Time for a Video Review for Titanfall’s Technical test on PS4 and Xbox One!
Review
No Man’s Sky Review: A Universe of Moments
No Man’s Sky, from the comparatively small team at Hello Games, is a game balancing on a tightrope. It is both indie and mainstream, confoundingly huge and yet incredibly personal. The game is straddling the lines of two of the biggest genres that exist in modern gaming, and not quite managing to exemplify either.
Near Death Review: The Martian on Ice
You are a pilot running supplies to Antarctic Research stations. Your Plane goes down in a storm. You stumble out to try to find shelter. It’s -38C with the wind. You make your way into the nearest base. It’s abandoned.
An hour and a half later, you’re using the rope lines you’ve been planting to guide yourself through the blizzard. It’s now -80C and you can’t see anything but the mild glow of the base’s wall lamps. You ran out of batteries for your torch when you left the last shelter. You need to reach a safe spot right now.
Near Death was created by Orthogonal Games. (previously of The Novelist, a game which has been highly recommended to me) to paraphrase their own words, “it’s not a survival game, It’s a game about survival”. And it is great.
INSIDE Review
Inside is a horror based platforming game by Playdead Games. Their previous game, Limbo, is an excellent addition to any library, a game with a simple aesthetic and gameplay that doesn’t demand too much time to enjoy. With Inside, as before in Limbo, they’ve created a deeply unsettling platformer, starring a young boy who wanders through a steadily more unpleasant environment, solving puzzles and doing basic platforming challenges. If you’re good at something, might as well just iterate on it.
Pokémon Go: The Next Generation of Game
Pokémon in the real world. The dream since 1998. This app is so close to being that. And yet also so very far away.
Pokémon Go is an app for IOS and Android phones. Developed in Co-operation with Niantic, the game uses their experience with Geo-Caching (placing marks on a real map to interact with gameplay) in order to simulate the experience of travelling and catching Pokémon. The game is not a replication of the mechanics of the handheld games, instead choosing thematic and simplified versions of the systems to work for this much larger, multi-player and publicly accessible game.
Lego Avengers: Needs more Assembly.
I really wanted this game to be great. Lego Marvel Super Heroes (the predecessor to this game) was a slightly flawed, but delightfully enchanting entry in the Lego X franchise, with it’s capacity for whimsy, huge cast of Marvel Characters and a whole island of Manhattan to have characters like Spiderman and Hulk fight and wander over.
Lego Avengers is in many ways a step back.
Oxenfree: Short, Sweet and Slightly Scary.
I think I had heard about Oxenfree months ago, reading about it in passing before I promptly forgot all about it. More recently, a friend mentioned that I should take a proper look at it. I am so that glad he did.
Night School Studios’s first title Oxenfree is a supernatural horror adventure game taking inspiration from 80’s teen movies, with a healthy dollop of ghost stories thrown in. Playing out in 2.5d, with an absolutely gorgeous visual style, the player takes the role of Alex.
Alex is a high schooler engaging in the traditional rite of passage of spending the night with her friends on the beach of Edward Island. She just wants to have a good time with her best friend Ren even in spite of having to drag her new step-brother, Jonas, along. Ren even knows the stories of the island, legends which state that if you bring a radio along, you might even be able to tune into ghostly frequencies of stations that never existed…
It’s Scooby Doo meets Telltale by way of 90’s Teen movies.
It stands for Hope.
Superhero TV shows have some identity issues. Constantly being asked to prove they’re mature and meaningful, as a genre, it looks like modern shows want to follow the trend of their big screen family.
Jessica Jones is looking dark and filled with distressing plotlines, Daredevil is filled to the brim with brutal fight scenes, Arrow has more angst going on than most Young Adult shelves in the bookstore. The Flash is probably the only one that’s consistently filled with optimistic characters and hope, but as a spin off from Arrow, it’s still tied in on that CW angst tinged universe.
Supergirl is a breath of fresh air. A show that is so earnest, so sincere and positive, that it’s easy to overlook the flaws which run through it. This is a show that’s coming through the tradition of The adventures of Lois and Clark on television, (Dean Cain even playing Kara’s adoptive father) and silver age heroes of comics. It’s goofy and silly, and entirely aware that it is about a woman who can fly, shoot beams out of her eyes and throw cars around.
Star Wars Battlefront: Initial Impressions
I was just on Hoth half an hour ago. The empire was pushing through our defence as our plucky rebel alliance was overrun. It wasn’t exactly going well for us, as gargantuan, invincible AT-AT’s tore up everything around us. I was crouched in a small trench, next to the now useless uplink that had allowed our Y Wing bombers to open a brief window of vulnerability on the monsters. They were suddenly weak, able to be hurt.
But now, they weren’t. And the empire spawn points had gotten a lot closer. I focused my blaster rifle down on the column of storm troopers coming through the small valley, and opened fire, players scattering towards cover as the lasers pew pewed. I even got one I think. I was very proud of that. Then the bolts started reflecting away as Darth Vader strode forwards. Implacable. Terrifying. And then there was a flash of red as his lightsaber flew from his hand and went straight through me.
And then I respawned a few seconds later and went right back to the fight.
Battlefront is exhilarating and fantastic, a sensory overload of an experience. I have spent the last day or so playing the beta for the followup to the games that pretty much define what Star Wars is for me. I really hope that the rest of it is this good.
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Feelgood Comedy with a Serious Heart
I think some of my favourite types of story are the ones where you take a character who is fundamentally good, then you throw a cynical, uncaring and frankly horrible world at them, and watch how they react. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is this idea down to a tee. One of Netflix’s newest Original Series, it’s the brainchild of Tina Fey and Robert Carlock and the 30 Rock influences are very much noticeable in the writing and comedic style.
The programme follows the titular Kimmy Schmidt, played by Ellie Kemper, as she tries to bring her small town sensibilities and earnest nature to New York City so she can survive and thrive. It’s a lovely, conventional and heartwarming story.
Except that the title is Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. And it’s named such because when Kimmy was 15, she was kidnapped by an Apocalyptic Preacher and forced to spend the next 15 years underground in a bunker with four other women before being rescued.
Which understandably, could be pretty dark as a plot line. Repressed trauma, flashbacks, deep rooted issues and all that.
Geek Errant 