Fallout 4 Review - Radioactive Frame Rate.

By Sam Coles:

Fallout is a series that I like but I don’t love because most of the time they have glaring issues which people seem to sweep under the carpet and say “What do you expect it’s a Bethesda game”. I find that is a terrible excuse because if any other company were to do that they would be crucified. Fallout 4 swayed me when I first saw the E3 trailer earlier this year, but has it swayed me to like this game? Yes and no, but unfortunately more towards no, but it’s not a bad game let me get that out in the open. 

Fallout 4 at the start of the game takes place before the massive disaster that is World War 3 and you start off in your family home where you must create your character in the bathroom mirror whether it be male or female. This great because the customisation is great fun to play around with whether you want to sculpt yourself into the game or make a monstrous abomination. This will also sculpt what your infant child looks like as, you also get to choose your name and your robot butler calls you by that name depending on how many names they have logged, subtle details like this are great. The nukes finally start to fly and you must flee to the Vault where you are then cryogenically frozen for 200 years, you awake after your slumber and go for the surface only to find that Boston is ruins, so you must start your adventure of survival.

Throughout Fallout 4 you’ll be exploring cities and settlements where you’ll converse with other survivors whether they are friendly or hostile. This is the thing I like about this game with the conversation system for starters your characters speaks and plus the conversations feel more organic and I think it helps with the cinematic angle in the conversations rather the static nature of past Fallout games.

For the most part though you’ll be trudging the wasteland and getting into skirmishes with bandits, super mutants and other mutated wildlife. Sometimes they’ll drop some rare items such as armour, weapons whether they’re melee or firearm and medicinal and other crafting supplies to help you on your journey. The game handles like a decent first person shooter when you’re in combat for the most part, it does feel clunky still which is a bit of an issue because the collision detection can be eerily precise sometimes. If you don’t want to play it like a shooter you can go back to the old school way of playing Fallout with the VATS system, where you can slow down time and you can pick parts of the body to blow to pieces and there is a percentage of what your chances are of hitting the target so it's like the old dice roll systems of early CRPG's.

Remember you have to survive in this world and maintain your health because there is no regenerating health so you have to keep yourself in peak physical condition by using Stims and food. You can be injured too where you can cripple your arm which will make your aiming more Waverley or you can hurt your leg which will make you limp. I like this aspect because you constantly feel vulnerable every step you take because your next step can see you legs blow off by a trip mine.

It’s not all shoot everything because for the most part it’s best not to get involved because sometimes you’ll be out numbered, plus if you decide to take the passive option you’ll be rewarded with currency, more info about a quest or new gear, so think before you shoot. Sometimes this will help you gain allies as you travel the wasteland as they can help you fight, carry some of your inventory or even give you information about a certain area, so you don’t have to go alone.

The presentation is good, but not great let me get the positives out of the way first. The game nails the wasteland look with ruined buildings to the rotting corpses that have been there for decades. The atmosphere is fantastic where you can sit there and listen to hear nothing but the eerie soundtrack play in the background, the game gets creepy when you visit the vaults. In terms of atmosphere it's fantastic!

Now in terms of the technical aspects of the presentation I'm not impressed. The textures are very muddy especially textures on clothes they're very low res and something that wouldn't be uncommon on a Xbox 360 or PS3. This game has horrendous bugs and frame rate issues well on the Xbox One version, but I have heard issues on PS4 and PC as well.

I've had frequent frame rate drops especially in urban areas where it would drop to single digits this really happens when there is fire everywhere and there is a quest where you're inside a warehouse and there is fire everywhere, which lead to slide show movement. I don't understand how no one has addressed these issues I always get the comment “It's a Bethesda game what do you expect”. No. You can't say that for one company and not for the other because if Ubisoft, EA or Activision released a game in this state you would be shouting to the hill tops, but just because it's Bethesda you give it a reassuring hug, when you should be saying this is not acceptable.

I've had bugs with the conversation mechanics as well where the main character would just stand there like an idiot with no button prompts to carry on the conversation and I also had several crash back to the dashboard as well.

When the game is running fine which isn't often the game is great but the constant stuttering really sucks me out of the world and the constant crashes make want to throw my controller. Just because it's Bethesda doesn't make them any different from any other video game company they should be criticised just as much as Ubisoft or EA etc.

Fallout 4 is a fun experience when the game runs properly, but I can't look past the performance issues that it has so I don't see myself going back to this game yet until these issues are straighten out.

Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition - A Destroyed World has Beauty.

By Sam Coles:

Darksiders is a series in my opinion that is really underrated and I know people berate it for being an M rated Zelda clone, in which I reply with. Yeah so what? How many games do you see that actually copy the Zelda formula? Not many and to be honest if you're going to do an action adventure format with blade based combat, why not take the simplistic nature of Zelda.

Darksiders II originally came out on the Xbox 360 and PS3 back in 2012 which was the follow up to the 2010 release. This time however you no longer play as War one the horseman of the Apocalypse, but instead you play as his soul harvesting brother Death, who looks like a more muscled version of Marilyn Manson. The story for this game is that you must help your brother War because he got into trouble with the Chard Council in the previous game for setting off the Apocalypse off too early so you must try and restore the world back to normal in order to save him.

This game is an adventure game where you roam the world collect treasure, slay monsters and grab new abilities, but it also splices in elements from RPG's such as armor and weapon loot with different stats whether it be better or lesser than your currently owned weapon. You also have a skill tree that you can upgrade various abilities such as Death's Reaper form where he turns into the traditional Grim Reaper and he can deal more damage, or his teleport slash where he can strike multiple enemies within a short teleportation jump.

Gameplay is fairly familiar if you've played any of the 3D Zelda games and God of War. It takes the Z targeting from Zelda and the frantically over the top hack and slash action from God of War so you can mix two types of weapons in a combo with pausing to switch them out. The combat is super responsive and satisfying although the camera can freak out a bit in tight areas when you're locked on so you get a face full of wall texture.

You’ll also be doing a lot of platforming as you traverse the land and dungeons. I must commend the game for this because it’s one of the best climbing controls that I’ve used because it’s not awkward, it’s snappy and you don’t perform leaps of faith and hope you land somewhere safe. For example if you’re climbing a pole and you want to jump to another pole then you press a button to reach and not awkwardly point the analogue stick in that direction and hope your character reaches out. Take note Assassin’s Creed and Uncharted.

The visual presentation is a mix bag in terms of the environments; some areas came look beautiful with vibrant colours such as the starting area where you’re wondering the tundra with your horse. However some areas can look really bland and bury this seems to be the dungeons only with their grey and brown hues that aren’t very interesting.

Darksiders II is a fun adventure game with interesting puzzles and great combat. If you’ve played this game before I don’t see any point in revisiting this game, but if you missed it the first time round and are looking for a decent game to fill the time on your Xbox One or PS4 then I would say pick it up.

Dragon Quest Heroes Review - Hack and Slash Fun!

By Sam Coles:

I don’t know if this is a new thing at the moment but the guys who make the Dynasty Warriors series seem to be making games with their formula with different skins of other existing game franchises. First they did The Legend of Zelda with Hyrule Warriors and now we have Dragon Quest Heroes. Does it work? In short yes!

The story of Dragon Quest Heroes is set in the world of Arba where monsters and humans both co-exist and get along with each other. Until a mysterious spell suddenly turns them against humans and begin to attack the humans for no reason. So you must journey through the land and fight your way through hordes of monsters and destroying them in the most outrageous and over the top way possible. It’s what you would expect from a Dynasty Warriors style game. You can pick between two heroes that you’ll primarily control, however you can assume direct control of the other characters during a battle as it has the classic party system.

The gameplay if you haven’t guessed already is a hack and slash game in the same vein as Dynasty Warriors as it is made by same guys. Like Hyrule Warriors you’ll travel to locales that you know from the Dragon Quest universe, as well as getting into big scale battles with waves and waves of enemies from the games even those deceivingly adorable slimes.

How it generally works you enter an area where you take down a wave of enemies until the game tells you to stop, but portals will appear which keeps you on your toes and you have to kill the portal keepers. This makes you think about how you tackle a battle especially when you’re defending an object or person because the portals are generally at the back of the map far away, so you have to leave objective vulnerable for a small amount of time. You’re not always stuck in small spaces fighting these monsters you get to explore large rolling green hills exploring and fighting monsters to gain XP and unlock new weapons. Now and again you’ll fight large bosses which will require different strategies such as using ballista’s etc. Each boss fight is fresh and varied which will not leave you bored.

It’s not just a hack and slash game it acts like an RPG like the other Dragon Quest games. What I mean by this is that you gain XP which is standard fair in most action games these days, but you have to assign points to each of your party members to keep them powered up. You also have to check their items and weapons to make sure they’re up to par with you and the enemies you’ll encounter next. After each mission you’ll be transported back to camp which is a hub area where you can interact with other characters, learn more about the world, buy new equipment and assign skill points to your party members when it’s quiet.

The graphics are bright and colourful with a beautiful cartoon style which will help it age better in the coming years. The characters visual styles are all unique and different with their own funny personality traits for each. The game runs at a buttery smooth frame rate of 60 frames per second during gameplay sections which is key for this sort of game because you need that quick reaction time.

Dragon Quest Heroes is a wonderful spin off to an already fantastic game series which has great action and doesn’t take itself seriously which is nice to play a game that is not serious in a sea of games that are gritty and violent. If you have a PS4 grab this game you won’t regret it.

Metal Gear Online Review - Stealth Action With Friends

By Sam Coles:

Metal Gear Online is what happens when you take the singleplayer stealth gameplay and you add 15 other people in a fun and sometimes chaotic game. Does it work? For the most part yes it works very well in a multiplayer environment.

First you must create your character and select a class, you can use your character that you created at the start of the campaign of The Phantom Pain or you can make a new character if you want to. You have three classes to choose from which complement each other if they’re distributed evenly in a team:

·        The Enforcer: These are guys who are going to be laying down most of the firepower during firefights as they’re heavily armoured and carry LMG’s, however they are slowest out of the three classes as they carry heavy weapons.

·        The Infiltrator: If you like close quarters and sneaking around then this class is the one for you as they specialise in CQC skills and sneaking around the outside of the map, they’ll be very useful for objective based games.

·        The Scout: If you choose this class you’ll be the eyes and ears for your team as you stay back and survey the area by spotting enemies and providing sniper fire.

You can level up your character bit by bit which will unlock new weapons and gadgets for your character. You can unlock gadgets such as the stealth camo which make you partially invisible for a few minutes which can be very helpful during objective based games to the cardboard box which is to be honest useless. You have an array of weapons to choose from such as pistols, SMG’s, assault rifles, LMG’s and sniper rifles to non-lethal options such as tranquilizer guns and stun grenades which offers a different style of play.

You have three game modes that you can choose to play:

·        Bounty Hunter

·        Comm Control

·        Cloak and Dagger

Bounty Hunter is Team Deathmatch but with a twist. You kill enemies to score like any other deathmatch mode, however every time you get a kill a bounty is added on your head each time you gun someone down. If you see someone with a high bounty you could shoot them, but if you knock them out and Fulton them you gain more tickets and the amount depends on how high their bounty is. I like this because you can turn a match around if your team is losing; it makes you play in a non-lethal style like the singleplayer campaign and makes the game balanced.

Comm Control is another twist of the Domination mode from games such as Call of Duty or Gears of War etc. You have an attacking team that has to use the uplink points to speed up the download of the intel that they’re after. The defending team must keep those points on lock down to stop them from downloading the intel. It’s fun but it’s not anything that I haven’t seen before in terms of multiplayer.

Finally we have Cloak and Dagger where stealth which is key to winning, well on the attacking team anyway. How this works is that the team that is the attacking team have unlimited stealth camo and must steal discs then take it back to their base and upload it. I hear you saying “Unlimited stealth camo! Easy!” Well you’ll be wrong because if you’re spotted you’re stealth camo will be disabled for a short time and you must hide until the heat calms down. The attackers will only be armed with tranquilizer guns and that’s it and you can knock enemies out where you can either Fulton them or stick a knife in their throat.

Now I have a couple of negatives with Metal Gear Online and the first one is that there is a huge problem with stun grenade spamming especially in the Comm Control mode because you’re given 3 stun grenades which is too much in my opinion. The second is that there are not enough game modes there are only three and it gets boring fast, they need to add more which I expect they will do in a future update.

Metal Gear Online is fun addition to already great game Metal Gear Solid V The Phantom Pain, it blends the stealth gameplay from the singleplayer and puts it into a multiplayer environment and it works. I wish there were more gamemodes, but overall it’s a fun addition. 

Star Wars Battlefront Beta Review (Xbox One)

By Sam Coles:

We’ve all been waiting for a new Star Wars Battlefront game for the best part of 10 years now, but finally we have a new one on the way brought to us by DICE who most famous for the Battlefield series. What I’ve experienced of this beta so far is that it’s ok but nothing mind blowing, but it has balance issues with Walker Assault which I’ll get into.

Let’s get the good out way first to soften the blow with the negatives I have with this beta. The presentation is fantastic it’s what I would expect from DICE in terms of visual fidelity. The environments look beautiful of what I’ve seen so far from the crisp snow on Hoth to the blood red canyons of Tatooine. Even down to the explosions and damage that guns make when they hit walls, vehicles and people you see sparks fly everywhere creating this chaos with the battle that you would expect. It’s nice that the game runs at a blistering 60 frames per second for the most part, but however it does only run at a resolution of 720p on Xbox One in the beta.

As per usual in the sound design department at DICE they’ve nailed it! They’ve mixed the sounds of the Star Wars such as the blasters and Tie Fighters with that Battlefield sound, so it sounds like they’ve added in the grunt of a real firearm with the noises of blasters. It helps you get sucked into the environment with chaos around with the explosions and the shouts of your follow soldiers.

So now let’s get into gameplay and features of the Beta. 

You have three modes to choose from:

·        Walker Assault

·        Drop Zone

·        Missions: Survival.

Walker Assault was a great Idea but however at the time of this review when I played it, it was horrendously unbalance and is always in favour of the Empire. I don’t think I played a game as the Rebel Alliance and won Walker Assault. So here is how Walker Assault works, you have two AT-AT’s slowly pushing up trying to stop you from turning uplinks on, which is a similar vein to Rush from Battlefield. This is a great idea on paper it should work right? No it does not work well at all because the Walkers take too long to destroy and I’m not saying make their health low but make them a tad easier to destroy. The reason why I say this is most of the time when you’ve destroyed one AT-AT the second is already at the shield generator. So I wish they would balance this before it launches on the 20^th of November.

Drop Zone is nothing too special two teams fight over drop pods that are randomly dropped around the map and you have to defend them for a short amount of time to gain power ups. I liked playing this mode but my problem is that it’s not anything that I’ve haven’t played before and in my opinion it’s a bit run of the mill.

Now Missions were very controversial because DICE said that they’re not including a single player campaign, but they said you can play missions single player. What mission do we get in the beta? Bloody horde mode! I thought we got over horde mode after Gears of War 3 I don’t understand how this mundane mode is still so popular? You fight off waves of enemies that increase in difficulty over and over agian, mowing down enemy after enemy in the same spot just isn’t fun it’s a snore fest.

So let’s talk gameplay when you’re out on the field and power ups etc. The gameplay is competent you shoot at the enemy and they eventually die, but don’t hold down the trigger for too long because the blasters over heat. There is a small mini game where you can do a sort of active reload in the same style of Gears of War to skip the wait of the gun cooling down period.

Now the main thing about this game in terms of operating vehicles and assuming controls of heroes of villains is annoying. So how it works with vehicles is that you’ll find small blue icons which will be in the shape of said vehicle which is a pain to spot in whiteness of Hoth. This is annoying because using vehicles is no longer a choice and becomes a scavenger hunt to find them. The charm of the old Battlefronts is that you could be a specialist with certain aspects such as being a pilot of ground vehicles or providing air support from an X-Wing or Tie Fighter, but it’s not an option in this game. The Heroes and Villains system works the same so anyone can be Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker without earning it like in Star Wars Battlefront II.

So after each match when you level up you’ll gain currency to unlock “Cards” for your loadout such as thermal detonators or jetpacks. My main issue with this is why don’t you let me have a grenade from the start? That is also a huge issue as well because you get infinite thermal detonators! I’m not joking and yes there is a cool down time but it runs down far too quick and I noticed a massive problem with spamming especially in the hanger on Hoth. So I was in this situation where I was constantly dying because of the grenade spamming this needs to be addressed they need to slow the cool down time by a mile or the logical thing to do is to give you limited amount of grenades.

Overall Star Wars Battlefront is a bit of a mess at this point in the Beta phase with the unbalance nature to Walker Assault to the boring horde mode in Missions. They need to get into gear and address these problems because over wise they’re going to have some very unhappy gamers. 

Call of Duty 2 - Still Holds Up After 10 Years.

By Sam Coles:

When you hear the title Call of Duty these days you'll get a sigh of fatigue from gamers or people saying that it is crap when it's not when they're functional games, but what do I know. Back in 2005 Infinity Ward released a fantastic launch title for the Xbox 360 simply named Call of Duty 2 and it wasn't modern or futuristic, but it retold a grounded biography of the missions that actually happened during World War II. It was a tense campaign which didn't resort to theatrics to keep the players attention, but instead put you into tense and dangerous situations that the soldiers of the time would have experienced.

So how the campaign is set is that you step into the shoes of soldiers from 3 different countries and different frontlines such as the Soviet Union during the Nazi invasion of Stalingrad, the British during the campaign of North Africa and finally the Americans in France Normandy. Each campaign is well paced with really tense moments such as the American campaign when you’re scaling the wall in Normandy as you have Germans trying to gun you down from the top of the cliff.

So if you’ve played any of the Call of Duty games you’ll be very familiar with the controls in this game although you can’t sprint in this game, but you don’t really need it in this game as your character has a decent pace. You can aim down sights which will help shoot precisely with a variety of interesting weapons of the period. Such as the M1 Garand for the Americans, the Lee Enfield for the Brits and the Papa Sha for the Soviets which was nicked named the burp gun because of its lead output.

Visually the game still holds up with its different locales, which keeps the game fresh, it also helps that it has multi-layered objectives so you’ll get several objectives such as destroy mortar crew A, B and C instead of doing objective after objective. You’ll fighting your way through the snowy tundra streets of a ruined Stalingrad, to the burning sands of North Africa and the rural country side of France. The detail in each area looks great for game that came out 10 years ago and it still holds for what it was trying to do back then.

The negatives that really have with this game is that it resorts to the old fashion way of progression by endlessly respawning enemies until you’ve hit the checkpoint, this really stands out as a flaw when you play this game on higher difficulties especially veteran. The other is that the A.I programming of other enemy soldiers has a habit of spamming grenades all the time and it makes you run around the battlefield like an idiot and it’s worse on veteran as you have 10 grenade markers on the screen.   

Call of Duty 2 is a game that doesn’t resort to theatrics to hold your attention like it does now, but instead gives interesting and tense situations to fight through with a lengthy campaign that is challenging and intresting. This game is a blast and still holds up today and is super cheap these days and easy to find so pick it up if you a spare few quid in your pocket.   

John Woo's Stranglehold - Gloriously Over the Top

By Sam Coles:

These days’ games always aspire to tell good stories with a deep meaning but sometimes I just want some good old fashion hardcore violence that has a simple context, which you then gun down everything in your way. Well John Woo has your back with his game that got a lukewarm reception back in 2007 with his game Stranglehold. I don’t know why it got a negative reception because in my opinion if you take it for what it is a fun high octane action game with bullet time and fantastic guncarter then you can easily enjoy it.

John Woo’s Stranglehold is a sequel to his 1992 film Hard Boiled which had the no nonsense cop named Inspector Tequila who is a bad ass who likes to get his hands dirty and work outside of the guidelines of the law to get things done more efficiently. You’re on the hunt for a police officer, who has gone missing well he thinks he has gone missing, but he is dead and no that is not a spoiler it happens at the very beginning of the game. The story is very clichéd but it sets up the context for the carnage you’re about to embark on.  

The gameplay with this game is fun and over the top with guncarter and throwing Tequila around the level which by the end of level you would think his rib cage would be destroyed with the amount of times you make him dive from the top of a staircase 50 times in one sitting. The game keeps score of your over the top antics with a star rating and how many enemies you have gun down in a row which makes you want to get the best combo you can with this score system, which is very addictive. You have the slow motion gun play like the John Woo movies so you’ll be diving through the air with duel pistols with other acrobatics such as sliding down banisters, riding on trolleys through a busy market place with duel SMG’s or flying down a zip line. The possibilities are varied and it keeps the game flowing as it encourages you to keep moving and not stay in one spot.

Graphics wise it’s not bad for a game that was released in 2007 and the game is very advanced for the time with its destructibility with the physics because you can tear an environment apart, and it is especially fun when you have a shotgun and you destroy a restaurant.

Overall John Woo’s Stranglehold is a great action game and if you take it for what it is a generic action game you’ll have a blast with it and plus it is super cheap these days, you can pick it up for about £2.