Activision announces Skylanders GiantsPosted on Tuesday February 7th, 2012 at 9:09am by Destructoid
Activision has today revealed a follow-up to last year's surprisingly enjoyable Skylanders, continuing the idea of toys that can be scanned into an active videogame world. Skylanders: Giants is an all-new game that will introduce a new batch of "giant" Skylanders that are more than twice the size of the original figures. There will be eight new figures, and some will feature new "light technology" that will see them light up when placed near the "Portal of Power" peripheral. Eight new regular sized Skylanders will also be introduced, and Giants will be compatible with all the toys already released for last year's title. In terms of the game itself, Giants promises wider worlds, with new challenges and battle modes. The titular giants will also have gameplay and abilities that reflect their large size. I really liked Skylanders, so I'm eager to see how this one fares. Hopefully the gimmick hasn't worn thin already!
Review: The Darkness IIPosted on Tuesday February 7th, 2012 at 6:06am by Destructoid
The Darkness was a rather solid first-person shooter and a good example of a license being properly handled. Developed by Starbreeze Studios, it featured some bold gameplay choices that didn't always pan out but managed a solid game worthy of a sequel. Picking up two years after the events of that game, Jackie Estacado has become the de facto organized crime leader of New York, and his time since has been spent keeping The Darkness subdued. Now, a new enemy has targeted Jackie and plans to take his gift to use as a weapon of mass destruction. In order to save himself and his family, Estacado must again unleash The Darkness and cut a bloody path through the city.
This is a case of an unremarkable story being handled remarkably well. The surface-level plot line in which Jackie fights against this new enemy doesn't keep its secrets long and quickly becomes little more than one bloody conflict after another. Meanwhile, a second story thread slowly develops which changes Jackie's goals dramatically in the game's final act towards a rather predictable conclusion. Were that all The Darkness II had going for it, things would be dire. But the presentation is more than up to the task of keeping things interesting. Pacing is very deliberate in attempting to keep the player on their toes. While some developers are content to throw in a scripted explosion sequence or two as a mid-level surprise, Digital Extremes will completely change the emotional tone on a dime, nail it and then throw the player right back into the fray when they're done. Little touches here and there plant seeds to reward observant players and demonstrate that there are greater aspirations than the standard licensed game.
Effective use of cel-shading gives a feel evocative of the comic books from which these games originate and makes it surprisingly easy to get sucked in. The effect does wonders to keep a game all about being in the dark remain vibrant and lends itself well in a practical sense to the gameplay as everything is easily distinguishable. It also sounds quite nice. In combat, guns are noisy, screams are bloodcurdling and Mike Patton feels bigger than life as the voice of The Darkness. Voice acting overall is stellar and while the plot may not be particularly original, the dialogue is pretty good and made all the better by some top-notch performances. It's a fairly short solo campaign, clocking in at around six hours, and fun from beginning to end with a very strong emphasis on killing people. Even at the outset controlling Jackie feels like a bit of a power trip with his tentacles in play. Mapped to the bumpers, the right tentacle bashes either vertically or horizontally while the left allows Jackie to grab objects or enemies and throw them. In concert with firearms in his hands, he's lethal at any range. Killing enemies and eating their hearts gives Jackie dark essence which may be spent on new and improved abilities with bonus essence awarded for more violent kills.
These abilities are both fun and useful. Grabs can become executions and reward a kill with health, ammo or even a shield made of pure dark essence (as well as some stomach-churning animations). Gun channeling buffs your guns with more damage, infinite ammo and rapid-fire for a few seconds and can eventually do the aiming for you. The bashing tentacle can fling enemies or sprout blades for a big damage boost. When upgrading, abilities are organized in a wheel with each quarter having its own skill tree relating to different types of powers. A steady flow of dark essence ensures upgrades are always there for the taking, but the game's length is such that it would be quite challenging to unlock much more than two trees to the point at which their more valuable powers become available, providing replay value in attempting different configurations of powers or achieving Jackie's full potential in the "New Game +" mode.
Also supplementing the solo campaign is the multiplayer "Vendettas" mode. Playable with up to four people (or solo, if you like), each controls one of Jackie's four supernatural enforcers. These characters are each centered around one of Jackie's Darkness powers which they can use as well as support abilities that contribute to the team. Like Jackie, they collect dark essence from kills and spend it upgrading their own unique ability wheels. Unlike Jackie, they aren't a whole hell of a lot of fun to play. With only one real power at their disposal each, the lack of variety makes the combat significantly less interesting. At around two hours, the Vendettas campaign is worth playing through, offering a different set of missions which run concurrent to Jackie's story and add some additional flavor, but could easily be dismissed. Greater challenges can be found in The Hit List missions, arena-style boss fights where the odds are much less in your favor. These are really difficult, to the point where it feels necessary to have more people helping to keep some of the heat off (or, you know, just Jackie). The Darkness II succeeds far more than it fails. The single-player experience features some genuine emotion in its narrative, something games which don't feature skull-extricating tentacles rarely manage to accomplish. And while the Vendettas cooperative multiplayer content feels lackluster by comparison, it's not bad either and serves to pad out this short but otherwise delightful game.
Review: Kingdoms of Amalur: ReckoningPosted on Tuesday February 7th, 2012 at 12:12am by Destructoid
Sometimes, the best way to become a blockbuster videogame is to act like you already are one. That seems to be Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning's modus operandi, and the gambit is paying off. Despite the big names attached to the project, very few people paid attention to the game until recently, when it started confidently presenting itself as a game that everybody wants. The power of persuasion at its finest. However, once you have everybody's attention, the hardest challenge awaits: being good enough to deserve your own contrived hype. Kingdoms of Amalur wants to play with the big boys of the role-playing genre, and even branch off into MMO territory. Now it's got to prove it has the right stuff to make that happen.
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (PC, PS3, Xbox 360 [reviewed]) Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning does not beat around the bush. It knows exactly what it wants to be, what it wants you to feel, and what a Western RPG is when you boil it down to the bare essentials. It is a game designed, from beginning to end, as little more than an indulgent power fantasy, pure escapism where players get to be anything they want to be, and feel awesome doing it. After creating a character using streamlined menus that allow them to pick a race, a gender, and some pre-set facial features, players wake up in the Well of Souls after having been killed and mysteriously resurrected. It's fairly typical RPG fare in what is a fairly typical RPG environment created by none other than R.A. Salvatore. It doesn't take long after the amnesiac hero's awakening before he or she is swinging swords, firing off arrows, flinging spells and stabbing unaware guards in the back. The small tutorial cave that guides players through the basics is over and done with fairly swiftly, before the budding hero is tossed into a colorful fantasy world with one ultimate goal: be amazing. There are three basic schools of combat in Amalur -- Might, Sorcery and Finesse -- and each one fills a stereotypical role that will instantly be familiar to those who have played almost any other RPG. However, unlike most other games, players do not have to pick a class and stick to it. As a "Fateless" hero, one is able to sculpt and shape their avatar into the perfect killing machine, designed entirely around their favored play style.
Might, Sorcery and Finesse each have their own skill trees, and every time a character gains a level, skill points can be invested wherever the player desires. There's no need to commit to a single tree, either, so if a stealthy wizard is required, skills in Finesse and Sorcery can be obtained. Similarly, players can put points into all three skill trees to create a balanced hero, or a single tree for a truly specialized individual. Fate Cards are unlocked depending on how many points are sunken into each skill tree. They bestow powerful new augmentations to better complement the chosen play style. For instance, putting points into both Sorcery and Might will unlock such Destinies as Battlemage and Paragon, which rewards physical mage combat by regenerating Mana every time a player takes damage. Should somebody want a character that purely specializes in Might, they'll unlock Destinies that boost melee damage, while Finesse characters can increase their sneaking and dodging skills. Completing certain quests also unlocks "Twist of Fate" cards, which confer permanent bonuses. For a game so focused on choice, it's important that players don't regret their decisions, and Amalur puts a strong emphasis on the power to undo skills and start over. For a large sum of gold, characters are free to visit Fateweaver NPCs and reassign their skills whenever they want. All skill points spent up to that moment will be returned, and may instantly be reinvested for slight alterations or complete reinventions. The ability to re-spec isn't new to RPGs, but Amalur turns it into an art form, an integral part of a game that revolves entirely around creating one's perfect vision of a fantasy avatar.
All of this choice would mean nothing if Amalur were not an enjoyable kingdom to inhabit, but it thrills me to say that 38 Studios has created a rather splendid game to house its ambition. While it's not the most endearing game world, Amalur is beautiful and, at the very least, quite interesting. It's a world cobbled together by well-known tropes and populated with ideas borrowed from other, more venerable games, but the blend is as sweet as it is familiar. This isn't a game that sets out to innovate or break new ground; it simply sets out to be good, and that's definitely a goal it meets. The world is littered with quests that can be undertaken or ignored at one's discretion, and the main story is complemented by a number of faction quest lines, each with its own self-contained plots and rewards. As one would expect, there are hundreds of tasks, ranging from simple fetch quests to dungeon-crawling assassinations, and while there's nothing unique about the litany of jobs on offer (in fact, some of the factions almost seem robbed from The Elder Scrolls' various guilds), they're all quite pleasant and they all contribute to the overarching purpose of gaining wealth, power and infamy. There's plenty of content, to boot. I have currently logged over forty-four hours, and I have many unfinished missions on the docket. Naturally, combat is a huge part of the experience, no matter which way you choose to fight. Players can carry two weapons at once, and can also select up to four special abilities or magical spells that are instantly deployed by a simple button press. General melee is a simple hack-n'-slash affair, although as new skills are unlocked, slightly more complex combo moves can be pulled off. Different weapons are better suited to different characters, with sorcerers able to use staves and ranged scepters, melee warriors gaining access to large, heavy weapons, and finesse experts wielding arrows or daggers. One face button is assigned to each weapon, so they can be switched on the fly to create versatile attack patterns. My own character, a specialist in Sorcery and Might, can send enemies flying back with a hulking greatsword, then continue to attack them at range with a pair of chakrams. Choosing two weapons that complement each other can make for incredibly gratifying action.
Special attacks and spells are used as seamlessly as weapons, allowing one to instantly stop swinging a sword and start pounding the ground to create earthquakes or fling balls of electricity. Performing well in combat fills a Fate meter that, when full, can be activated to unleash Reckoning Mode, which slows down time and vastly increases the amount of damage dealt. In Reckoning Mode, enemies are whittled to a sliver of health and left stunned, prone to a devastating execution that can generate bonus experience depending on how hard the player mashes a button. If multiple enemies are stunned before the execution is activated, then the experience bonus is chained. It's a simple system, but a pleasing one. Combat is both fun and challenging, with a focus on efficient blocks and dodges that creates a more tactical edge than most button-mashing RPGs offer. Enemies are aggressive and players will need to be on the defensive just as much as the offensive. While it's a noble effort to inject a little depth into the game, it can become incredibly annoying. For instance, player attacks can be interrupted at any time, even if they're halfway through a lengthy spell animation. Meanwhile, many enemies can pull off attacks uninterrupted and will power through even the most deadly of abilities. Perhaps the worst -- and most common -- grievance is had when fighting multiple enemies with fast attacks. It's not uncommon to get hit by an opponent and knocked right into the attack of another one. Some enemies even have their attacks timed to create almost seamless chains, with one blow ending just as another begins. For melee characters, this can mean blocking to an almost farcical degree, with there being almost no gap in an opposing assault. Just wait for an encounter with spiders, with those in melee range taking turns to attack while those positioned further away effortlessly lob projectiles. The coordination of the hostile forces can sometimes border on bullying.
One other gripe with the combat is that special abilities, even when leveled up, feel remarkably weak. Even those skills designed to deal with crowds have rather small attack radiuses, and when they hit, they seem to do little damage. They're also really good at missing their targets, while enemy skills home in and hit with 100% efficiency, even readjusting their trajectory mid-flight should you dodge! It would also help to not be restricted to four mappable skills at the maximum. One soon learns that it's a waste of points to unlock more than four active abilities, as they simply won't be able to use them all -- not without constantly navigating through menus to swap them out. A final annoyance is the map system. The on-screen mini-map is practically useless, since it doesn't account for the lay of the land and the rather exasperating invisible walls that fill every path. The world map also uses a tiny gold ring to indicate where an active quest is, and it can be maddeningly tough to pinpoint. These irritations are minor, but they will be with the player from beginning to end. It can grow incredibly frustrating, as players are often at the whim of luck, hoping the enemy attacks are aligned just right (or wrong, in their case) enough for an opening. However, when that opening is presented, that's when it becomes worth the hassle. Thanks to combat animations that feel incredibly meaty and impactful, a successful assault is intensely enjoyable. The game often reminds me of Monster Hunter, especially when using the oversized greatwords and hammers, as each attack feels weighty and bone-crunching when it connects. Once players level up and gain new attack combos for their regular weapons, the enemy oppression lightens up a little as well, allowing for a more even, and brutally enjoyable, battle.
Outside of skirmishing, there are more passive utility skills that can be enhanced with each level gained. Taking the form of many genre staples, characters can learn to pick locks, increase their mercantile abilities, or learn one of the crafting trades. There are three crafting systems, one for weapon creation, one for alchemy, and another focused on creating gems that can be slotted into equipment. To craft items, players need to find components in the world (or salvage them from loot, in the case of blacksmithing) and take them to the designated crafting system. Fashioning a new item is a simple case of choosing the right parts and hitting the button. It's rudimentary, but elegant, and well worth the time. All of this takes place in a beautiful world, with character design by comic book artist Todd McFarlane. The human characters have a unique blend of realistic proportions and cartoonish features to create a rather pleasant cast that avoids the "uncanny valley" trappings of similar games. A varied palette of bright, contrasting colors makes this one of the prettiest-looking console games in recent memory, while a typically stirring soundtrack keeps things exciting. The voice acting is a little more spotty, with some decent performances marred by terribly forced accents. At its heart, Kingdoms of Amalur doesn't offer much that hasn't been seen before. Earning gold to buy more armor and weapons, performing quests for experience, battling monsters and growing one's skills to become a godlike master of war -- these are all things we've experienced a dozen times before. However, never before has a power fantasy been delivered in such a direct way before. Kingdoms of Amalur doesn't waste time taking things slow; it doesn't let too much waffling get in the way of acquiring more gold, more experience, more loot and more skills. While there's something faintly sterile and alienating about Reckoning's world, the focused purity of its intentions is reason enough to keep playing. You'll want that new magic helmet because it looks cool and will give you more health, not because you care very much about using it to save the city. The game is all about you -- how tough you feel, and how bad your ass is.
It's an honest, undiluted admission to what Western RPGs are, and I can respect that. Rather than try to be too deep or too meaningful, Reckoning simply presents players with a direct feed into the vein of empowerment and expects you to gorge until you're bursting. While the combat can often undermine that feeling of acquired strength, there's still enough rousing success to be had to keep one returning for more. For anyone who needs little more than a sword, a shield, and some monsters to annihilate, there are few games more committed to delivery than this. For those who find themselves addicted to looting dungeons and crafting increasingly powerful electric resistance gloves, there are few games more willing to serve the goods. For those who want an RPG free of pretense and utterly devoted to indulgence, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is your game.
SOE wants to court you but you'll have to work for itPosted on Monday February 6th, 2012 at 7:07pm by Destructoid
The cold, bleak month of February has never struck me as particularly romantic. But my frosty heart is often melted by trinkets, so I'll take what I can get. With Valentine's Day drawing near SOE has decided to court the players of a few of their MMOs. Instead of sending them inappropriate pictures and hanging around their houses late at night in the conventional manner, SOE is offering quests, contests and rewards. If they do start stalking you it has nothing to do with their Valentine's Day celebrations and you should probably just call the police. In Free Realms players can celebrate the Festival of Hearts which features a pixie romance, themed areas and quests for special Valentine's Day items. In Norath it's Erollisi Day and Everquest II's players can aid the Sisters of Erollisi in fulfilling the call of love, if that's carnal love or something else, I don't know. Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures is just getting some marketplace items, maybe it doesn't deserve as much love? You can find the dates and some more information on their respective sites. Vessel coming to PC March 1st, consoles at a later datePosted on Monday February 6th, 2012 at 7:07pm by Destructoid
Salivating for that next inventive indie platformer? Strange Loop Games' aquatic puzzle-platformer might just be able to quench your thirst. Similar to Fluidity and the Pixeljunk Shooter games, Vessel presents environmental and physics-based puzzles that are solved through the manipulation of animated liquids. In addition to that, players can expect level design reminiscent of Metroidvania titles coupled with bright, vivid visuals and gorgeous lighting effects. Vessel will be making its way to PC in just a few short weeks, releasing on the first of March. If you're holding out for a console version, the title will eventually be trickling down to the PlaySation Network and Xbox Live Arcade at an unannounced later date.
Sanctum 2 is aiming for PC and consoles in 2013Posted on Monday February 6th, 2012 at 4:04pm by Destructoid
Did any of you play Sanctum? It's an enjoyable mix of first-person shooting and tower-defense maze building, and while I haven't been back to play the newer content, it's a recommendable game. According to Joystiq, it sold some 300,000 copies on Steam and a sequel is coming to PC and consoles in 2013. Can't say I saw that coming, but I'm excited. Perhaps the success of titles like Orcs Must Die! and Dungeon Defenders on consoles has made it easier to convince publishers to fund this stuff. Reverb Publishing executive producer Ted Lange is feeling it: "We all have logged quite a few hours with Sanctum and can definitively say that what Coffee Stain has in store for Sanctum 2 will blow the minds of Sanctum fans and new gamers alike." Sanctum 2 defends PC, consoles in 2013 [Joystiq] You should sign up for the Hawken beta right nowPosted on Monday February 6th, 2012 at 1:01pm by Destructoid
The wonderful-looking mech combat game Hawken will be launching December 12, 2012. (Perfect date for a marketing team, eh?) Since that's painfully far away, now is a good time to sign up for the beta. If you manage to get three friends to join in, you'll be allowed to reserve a gamertag. I'm not sure if we ever covered the news about Hawken adopting the free-to-play model, but that's happening. For a multiplayer game -- even one that looks this promising -- having a huge base of active players is key, so the decision makes plenty of sense. Meteor Games to publish high-end online game Hawken in December (exclusive) [GamesBeat] Volition dev would love a console that kills used gamesPosted on Monday February 6th, 2012 at 11:11am by Destructoid
The idea of a new Xbox that refuses to play used games may sound like a problematic, consumer-unfriendly, potentially suicidal idea to reasonable people who are capable of long-term thought, but some people are right behind it. Volition design director Jameson Durall, for example, thinks it's fantastic. "Personally I think this would be a fantastic change for our business and even though the consumers would be up in arms about it at first ... they will grow to understand why and that it won’t kill them," he wrote in a blog. "It does have it's faults that would have to ironed out, like game rental. I'm a fan of rental companies because they have to buy copies of the game to be able to rent them out and if someone likes the game, there is a chance they would purchase it for themselves. "Another issue would be with simply lending the game to a friend, but maybe they could implement something similar to what Amazon is doing with their Kindle Books lending policy. The license of the game could be transferred for a set time to another Gamertag and the original owner won't be able to play during that time. Seems like it could work. "In the end, I fully believe that we have to do something about these issues or our industry is going to fall apart. People often don't understand the cost that goes into creating these huge experiences that we put on the shelves for only $60. They also don't seem to realize how much they are hurting us when they buy a used game and how pirating a copy is just plain stealing." I love how his "solutions" to the MANY faults with this idea are ones that make previously simple acts far more complicated and inconvenient to consumers. Want to borrow a game? Transfer a license to your system? Want to rent one? Sign up for Microsoft's exclusive rental service! You'll get used to this new waste of your damn time, kids! Of course, that's the answer to everything, isn't it? When you want more consumers to buy your products, make enjoying those products as inconvenient as possible, because that's got such a proven fucking track record of success, doesn't it? Shit on your consumers, make them jump through hoops, and answer the criticism by saying, "Ah, you'll get used to it, it's not going to kill you." That seems to the game industry's M.O. right now, it's an absolutely terrible slope to start slipping down. If this industry dies, it won't be due to piracy, nor will it be to used games. Just ask the businesses that started to fail, pissed off their customers trying to fix themselves, and then died overnight. Oh wait, you can't, because they're dead. THAT's what will kill this industry, if it falls. Not GameStop, and certainly not you or I. It's when I hear these "solutions" to combating used games by making life tougher for every consumer, that I start to worry about this industry's doom. Skyrim Creation Kit finally out tomorrowPosted on Monday February 6th, 2012 at 6:06am by Destructoid
The long-awaited Skyrim Creation Kit is finally gracing Steam users tomorrow, according to Bethesda marketing mushroom Pete Hines. With this kit, modders will finally be able to create their own campaigns using the same tools that Bethesda itself uses to build the game's world. If you're a player rather than a creator, the Steam Workshop will make it easy to download and install the campaigns that others have made. With this little feature finally on the shelf, Skyrim can give you fresh experiences for as long as modders have ideas. So that's nice. Hines hinted that the Creation Kit would launch alongside a "special surprise," although we're going to have to wait patiently to get a clue about that. Posted on Monday February 6th, 2012 at 5:05am by Destructoid
Salivating for that next inventive indie platformer? Strange Loop Games' aquatic puzzle-platformer might just be able to quench your thirst. Similar to Fluidity and the Pixeljunk Shooter games, Vessel presents environmental and physics-based puzzles that are to be solved through the manipulation of animated liquids. The game will be making its way to PC on March 1st and will be trickling down to PSN and XBLA at a later date. Xitol Softworks reveals Zone The Battleground concept artPosted on Monday February 6th, 2012 at 2:02am by Destructoid
To say the market for first-person shooters is a tad over-saturated would just be pointing out the obvious. Unlike so many other genres, just having a competent product doesn't cut it. With so many great titles on the market these days, it takes something truly special to separate your game from the rest of the grey and brown bulletfests on shelves. Enter the latest Xitol Softworks and the latest game to vie for your trigger-squeezing attentions, Zone: The Battleground. While not much is known about the game itself at this point, Xitol Softworks is an interesting story. The fledgling developer started their journey into the world back in 2007 as a community of modders. Since then they've moved on from messing with the innards of Halo: Combat Evolved by becoming an officially registered company and using the Unreal SDK to work on a project of their own. Zone: The Battleground marks the studio's first effort since becoming an officially registered company last November and is announced for release on PC and Mac before the end of the year. Until then, the team is currently looking for artists and modelers and soliciting community input for the project. I'm wishing these guys the best and hoping they create something interesting and unique -- the last thing the world needs is another banal, by the numbers shooter.
Review: King Arthur II - The Role-playing WargamePosted on Sunday February 5th, 2012 at 12:12pm by Destructoid
You look at a list of new PC releases. The list is populated by arcane words and you sense strong magic at work behind the somehow familiar titles. To your surprise, the list asks you in an inaudible voice, "Do you like tactical battles with large fantasy armies, but don't know The Art of War and The Book of Five Rings by heart?" Curious, you answer "Yes." The strange list then asks you another question. "Do you like to go on text adventures while a single narrator reads the stories out loud, using different voices to mimic different characters?" Amused, you answer "Yes." "Then come play with me, my Lord," the list beckons. You install King Arthur II - The Role-playing Wargame. More than 25 hours later, you leave your computer wondering if you've received a buff or a penalty.
King Arthur II - The Role-playing Wargame (PC) Set some years after the first King Arthur, the lands of Britannia have been ravaged by magic and disaster. Something has happened to Arthur when he went to grab his Holy Grail for an occasion, critically injuring the once and future king with a wound that will not heal and shattering the Grail into many shards. As the King lies on his bed, permanently wounded but alive, hordes of the monstrous Fomorians are now laying waste to the population of Britannia and the land itself. To make matters worse, the Knights of the Round Table have disbanded to fight the new evil wherever they can and the wizard Merlin has disappeared without a trace. As Arthur's son, William Pendragon, it is up to you to embark on numerous quests to restore the Grail, heal your father, heal the land, find Merlin, and slay thousands of fantasy troops in the process.
The mix of text adventure quests with multiple paths, Total War-esque tactical battles, and role-playing elements in the form of upgrading your heroes and troops makes a return in this sequel. For the most part, players of the first game will feel right at home as they recruit massive armies, walk around an overworld map, and dispatch of opposing armies while trying not to lose any soldiers if they can help it. Along the way, King Arthur II has made some drastic changes in a few aspects of its RPG/adventure/warfare mix, and not all of them are equally welcome. For starters, the macro level of resource management of your provinces has been stripped bare. Provinces no longer supply food or gold through taxes, but now host a few locations that can be upgraded for different benefits. Castles allow you to swap units between your standing army and a pool of reserve units, villages can yield bonuses to damage or hit points for your different types of soldiers, Stonehenge-like stone circles can be upgraded to allow instantaneous travel to similar stone circles across the map, and various other buildings provide different benefits to things like magic, diplomatic relations, or allow for the crafting of artifacts. You still need gold to buy new units or to reinforce troops who have incurred losses, which now only takes one turn regardless of how many individual soldiers need to be recruited. Every turn is still one season in a year, with the winter season dedicated to building and upgrading your provinces, conducting research in a somewhat convoluted tech tree that unlocks upgrades, while the winter snows prevent all armies on the overworld from moving. Because you no longer get gold on a periodic basis, however, you need to accumulate it by fighting enemy armies, at the risk of losing troops, or by completing text adventure quests to collect gold the easy way.
Although you still need to take great care with how many losses you incur per battle lest you are no longer able to keep your army at full strength for the next encounter, especially when you are at risk of running out of gold, the difficulty in King Arthur II does not spike as harshly as it did in the previous game. Part of it is due to the incredibly linear path the sequel offers. While this is initially welcome as a tutorial to get players acquainted with all the mechanics -- and it's still a rather complex game despite the new fashion of province management -- it also removes a lot of the freedom you expect in these types of games. In many cases, progress is made by simply walking from battle to battle without really having any choice where you want to strike next. There are a few instances where a quest can be completed by taking over a few provinces in any order as long as you defeat the quest objective's army, but the overworld is largely reduced to a visual representation of getting from target to target for progression's sake. Many provinces are defended by "impossible" strength armies that have highly inflated stats, making them unbeatable until you've progressed through enough storyline quests to be permitted to fight them. When you do progress far enough, the game's "military advancement" tech tree automatically goes up by one level and all your units -- existing units included -- are upgraded to more a powerful class, while the impossible armies now suddenly have more manageable stats. It also takes a couple of hours until you can even field a second army, and by the time you are allowed access to a third army, your main army is powerful enough to wipe out anything in sight. In a way, it can feel like you are facing invisible walls that restrict your experience in a genre of games that normally benefits greatly from having the freedom to approach world domination in your own way. This new form of linearity makes King Arthur II more accessible than its predecessor, but it makes you wonder if they haven't stripped down the management aspects too far. Any management on your side on the overworld can yield benefits for battle performance, but you're hard pressed to notice the results of your micromanaging efforts. On the upside, the text adventure and tactical encounters are as fun as you'd expect and better than before.
The new engine makes the large battles a joy to behold, if you have the rig capable of displaying the graphical prowess at a sustainable framerate. Heavy infantry hold the line, archers destroy everything from afar, spearmen skewer cavalry and large monsters, cavalry smash through archers, and the new flying units pester everything on the ground as long as they aren't shot down. The victory locations from the first game make a return, but now simply provide access to spells, buffs, and other bonuses instead of acting as positions that can let you win or lose an entire battle depending on who controls them. They work in conjunction with the new magic system that protects you from losing half your army before it has even reached the enemy front lines. Both you and your opponent can have up to three heroes in your army, whose individual skills add up towards a global "magic shield." Every spell that isn't powerful enough to pierce the shield simply eats into the shield's defenses. It's a clever system that lets you focus on the tactical warfare side of things if you want, although it is also very easily exploited. With three powerful and upgraded spellcasters in one army, you can hurl fireballs at random locations and cast long range damage-over-time poison spells at enemy troops until the enemy's magic shield is vaporized. Once it is gone, it's all too easy to completely decimate an entire army with just your heroes, while the AI never truly gets a chance to oppose you, or runs into a rain of archer fire if they attempt to approach your heroes with troops. At the start of the game, you can tailor your own version of William Pendragon by answering some questions à la Mass Effect. My William was an evil Sage, a spellcaster, who could eventually cast a meteor spell that instantly destroyed all but the strongest troops within a huge area. It's fun to mess around with your über-strength wizardly trio of doom, but it can also reduce a lot of the battles in the second half of the campaign to a game of watching cooldowns tick and keeping your heroes at a safe distance, well-protected by your ranged units.
Of course, you don't have to exploit the system if you don't want to, but it's somewhat encouraged because this way you don't lose as many soldiers in melee combat, if any at all. Once you've been in a situation where you have two heavily crippled armies, no gold to combine them into a single army powerful enough to deal with an inescapible upcoming battle, and thus no way to gain more gold if you happen to have run out of quests that don't involve fighting, you're naturally inclined to do whatever you can to not lose a single soul -- if only so you don't have to revert to a savegame from over an hour ago. It's a bit like when you pull off a tactical masterstroke against an overwhelming force in Total War: SHOGUN 2, leaving you victorious with 70% of your troops instead of being decimated. Would you choose to win the same battle and keep 100% of your troops? Of course you would, but the process of doing so in King Arthur II is far less exhilirating. Still, if you play King Arthur II in a more traditional Total War style, there is plenty of fun to be had. Units can hide in forests and gain a brief damage bonus when they ambush enemies in the open, the victory locations can shift a battle either way from time to time, and it's always fun to see hundreds of soldiers clashing steel upon steel. Your units also receive stat increases from provinces or from leveling up through battle experience, but there is a disconnect between the countless minutes you spend pouring your eyes over all the numbers and the actual perceived effect during any battle. Especially when your units' "military advancement" through quest progression can instantly give them dozens of levels worth of stat increases when they are upgraded to a new class, it sometimes makes you wonder why you bothered to spend all that time tailoring them in the first place. Likewise, you can switch a unit from any category (say, archers) to another sub-class to focus on offense or defense, but the effects aren't always very noticeable. While the battles are as fun as you want them to be and the campaign is too linear for its own good, the text adventure quests are provide a much needed level of charm to the game. You are continuously subjected to the same male narrator who reads the text out loud, whether he's protraying a powerful knight, a wimpy priest, or a beautiful maiden. This guy just changes his voice to match the characters in question, which never fails to sound like the father figure who read you bedtime stories in a hilariously exaggerated manner. These text adventures also tell a story that isn't bad at all, and the decisions you make can affect your performance in upcoming battles, or your personal standing on the game's two-dimensional morality chart. This morality system doesn't affect the gameplay all that much, but regardless you still allow yourself to believe that it does for the sake of role playing, simply because the text adventures slowly make you feel engrossed in the fantasy world. I was a massive Tyrant dick son of Arthur, and all the choices I made were worth it from a role playing standpoint; benefits or impairments be damned, peasant flesh had to be sacrificed.
King Arthur II is a massive game filled with all sorts of intertwining systems. You'll find text adventures, diplomatic relations, factions that can be hired to perform tasks in an almost hidden away screen, province construction and allocation, and a dozen ways to upgrade your army's strength. It all combines into an experience that takes you by the hand as you move from battle to battle and from quest to quest. Some players who want a more fantasy-oriented Total War experience might welcome the lowered barrier to entry and the change of scenery. Others, and fans of the original in particular, might find it too restrictive. Either way, the sheer amount of tools you have at your disposal to customize your heroes and armies would've been better served in a game that encourages different approaches and playthroughs in a more non-linear fashion. Upon launch, it was also plagued by some game-crashing and progress-inhibiting bugs, but NeoCore has been quick to address most of these issues with patches over the first week. There is still some talk of performance issues on high-end rigs, which is something I can't confirm with my poor old rig. Suffice it to say that it is playable enough on an older PCs if you're not too picky about framerates in a strategy game, and it might take a while before it runs at more than 30 frames per second on any PC from the looks of it. It certainly seems to eat up more resources than it should -- even starting up the game immediately switches Windows 7 from Aero to Basic mode -- yet I found it to be playable enough even at the lower framerates. Whether or not King Arthur II is one step forward, two steps back or the other way around is going to depend on what you expect from this sequel. The streamlined campaign may raise many an eyebrow while the text adventure quests will elicit more smiles than frowns, and any fan of this genre of strategy will still spend countless hours both on and off the battlefield. It's not quite the diamond in the rough that many have hoped for, perhaps, but you'll be hard pressed to keep yourself from playing just one more turn.
You need to think about playing Hack, Slash, LootPosted on Saturday February 4th, 2012 at 4:04pm by Destructoid
Indie game dev. David Williamson's newest project was officially released to the wilds recently, and I'm definitely digging it. Hack, Slash, Loot is a turn-based dungeon crawler with an objective that could not be more plain: hack, slash, and loot your way to the end. I just spent some quality time with the demo (available here) and I'm definitely a fan of the grid-based movement and combat. As the title implies, there's loot aplenty with new equipment, weapons, or one-use items - scrolls, potions, and the like - waiting for you around every corner. Dungeons are generated randomly each time you start a quest so it's always a new experience and, much like Binding of Isaac, you can get lucky and things just might go your way or you'll get a particularly difficult draw. In the case of the latter, good luck. Take a peek at the trailer and screens, give the demo a try, and, if it's your cup o' tea, you can snag the game for $10 for PC, Mac, or Linux.
The Weekend Modder's Guide: SkyrimPosted on Saturday February 4th, 2012 at 2:02pm by Destructoid
This week, I'm not going to be talking about an older game. Rather, I'll be talking about something fairly new: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Now, the game looks great as it is, but we all know the PC can look far better than anything on consoles. With a little bit of tweaking, we can make Skyrim into an insanely hot-looking game. I'm going to skip over all of the reasons of why you should play the game this week, since you'll find tons of people talking about why you should already own Skyrim. I'm just gonna jump right into teaching you how to turn Skyrim into the beautiful game that it truly is.
Time: 2-3 hours 1. We're going to start by downloading and installing the Nexus Mod Manager. This mod manager will let you easily install and remove mods. It will create a folder in your Skyrim install directory called "mods." You'll be able to drop mod archives (.zip, .rar, or .7z files) right into this folder and install them from the mod manager. All of the mods that I am going to show you today can be installed this way. 2. Download and install the Skyrim Script Extender . Copy all of the .exe and .dll files from this download into your Skyrim directory. To make this work properly, you have to launch Skyrim from the "skse_loader.exe" from now on. Make sure you get the newest version, and that your copy of Skyrim is up to date. If a new Skyrim patch comes out it might take a few days for this to be updated to match. It can be a little annoying, but it lets you install more powerful mods. 3. Download and install Skyboost. This helps to increase the game's framerate. Skyrim is a CPU hog, and these files relieve some of the stress on your CPU. Extract the downloaded zip folder, and copy both files from the "bin" folder to your Skyrim install directory. IMPORTANT NOTE: Skyboost MUST match the version of Skyrim that you have installed. If Skyrim gets updated, you might need to delete "skyboost.asi" in order to get your game running again. Just keep checking for a new version of Skyboost if you want to keep using this mod. It's a bit of a pain, but the performance boost is worth it. 4. Download the ENB Series Skyrim Injector. This the mod that makes the game really pretty, and they are also the guys behind the insane Grand Theft Auto IV graphics mods. This is still a beta right now, so once you install this you should keep checking back for updates. Make sure you get the latest version of the injector. If you are running Vista or Windows 7 then you'll need to install DirectX 9 in order to make this run correctly. If you are ambitious, you can edit the "enbseries.ini" yourself. You can find it in your Skyrim install folder. If you are like me and you want other people to do all of the hard work, you can find a ton of nice preset "enbseries.ini" files online. I am currently using Cinematic Lighting ENB. Just replace the existing .ini file with the new one that you download. It's worth trying out different ones because each one can drastically change the way the game looks. 5. Get some mods! This is the fun and easy part. All of the mods I list below can be used together, so you don't have to pick and choose which ones you want. If you want to add more, just be careful that they don't conflict with anything else you have installed. In other words, you can't have two water texture mods running at the same time. I suggest that you stick with this list if this is your first time modding an Elder Scrolls game. Once you have these successfully running, then you can browse around for other mods. Remember, just copy these to your Skyrim/mods/ folder, and then use the Nexus Mod Manager to install them. The mods: A Quality World Map - With Roads
Better Sorting Categorized Favorites Menu
Detailed Bodies
Enhanced Blood Textures
Enhanced Horse Skins
Enhanced Night Skyrim
Glowing Ore Veins Improved NPC Clothing Intro Music Replacement by Malukah Nicer Snowflakes Real Ice
Realistic Water Textures
Skyrim Flora Overhaul Skyrim HD - 2k Textures
SkyUI
KenMOD - Time on Loading 5. Open up "My Documents/My Games/Skyrim". There are two files in here that we are going to edit. The first one is "Skyrim.ini". Open it up with Notepad add "uGridstoLoad=7" at the end of the [display] section. Now open up "Skyrimprefs.ini" and edit these values: bMouseAcceleration=0 Make sure you save all of the changes that you make to these files.
Making all of these changes may take a little bit of time, and you'll probably have to do some tweaking to get it all running right for your setup, but the investment is worth it in the end. You'll have a version of Skyrim to show off to all of your friends and the console kiddies will be mad with jealousy.
Aliens: Colonial Marines graces us with gameplay footagePosted on Saturday February 4th, 2012 at 6:06am by Destructoid
Here's a new trailer for Aliens: Colonial Marines, this time sporting some actual gameplay footage as opposed to CGI. There are plenty of hissing xenomorphs and screaming marines, which is exactly how the universe should be balanced. This trailer would excite me, except for one thing -- none of this footage is new. Everything in this video has been taken from the demo level shown at last year's E3 (and later shown at PAX). After such a long time, I was really hoping to see something new. The fact that a single ten minutes of polished gameplay has been revealed since the game was announced makes me nervous. In any case, my Alien fanboyism is still keeping me super stoked, and I hope Gearbox knocks it out of the park. It's got to be better than AvP was.
- Test Drive: Ferrari Racing Legends gearing up for spring - Metro: Last Light delayed to 2013 - Mortal Kombat Kollection comes to Steam - Star Trek Online turns 2, offers you the next Enterprise - Valve announces updates for Team Fortress 2 in 2012 - Benefits of subscribing to Wakfu outlined - 7th Guest and 11th Hour coming to Good Old Games - The Warhammer 40,000 games are 66% off on Steam - This is the only way a sequel to Snake could work - Offspring Fling is all about throwing babies - Star Wars: The Old Republic hits 1.7 million subscribers - Alan Wake on PC: Launch, tech features detailed - DRM fun: Several legit Ubisoft games will break next week - BioWare announces the first SWTOR Guild Summit - 'Rise of the Martian Bear' out now for Iron Brigade |
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