t reported to team statistics, something that’s been happening recently with online games. All that’s reported is your kills and score, how much you contributed to your team rather than how much you contributed to the other team. This helps reduce some...
Rarely does a game live up to its hype. I had been skeptical for a long time now about just how good Overwatch was going to be. It seemed good and Blizzard has had a great record for making incredibly detailed and polished games, but most of the games they’ve made over the last decade have been iterations of the same IPs they’ve been working on years. Could they really pull off a new genre for them set in the world of a failed MMO? They absolutely can and they certainly did.
Gameplay in Battleborn is the real meat so it needs to engaging and rewarding. I can safely check the engaging box but I feel hesitant to check off rewarding. I have a lot of fun playing Battleborn, something I often take for granted on highly competitive games where progression up the ranks often overtake the experience. Battleborn is certainly competitive but it doesn’t feel stressful like MOBAs. Even when I’m losing I’m still able to put up a fight and have some fun (unless it’s an all-out stomp which have been pretty rare in my experience). Even the campaign is engaging enough for me. True, some missions are far more fun and interactive that others, but I kind of like the big-arena horde-mode style of gameplay Battleborn offers. Heroes level up at a pretty steady clip in campaigns so the pacing always feels fair, but my one complaint is I can’t safely check off that campaign missions are always rewarding. Completing some missions can grant you a new hero and those feel rewarding at first, but there isn’t much reason to replay many of the missions other than for the fun of it. If you were completely averse to PvP...
Some horrible catastrophe has left the captain of a space station floating in space in a damaged EVA suit. As the sole survivor, you must navigate the wreckage and find a way to get the escape pod working again. Throughout your journey you’ll find clues as to what exactly happened and try to piece together what really happened to the crew and the station. ADR1FT is the latest title from Three One Zero, published by 505 Games, in which you control a stranded astronaut from a first-person perspective, either with keyboard and mouse (or controller) on a monitor, or an Oculus Rift plus controller. I sadly don’t have my hands on an Oculus yet, so this review is based on the traditional version, but many of the story and mechanical aspects will remain the same no matter how you experience ADR1FT.
Space games sure seem to be a hot commodity these days. You have Elite: Dangerous for your exploration and dogfighting, FTL: Faster than Light and its DLCs for your rogue-likes, Star Citizen for all of your hopes and dreams of what you want a space game to be, and a dozen others to cover the various other aspects of life in space. But there aren’t many that focus on fast paced capitol ship battles. Enter Rebel Galaxy, a space western (think Firefly) with capitol ships that handle similar to pirate ships. With such a large number of recent space games, I’m always skeptical of the newcomers. I can now say that Rebel Galaxy did not disappoint. The game features a deep story and exciting battles between large ships, bickering factions which you can befriend or antagonize, chances to customize and upgrade your ship, everything you would expect from an action adventure space game.