Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a game by a different developer, that manages to feel exactly the same as Borderlands 2. There are some differences like new characters and so new skill trees. Generally speaking though this game hasn’t innovated, which is fine if you liked Borderlands 2. If you thought Borderlands 2 was pretty boring, then you are in trouble. Which means that I am in trouble. Of course there’s the entirely fair question, as to why I bought this game. The honest answer to that question is that my friend has a lousy PC. So in the search for co-op games we ended up on this one. Is it fun? Nope.

I’ll skim through the rationale for why I didn’t care for the game. Which should be fairly obvious between my last reviews and the TL;DR at the top. Essentially Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a looter shooter with bad loot and bad shooting. The cherries on top are of course; the weird vehicle controls, the annoying dialogue, the poor quest design and the generally tedious nature of the game’s level scaling system. There are some bright spots, like decent variety and the fact that the whole thing works in co-op, but generally speaking this game is a game for idiots. Combat is basic, the jokes fall flat, the game manages to feel extremely repetitive, most of the content is bland, it’s just a mess. Why this series became the series for co-op players is beyond me.

As for what this game adds to the series, well it has some background for the perennial favourite character of Handsome Jack. Who isn’t particularly interesting here, and is basically trying to be a hero but becomes a villain. The way this happens occurs slowly across missions, but essentially he goes from normal person to paranoid dictator in a gradual fashion. Yet it’s not handled very well, and it’s hard not to get the impression that our characters shouldn’t have sided with him once he started randomly executing civilians for the lols. The story also involves the vault hunters from previous games spoiling his plans to take control of the world, but they don’t do much. Honestly if you were a big Borderlands fan then I imagine you’ll find this game to be lacklustre in terms of exploring the characters.

Especially as the game otherwise doesn’t add that much. There are one or two new vehicles you get to use a handful of times. Plus the O2 mechanic, wherein you need oxygen to breathe but can also use this oxygen as a impromptu jetpack. Otherwise I can’t really think of anything outside of the new character classes. These are fine but I’m not playing through the game to max level 6 times. So the only thing I really noticed is that you can play as Claptrap. Which is about as much as fun as you’d expect.

With those new additions out of the way, I’ll just reiterate that Borderlands: The Pre-sequel really is more of the same. Just with Australian accents. The combat is the same, the weapon looting system is the same, the UI is the same, most of the enemies are the same, the mission is the same, the dialogue is of the same quality and so on. There really isn’t a lot that’s new. To the point that the O2 system which is arguably one of the biggest additions doesn’t do much. It gives you a new character item slot and it introduces some risk/reward to the game. As you need to breathe (albeit not if you play as Claptrap), you need O2. You can spend it to jump slightly further or revive your companions faster however. Outside of this though, it just makes the outdoor areas a bit tedious. As you need to camp near the O2 stations every now and then. The game does at least still have an appealing art-style. Outside of that though I can’t think of anything it does particularly well.

I mean for goodness sake, this game has missions where you need to hunt for audio logs that are hidden in an office, and then have to listen to them. There are missions where you need to guard a box as it slowly trundles along a conveyor belt while it’s under attack. Even finding these stupid missions can be a pest as they’re scattered around the world, and once you are a few levels above them they give you no XP. So if you need to keep up with the game’s level curve (lest you be punished by health sponge enemies), then you’ll need to quick travel to an area. Then possibly go to a new area from there. Then run to a bulletin board. So that you can pick up a quest that sucks. It’s just not a very well paced game, and even for a mindless shooter there’s so much downtime.

There are some design decisions that are questionable, like co-op making the game harder but these can be hand-waved away or at least justified. Yet the moment to moment gameplay feels at odds with itself. You want to shoot the dudes, but then you need to loot the dudes. So you need to open the inventory screen and faff around there. Then you need to slowly trundle towards the next objective. So that the game can give you another objective. Then another one. So that you can complete a quest that doesn’t give you enough XP. Meaning you need to run to a fast travel station and then fast travel to somewhere near another quest. That will involve shooting dudes, and looting the dudes, and looking at your inventory… and so on. It’s just a tedious game and I have to give credit to Borderlands 3 for improving on it.

In conclusion, I’ve run out of things to say and ways to re-iterate the main point. Namely the Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a pretty boring game. It doesn’t change much, and essentially feels like Borderlands 2 again. Which will be great for some people. I shudder to imagine who those people are, but they must exist. As for everyone else, if you want a co-op game look elsewhere. At the very least grab Borderlands 3 or Tiny Tina’s D&D styled mini-campaign before picking up Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.

The post Borderlands: The Pre-sequel appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

Before starting this review, I’ll just confess that Quantum Conundrum had been sitting in my backlog for around a decade before I finally got around to playing it. I actually first got it via PlayStation Plus way back in February 2013, where it sat on my PS3 until I moved onto the PS4 around 5 years later. While I don’t have PlayStation Plus any more, I did grab the game in a Steam Sale years ago and for some reason thought Spring 2024 was the time to actually play the damn thing. After doing so, I can kind of see why it was semi-popular at the time of it’s release. Although in all honesty, I found it a bit disappointing at least until I got to Act 3. You see the game is split into three acts, and the first is a bit boring (essentially the tutorial stage) and the second act is honestly a tad tedious. As a consequence, I found the game doesn’t really get going until you’re more than halfway through it. One of the reasons for this is the simple fact that Quantum Conundrum relies on the player manipulating 4 alternative versions of reality (only one can be active at a time) and you don’t get access to all 4 of them until… the last act. Now you might think the second act would be better than the first one, but honestly it just drags because so much of it is dedicating to faffing around with the third element.

I guess at this stage I should explain what the four elements are. You’ve got the ability to make everything low weight, everything very heavy, to make time go really slowly and the ability to reverse the gravity of objects. For the low weight (or the “fluffy” dimension) one, it lets you pick up and throw objects that would otherwise be too heavy. The heavy dimension makes it so that smaller objects can smash through barriers and ensures that all objects can resist lasers (which are surprisingly prevalent). While the last two are fairly self-explanatory. Combining these various abilities together can result in some fun little brain-teasers, although as mentioned you only get all four towards the end of the game. As a result, most of the early puzzles are… pretty straight forward as you want to make objects light to move them and then make them heavy to let you get past barriers, windy areas and the like. Indeed I think it’s fair to say that a surprising amount of the puzzles in Quantum Conundrum revolve around making something light so that you can throw it and then ride the thrown object to where you need to go. This is why I consider it more of a platformer than a puzzle game. There are some more unique puzzles in the game, but the majority revolve around making things light and throwing them, or making things heavy so you can get them in the right spot. In the second act, you then need to slow down time to make sure you can ride/move them properly.

Now to be fair, this isn’t the entire depth of the game. Quantum Conundrum does also require you to think about the momentum of various objects, to ensure that they can move fast enough to achieve your goals. With that being said, because the game has such a focus on momentum and throwing objects, it does also have a surprisingly high demand for precision platforming. Most of the time you die, is because you failed to achieve a jump correctly or switch elements at the exact right time. Failure with the puzzles won’t result in death, it’ll just lead you to stand there going “huh” for a while. I guess it’s worth pointing out that I thought the game wasn’t too challenging, either with the platforming or the puzzles. I think I got stuck two times throughout the whole 8 hour experience, and outside of one or two slightly pedantic platforming sections it generally wasn’t too bad.

In terms of other content, the game has a few collectibles for you to hunt for. There are blueprints that unlock the four abilities mentioned above, but in the general hub world. Then there are a series of collectible doodads that don’t add much to the game really, but hunting for them can add a bit of extra playtime for the more enthusiast players. Some of these require a creative approach to grab, so they’re not just a case of hidden little things tucked away. Which is good. Finally the game has a par-time for each stage, alongside two other ways of tracking whether or not you did a good job. The first is that it tracks whether you were able to complete a stage without dying. The second is that it tracks how many times you activate your abilities, with the aim being to have a number of uses below a set amount. This equivalent to a score tracking system is a good way of adding a bit of extra content for the 100% completionist headbangers, although most casual players probably didn’t care. I certainly know I didn’t!

And that’s about it in terms of what you get in the game, although as this was an indie release I think 8 hours + 100% completion chasing is honestly pretty fair. The game is much longer than Portal 1 was and while I don’t think it was as good, I certainly can’t complain about the amount of content you got for such a cheap little game. In terms of the rest of the production value, it’s actually pretty solid for a low budget 7th console generation game. There’s only one character with any dialogue, but he’s relatively entertaining and while not as aggressively rude as Glados is still a fun addition to the game. The game does make a big deal of how he provides hints for puzzles, but I often found the things he says were either super obvious or relatively cryptic. I guess it depends on whether you’ve figured out or not, but still. As for the visuals they’re decent, nothing that will blow your mind but the game has a slightly cartoonish graphic style that has aged gracefully and is appropriate to the setting. Finally the sound track is alright, again nothing special but the game’s general soundscape is fine.

So in conclusion then, Quantum Conundrum is a perfectly pleasant game albeit one that leans more towards being a platformer with puzzles than a puzzle game with some platforming. Depending on your expectations and preferences, this will either be a good thing or a bad thing. For me it was a bit of a disappointment, as I was hoping for a true competitor to Portal rather than a platforming game with some head-scratching moments. With that being said, I think my verdict is highly subjective and arguably not entirely fair. The game here is pretty solid and has no obvious flaws, it was just staggered too much for my taste. I think if the first Act had introduced all of the abilities and the rest of the game made use of them all, this would’ve been a great game. As it stands it’s an alright experience, but one that I probably wouldn’t recommend willynilly. Instead I think this is a good platformer with a twist, but you shouldn’t go into Quantum Conundrum expecting it to be a great puzzle game.

The post Quantum Conundrum appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

Quick Note: My screenshots didn’t save for some reason, but that’s OK because this is a very short review.

Alright so I recently played through the BF3 campaign and found it to be pretty underwhelming and an FPS experience I couldn’t really recommend. As this blog is about me and my one-man-mission to rise up clear my games backlog, I also remembered I had Battlefield 4. So I decided to play through it while my memory of BF3 was still fresh. To my surprise, the Battlefield 4 campaign is actually decently entertaining and while it still can’t really compete with the better Call of Duty campaigns, it’s better than some of them! This might not sound like praise, but considering how much BF3 and especially Battlefield 4 have been trying to emulate the success of those CoD campaigns, it’s nice to see that DICE finally managed to make something that succeeds in this regard.

I’ll try to keep it concise, much like the campaign. Because Battlefield 4 has a grand total of 7 campaign missions – that’s it. In them we play as a silent protagonist muhreen who is fighting to save the world from a coup in China. The levels are fairly linear although you can sometimes find an empty vehicle or turret to use. The enemy variety is minimal, as you only fight enemy soldiers and the occasional enemy vehicle. There are a lot of bombastic quasi-cutscenes where things explode/collapse near/onto our protagonist. As for the gameplay it’s what you’d expect. You can carry two weapons (and two pieces of gear like mines or grenade launchers). Your health regenerates. The enemy is all over your ass 24/7 and there are a handful of opportunities to use vehicles and turrets. You always have a squadmate or squadmates with you, but generally they are absolutely useless unlike in BF3. I’m not sure why your squad is so useless now, but sadly they really are hopeless. It’s no wonder that you get chosen to be the new squad commander/overall badass. The enemy AI isn’t great, although they are freakishly good at using grenades. There are a couple of positive changes that Battlefield 4 has made to the single player formula though. So I’ll give them credit for the following.

First things first, there are now collectibles in each level and they are exceedingly well hidden. Nothing fancy, I think every CoD has done this since the Xbox 360 came out. Yet it’s something “new” that wasn’t in the previous game. More importantly, you now gain score just like in multiplayer for killing various enemies and the multiplayer score-streaks carry over. So multi-kills, headshots, “adrenaline kills” (ones that occur when you are near death) etc now give you bonus points. These points then unlock 3-tiers of medal for each mission. Each medal gains you access to new weapon unlocks, in the myriad gun-cases scattered around every single player level. This is another new idea and one I actually quite liked. Basically the way it works is that you can take any unlocked gun out of these gun cases. This lets you swap your load-out frequently, and lets you experiment with every gun in the game. They also reload your ammo, and as you can’t carry much at a time they are very useful. There are also equipment cases which do the same thing except for your gear. Unfortunately these always have an arbitrary restriction on what gear you can use. You can’t unlock the RPG by being swagtastic on the 3rd mission for example. You can also spot enemies with some cool binoculars, which lets you tell your squad to ENGAGE certain enemies. This is the big new gimmick, as it lets you tell your squad which enemies to focus on. In theory this would be pretty useful. In practice your squad sucks and they will barely even ENGAGE enemies you haven’t told them to. Seriously if I had a single great British pound for every time my squad failed to deal with the one enemy who flanked me – despite that enemy being right in front of them – I’d be able to buy every battlefield game.

Other than these new additions and tweaks, the campaign hasn’t changed too much. Fortunately the Quick-Time-Events are now totally gone (thank God). Plus as mentioned the visuals have been improved at least for the Xbone/PS4/PC versions of the game. The story is a bit weaker almost as if to compensate, with more of a focus on your squad’s characters. By which I mean, the character called Irish. Seriously he could be mistaken for the protagonist if he wasn’t absolutely useless at shooting people. Fortunately I don’t think anyone was too enraptured with the BF3 campaign narrative. Especially as this game basically shares nothing in common with the previous one. Well except for a single returning character who you only see for a total of one mission. In terms of smaller gameplay changes, your character does feel like they have more health so you can actually run-and-gun as the game expects you too, which is a welcome change. As for the soundtrack, it’s still fine if nothing particularly special. That’s about it honestly, as there isn’t much incentive to replay missions. While I could make snide comparisons between the prison level in Battlefield 4 and the gulag level in CoD: Black Ops I won’t bother.

In conclusion then, the Battlefield 4 campaign is better than the BF3 one. It’s nothing amazing, but there are some solid gunfights if you can look past the Michael Bay explosions. The narrative has some weirdly dark moments for a game that generally doesn’t take itself that seriously, but other than that it’s a standard 7th generation console shooter. You run around, you regenerate health, the AI is dumb, your squad is dumb and the action is constant. It’s not a bad experience by any means and the smaller tweaks add up to make a campaign that’s much better than the one in BF3.

The post Battlefield 4: Campaign appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

I can understand anyone who thinks it’s churlish of me to review the Battlefield 3 campaign experience solely on it’s own merits. After all, the main selling point of the game was the multiplayer mode which has been the main selling point of every Battlefield game since the series began. Indeed the series entries I played the most of while growing up are BF2 and BF2142, neither of which has a campaign mode (at least on PC). So why bother reviewing the Battlefield 3 campaign, considering the fact that it was at best an extra little bonus like the co-op missions? Well because that’s all that remains of the game for most players as of the year 2024. Sure you can technically still join a game on PC and I think Xbox 360, but the player-base is tiny at this point and if you bought it on PS3 then… that’s a shame! As a consequence, I think it’s only fair to review the campaign, which is probably the only way you’ll get to “enjoy” the game going forwards. Unfortunately for Battlefield 3, the campaign makes Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 look like a visionary single player experience, one that it’s desperately trying (and failing) to emulate. Let’s go through the checklist together, dear reader;

• Contemporary FPS game: Check
• Regenerating health: Check
• Two weapon limit: Check
• You swap between characters to see the full scale of the conflict: Check
• The game is extremely linear: Check
• The game’s engine spawns enemies in pairs to mask hardware limitations: Check
• The main bad guy is using middle eastern rebels as fodder to initiate WW3: Check
• After a certain point in the game you start shooting Russians: Check
• The campaign takes about 6 hours: Check

After playing through both campaigns, the main differences that Battlefield 3 offers are an increased emphasis on Quick Time Events, less max HP for the player and slightly better vehicle sections. Otherwise you could honestly be forgiven for thinking that this was just another Cawadoody game. To be fair, there is also some environmental destruction going on, but it’s basically a gimmick and never really helps (or hinders) you. Expect for one section where you need to run up onto an overpass while infinitely respawning enemies shoot at you and all the cover on the bridge gets ruined in like two shots. Which is hardly a point in the game’s favour, let’s be honest.

Now as the gameplay is so standard, I think it’s fair to briefly mention the narrative. The way it works is simple, you spend most of the game being interrogated and your flashbacks serve as each individual mission of the campaign. This is a bit of a hazy mechanism when it comes to the multiple other characters who you don’t know anything about, but let’s ignore that for now. Essentially you are a MUHREEN and after bumbling around the Middle East you chase the head of a terrorist group, then the even more evil guy who was using him as a puppet. To the game’s credit the final mission is actually cool (QTEs notwithstanding seriously why does this stupid game love them so much) even if a lot of questions aren’t really answered. As for the rest of the narrative, it’s nothing special but nothing terrible either – par for the course for games of this genre and generation. Most characters are cool soldiers who are stoic and do soldier things but you have a designated smart ass in your squad and an overly ambitious colonel? major? Who cares. There are also two moments in the game when a character gets sad because their friend dies, which must have been a mandatory part of getting a game published on the Xbox 360. Overall I’d give this game an OK/10 for plot, it could’ve been one of those lazy Sunday afternoon rental movies although I think it would’ve been a bit too cliche.

As for the other aspects of the game that support the not-great combat, you’ve got an acceptable OST that is totally forgettable outside of the two times when they drop the Battlefield theme. These moments were cool, I guess, but if you didn’t care much about the series (understandable considering the last big release was BF2142 which was PC exclusive) then this probably didn’t do anything for you. The graphics and visual style are… fine but nothing really special and there isn’t a huge amount of environmental. You’ve got desert, forest, a nice villa and brown-and-bloom urban warfare. I can confirm that I didn’t encounter any bugs, which is good and everything generally ran fine on my humble Xbone although Battlefield 3 does seem to have some weird issues with frame-drops during areas with abrupt changes in lighting. Otherwise everything is just OK.

But my main issue with the campaign really is the gameplay, outside of the generally enjoyable tank mission and OK/10 jet mission it’s not great. A lot of set pieces involving enemies spawning in waves while you’re stuck in a position, or getting told to flank the enemy while your squad frantically try and order a pizza or something. The shooting feels OK, although the flinching from damage makes most weapons kind of a hassle to aim considering just how freakishly accurate the enemies are. There’s a stealth section of sorts, where you only have a knife and it kind of sucks. Fortunately it doesn’t last very long at all so swings and roundabouts. There are a lot of different weapons you can use, but it doesn’t matter much and you never run out of ammo so that’s either good or bad depending on your perspective. Occasionally you need to use a special weapon against vehicles, but don’t worry because you always magically regain more shots in the event that you manage to miss. Really though the combat is OK it’s just not great. Your squad will occasionally just start shooting a wall in front of them instead of the enemy, although they do actually deal damage unlike myriad other lousy FPS games so they can clear things up. As for the enemy, they love to either zerg rush your position or camp like boy scouts. Either way they’re kind of annoying, as they are extremely accurate and keep respawning in hard to predict ways. Was that the last enemy, or is another one about to materialise with little warning? Is there still one camping somewhere, and if so will they nearly insta-kill me as soon as I see them? These are the questions you will ask yourself at least once every level. Speaking of insta-kills, not only are there multiple QTEs in Battlefield 3 that you must pass successfully first time, but also some sections where not being in exactly the right place will instantly kill you. As will RPG enemies shooting vehicles that are near you, which would be fine if they didn’t just get spawned out of nowhere on multiple levels. Generally this is a game that wants you to go fast, but punishes you for doing so. Except on a couple of occasions, where if you don’t go fast enough you fail and have to go to the last check point. It’s just an inconsistent game.

So are there any parts of the Battlefield 3 campaign I actually quite liked? Well aside from that tank section (or section-and-a-half I suppose), I did find the two Spetnaz missions kind of fun although the bit where you need to chase that guy was annoying. I’m trying not to spoil anything, but if you play the game you’ll know which part I’m referring to. As mentioned the story is fine, probably not as good as the one in Cawadoody:MW2 but not terrible or overly tedious thanks to some decent voice acting. I suppose I should mention that the CHEEVOS for the game are actually implemented pretty well and offer an incentive to replay the campaign levels while the multiplayer ones aren’t totally rubbish. Finally I thought the first and last missions were a nice way of tying up the narrative, while the rest of the game had a decent pace and got stronger in the latter half. With all that being said, trying to copy Cawadoody is a mugs game and as a consequence the campaign just feels a bit… hopeless. The AI acts weird, the highly linear levels feel like an artificial constraint, there’s minimal gameplay variation between most parts of the campaign and generally it’s all just a bit lackluster. Not terrible but not good, is how I’d sum up the Battlefield 3 single player experience.

Therefore the most important question remains, would I recommend the Battlefield 3 campaign? No. I wouldn’t really recommend it to anyone and would just skip it unless you have a decent amount of nostalgia for the game. It has a few areas where it’s successfully above the average and a couple where it’s honestly slightly below average. The game is basically the same as this review, a meandering mess that doesn’t really go anywhere or answer any pertinent questions you might have. It’s just some filler, that distracted you from better things.

The post Battlefield 3 (Campaign) appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

I’ll start off by saying that hating on De Blob doesn’t feel great, because it’s clearly a cute little passion project that has some sensible design and started life as a Wii game. This means it’s fairly easy, the controls are a bit janky and that it’s targeting a younger and/or more casual audience. But honestly, who wouldn’t want to be a big colourful blob fighting some quasi-fascist meanies while painting the world and listening to some smooth tunes? It’s this thought that led to me buying the game, and it’s this thought that I cursed while struggling through the midway point of it. For some reason De Blob is one of those games that starts weak, then gets terrible before snapping out of it and having a couple of decent levels at the end. I can only imagine this is a big factor in the absolutely pitiful Xbox achievement completion rates, with around 1/4 players finishing the first level and less than 1 in 100 finishing all 10 levels. I am now part of that elite core, even though it only took like… 5 and a bit hours? De Blob is not Le Complicated, it’s a fairly simple platformer where you are trying to yoink colour from the world so that you can use it to paint things and jump-attack the baddies. The twist is that each stage has both a (very generous) timer and a scoring system, so you need to gain enough points to unlock the next part of each level. With each level having 3 or 4 parts. To help you SCOREMAXX you can complete various challenges, which have less generous timers and involve painting certain objects in certain colours, beating X number of designated baddies and platforming to a certain point following a fixed route. Then there’s a more substantial series of challenges, where basically you need to gather enough of a certain type of paint and then mash the A button. What makes these more substantial is the fact that they (sometimes) unlock new areas, while the rest never do. Which means most of the challenges are entirely optional, but they’re an easy way to get enough score to unlock the rest of the level and so they’re generally recommended.

The main other way to gain score is to… hold onto your hats… paint things! Considering this is the big gimmick of the game, that makes sense. The twist is that you’ll want to paint various items that are in the same group in different colours, as painting them all the same colour gives you 100% of the points, while 2 different gives you 200%, 3 gives you 300% and so on. There are 7 colours you can use, so in theory you can get up to 700% of the score for each group. If this sounds confusing (“wtf is a group” you might be wondering), then it’s just a semi-arbitrary way the game clusters buildings together. So if there are a bunch of apartment buildings, warehouses etc they will be split into Avenues and you’ll need to paint every one of them to get any score bonus. Once you’ve painted a group, the inhabitants will spill out and then you can paint them too! Don’t worry though, because they love it. You see the plot such as it is, features all of the colourful fun loving inhabitants of radia (radian?) getting INKED by the bad guys and now everything is drab and monotonous and boring and sucks. So Blob and La Revolucion are in town to paint everything and everyone and turn tank factories into wicked sick DJ buildings and so on. As you can probably tell, the plot is super basic but hey that’s fine. Mario never had a great plot either (shush JRPG fans no one cares). The game even has a bunch of short cutscenes between missions, with a heavy focus on slapstick physical humour and 0 words being used. It’s no Tom and Jerry but these are fine and honestly if I was like… 8 they might’ve been funny. Unfortunately I’m 28 and have a rich and fulfilling life blog so they weren’t quite for me.

But the cutscenes weren’t bad, and the core idea of painting a video game world is a fun one. So why am I not recommending this game??? Well the simple reason is that it’s just kind of annoying to control. Not only does the game love to show you when things are unlocked with a panoramic view of where this new doodad is located, but generally the platforming feels kind of iffy too. This means that during encounters or the mini-challenges, you’ll often fluff a jump which screws everything up because De Blob got De Stuck on a wall, due to the fact that he latches onto walls. Or maybe you wanted to jump-attack an enemy or lock onto an object you have to paint. Well too bad because De Blob wants to De Lock-on to some extra paint, with bonus points for the multiple occasions where this caused him to be Le Wrong Colour now and thus screwed up the pacing even more. Even if you can overlook this admittedly modest issues with the control scheme, the pacing of the game is just bizarre. Sometimes you’ve absolutely crushing it score-wise and other times you’re just looking for what handful of things you’ve missed and haven’t painted yet. For context, in both cases the best I’ve been able to achieve is a meagre Silver medal, so I can’t imagine the sheer hellish experience that is aiming for 100% completion in every level. Close to half the achievements involve painting EVERYTHING, whether it be EVERY TREE or EVERY BUILDING or whatever it is. If you know someone with OCD and despite them, then encouraging them to play De Blob is a good way to make them suffer.

Which is honestly a shame because it’s clear the developers weren’t total fools, there are some cases of smartly implemented player leniency related to narrowly beating out the clock during timed challenges. Plus the difficulty isn’t that high, while the soundtrack is pretty good so this should be a nice casual experience. I mean you get to choose your background track from a selection of around 11 and these also change the sound effects that play when you paint stuff, activate ultimate mode and so on. Yet it’s just a game that feels like a slog, because you’re just doing challenge after challenge after challenge and they’re all basically the same and then the game goes GOOD JOB NOW GO TO THE NEXT AREA. NO WE WON’T SHOW YOU WHERE IT IS WITH A MARKER, GO FIND IT. Again I feel like a loser for whining about the lack of markers, but sometimes the panoramic view is of an area you’ve never been to so you just kind of have to roll around until you figure out roughly where that one gate is. Oh and to add to the fun controls, there’s some occasional sections that require some relatively tight platforming performance lest you get hit by spikes or insta-killed by electricity. Which wouldn’t be a big issue, but the way damage and health works in De Blob is De Weird.

So I’ve already mentioned that you want to gain colour, the way it works is that you can have a maximum of 100 colour regardless of what colour that is. No you can’t store multiple colours, as you touch a new one it either mixes (so yellow + blue = green) or you just become that colour (e.g. green + blue = blue). It costs 1 colour to paint most objects in the game. Enemies also require a certain amount of colour to defeat. As do some objective types (the ones where you mash A). What does this mean? Well you might need to be green to colour in a set of buildings. Each building you colour in, costs 1 colour. To get more colour, you will no longer be green unless you can remix your colours to return to green. Defeating enemies also costs your green colour unless you are a different one. In the early game this isn’t really an issue, but later on most cost between 10 and 100 colour, so you need to be very careful with what you touch lest you be just 1 colour short of taking out that tank or objective. Then if you do hit by the bad guys, then you are INKED and lose colour every second or die once you hit 0 colour. So you need to spend health to damage the enemy, while being restricted in what health pickups you can take lest you be the wrong colour for the objective. It’s not challenging, it’s just kind of annoying that you might need to be Purple and then you accidentality brush up against some yellow pickup, meaning you are now brown, so you need to find a blue and a red while not touching anything, while getting hit by the enemies. Remember, this is a game where the control is kinda jank. In part because as you gain health, you are a bigger blob, so you move and jump slightly worse. Each of these mechanics is cool by itself, in combination they lead to irritating situations. Especially when the pacing kind of sucks, which it does for most of the levels (I’d say it turns around by level 8, but again there are only 10 levels).

The game also has some other content, including free paint mode where you can fart around each level for as long as you want and some side missions which I honestly haven’t played. Mainly because as stated, less than 1% of players even finished the game and I didn’t really have fun with it so… I think I’ve been unusually charitable towards it. I mean I bought, I tried it, I finished it, I even wrote a review about it. I can even still say the music is good, the premise is nice, the game world is charming and the way that you paint the world is satisfying. Unfortunately the gameplay which is pretty important for a videogame just feels rough. Like it has all the pieces, but the combination of a slightly rough control scheme with the specifics of the colour system, with the sluggishly paced levels and the repetition just makes what should be a short game feel like a grind. Which is ironic for a game in which you play as De Blog, De Hero of the world saving it from monotony. Much like Legendary I know the developers meant well and I’m glad they got the chance to make a sequel. Hopefully it fixes some of the quirks of this game and has better controls, less repetition and some other modest tweaks. Considering the final stages were actually fun, I can only assume De Blob 2 is a better game. Especially as it wasn’t developed for the Wii, so I can only assume it plays a bit better. With that being said, I’ll wrap up by saying that De Blob is just kind of a chore to play and I can’t really recommend it to anyone.

The post De Blob appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

Section 8 as the TL;DR covers, is a pretty standard and long dead FPS game that lived and died by it’s multiplayer modes. With that being said, it had a few tricks up it’s sleeve which I think made it a pretty fun and enjoyable game, even if it wasn’t going to set the world on fire. Before diving into those though, I’ll just quickly rattled through the surrounding layers that aren’t really worth covering in detail. Firstly the graphics are fine for the era, nothing special but the variety in locations is appreciated and it avoids the near-ubiquitous BROWN AND BLOOM approach favoured by it’s contemporaries. It even avoids the near mandatory urine-filter that makes all the blues washed out in favour of a “nice” yellow layer. Instead this a game that just looks kinda nice. The soundtrack, such as it is, doesn’t really have a much of a role in this outside of the menu screen but it’s inoffensive so gets a pass. The weapon selection is about what you’d expect, namely assault rifles, pistols, sniper rifles, a missile launcher, a shotgun and an SMG. Finally the AI manages to be both kinda bad and also adequate at the same time, they’re good shots but tactically brain dead so swings and roundabouts. Oh and obviously the writing sucks and the voice acting isn’t very good because this is a game on the budget end of the spectrum.

With that out of the way, why did I like Section 8? Well the first thing that was really cool about the game was the fact that you spawned in by jumping through space!!! The way it works is simple, you pick a place you’d like to respawn and the game obliges by booting you out of a space ship. You then hurtle down towards the battle field, with the option of either crash landing like a badass or initiating a space-break that gives you some control over where you land. Either way getting the whole battlefield while you rush towards it is genuinely pretty cool and a nice idea. One that even ended up becoming part of the Medal of Honor series via MoH:Airborne, shortly before they went full “let’s try to be even cooler than Call of Duty” and died. The other twist that Section 8 has to offer otherwise jaded FPS fans is that you get two mobility gimmicks. The first is that if you hold sprint, eventually you’ll enter SUPER SPRINT after a few seconds and then switch to third person view while running at a very silly speed. As a bonus, you can damage both friends and foes by barrelling into them at Mach 4. Which is honestly a great addition to any game. Then the other great addition to any game is the humble jetpack, which doesn’t last for very long but everyone gets one so Section 8 gets a thumbs up from me if only for that. To compensate for the fact that everyone gets regenerating shields that take a while to go down, plus these movements options the game also has a limited auto-aim feature. Essentially every now and then you lock-on to the enemy for a few seconds, which ends instantly if they go behind cover or line of sight is otherwise broken. The timing has been handled pretty well, as you can’t just abuse it due to the long cooldown and it doesn’t guarantee a kill as generally you’ll only whittle down the enemy’s shields or at least a big chunk of them. As a consequence of these ideas, Section 8 is a fun little multiplayer shooter that gives players the ability to flex on the baddies while still having some crutches for noobs. Plus the multiplayer modes while limited, do feature two variations on “players vs overwhelming numbers of bots” which you love to see in a game. Anyone who has tried playing the Star Wars Battlefront 1 & 2 galactic conquest modes knows how fun standing off against legions of the AI can be, even when the AI isn’t particularly bright.

Unfortunately as mentioned earlier, the Section 8 multiplayer modes are super dead and no one can buy the game. There is a discord community that has jerry-rigged the LAN mode and sometimes plays the game, so click here if you’d like to join them. Otherwise you’re stuck playing against the bots in a pale imitation of MP, convincing a group of your friends to play a LAN game or “enjoying” the campaign mode. Which is why I’m writing this review, because I’ve only recently gotten around to playing the campaign mode after barely thinking about this game for around 12 years. How is it? Well it’s pretty mediocre in pretty much every way imaginable. Now notice that I didn’t say bad, I just said mediocre. This is because the campaign mode can’t really be considered bad, as it’s too bland and inoffensive to be actually objectionable. It’s fine, it even has one or two interesting (not necessarily good) ideas and it functions as a nice enough tutorial for the multiplayer mode. Which is unfortunately dead, but if we consider it in the context of when the game was relevant it’s a forgivable offence. I mean Battlefield Bad Company had a campaign, and it was OK, but people only really cared about the game for the multiplayer mode. So what makes the campaign so bland I hear you ask?

Well first thing’s first, the campaign is just a collection of 8 maps where you basically play normal skirmish matches against the AI. There are some restrictions to your load-out at least initially, and the occasional (short) cutscene but generally speaking these are pretty standard missions. You spawn in to the designated area, move forward, shoot the handful of AI enemies, press the action button to hack something and then either more enemies spawn while you defend the objective or the map gets bigger. When the map gets bigger, you go to the next objective. Rinse and repeat for almost every part of this very short campaign. Should you die, you can just respawn back in. There are no penalities for dying at all. The enemy variety is very minimal, because the enemies are just AI bots and occasionally AI bots in vehicles. Sometimes you even get a vehicle too! The plot is basically an irrelevance, your squadmates have zero personality and neither does the protagonist. In fact the only thing I can think of as being noteworthy is the bizarre way that your squadmates interact with the enemy. On the one hand, they are invulnerable. On the other hand, they only deal damage in rare instances where they are allowed to, or when you’ve dealt a decent amount of damage to an individual enemy who they are then allowed to finish off. It’s quite common to see a squadmate and an enemy locked in an elaborate duel to the death, where both run into each other, unload multiple magazines of gunfire and neither take any damage. This does make them effective distractions, but the enemy will prioritise you if you get too close. Unfortunately, a squad of 5 enemies can all deal damage whereas your squad of 3 buddies is much more limited. As for why I described it as a glorified tutorial, well that’s because over the course of Section 8’s eight missions (in hindsight, was that intentional on the part of the developers?) you are gradually introduced to each mechanic that will be in the multiplayer mode. You get to play as each class at least once. You get to call in turrets and vehicles. You get to pilot each vehicle precisely once and you have to fight each “enemy type” (namely infantry, mechs and vehicles) multiple times. The whole thing is a pretty basic and barebones story stretched over a couple of maps that play like a more scripted version of a multiplayer battle.

And at this point there really isn’t much more to say about the game. The campaign is basically a blur and I finished it in one sitting, without any difficulty. The fact that you can respawn infinitely and that each completed objective causes a supply point (which regenerates ammo and health) to drop in at your location makes it a pretty easy time. The final boss fight is just a mech with some tougher enemies escorting it, while the only real fearsome gunfights occur during “defend the objective” missions. But you can keep respawning, and the enemy AI is pretty dumb, so I never failed a mission. As mentioned the plot is super basic, you are a MARINE in SPACE whose squad dies fighting the BIG BAD GUY and so you are MAD at the BIG BAD GUY and eventually you find him and SHOOT HIM. That’s about it, there’s no world building or side characters or ambiguity or choices or anything. It’s as simple as it gets. There is one cutscene that is unintentionally really funny because the protagonist keeps saying he’s gonna COME but I chalked that up to me being immature. I will note that the environments look kinda nice and uh… the shooting is fine even if playing against bots isn’t as fun as playing against real people. I guess I should point out that Section 8 is weird in the sense that explosives don’t deal that much damage, and as a consequence enemies are surprisingly durable even if they are unsurprisingly dumb. There’s not much more to elaborate on there though, because this is a very simple campaign for an enjoyable if fairly simple FPS game.

In conclusion then Section 8 is a good FPS game that has been largely lost to the mists of time. If you were to pick it up today, you’d get a mediocre campaign and some matches against AI bots that are pretty dumb. You’d also get the potential for a fun LAN party, but let’s not kid ourselves – that probably won’t happen. So would I recommend Section 8? Not really. It’s a game I enjoyed back in the day and playing through it wasn’t a bad experience, but unless you are someone like me with fond memories this is a short and insubstantial experience. As mentioned the game is sort of free, because it’s abandonware and the truly dedicated reader can join a discord group and maybe get an online match out of it. Alas Section 8 is a game that came and went, that I can’t in good faith endorse to anyone except those who are exceptionally curious about the dead games of the 7th console generation. If you are one of those eccentrics, then it’s a fine experience with some nice ideas. For everyone else, press F to pay respects.

The post Section 8 appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

Call of Juarez: The Cartel is a game that didn’t get off on the right foot, and as a consequence has basically faded from relevance entirely. It was an attempt to gently reboot the series into the frankly crowded field of contemporary FPS games and one that essentially failed. Call of Juarez: Gunslinger would come out a few years later and would actually be a success, both critically and commercially. Which means that Call of Juarez: The Cartel, for it’s merits and (numerous) flaws basically ended up as a dead end and quite possibly killed the series as a serious $60 AAA contender in it’s genre. Remember, Gunslinger was a budget game with budget aspirations, whereas The Cartel was a full budget game with the pre-requisite $60 price tag. So what caused Call of Juarez: The Cartel to be considered such a stinker?

Well to start off, it wasn’t the graphics which are nothing special but again aren’t particularly terrible and are basically fine. It also isn’t the writing, which while unintentionally cheesy and occasionally hilarious (again unintentionally) is mostly fine and actually delivers a surprisingly competent narrative. Of course by the standards of any other genre, Call of Juarez: The Cartel would be bad. We’re not talking about any other genre though, we’re talking about a FPS game, specifically a FPS game during the Call of Duty Modern Warfare era so having some occasionally interesting twists puts this game in pretty good stead. No the main issues with the game are simple and frankly what you’d expect. It’s a FPS game with regenerating health, inconsistent enemy damage, friendly AI that could charitably be described as useless, a strict 3 weapon limit (1 real gun and 2 pistols), wimpy grenades and an incredibly linear experience. To give an indiction of how the moment-to-moment gameplay feels, you are in a back alley shooting at clones of the same 4 guys who say the same handful of lines in every encounter. They will die in like 2 hits, but all the guns are inaccurate and aim-assist is for girls so if you’re playing on console then shooting is slightly tricky. Meanwhile your AI squad mates are shooting at the terrain that the bad guys are standing behind, and every 15 seconds will either say “DO U EVEN PRACTICE WITH DAT PIECE” or “TRY AIMING” if you miss, or “LEAVE SOME FOR US” or “U DONT HAVE TO DO DIS ALL BY URSELF” if you don’t. Rinse and repeat for around 4 and a half hours. Sometimes you drive a car (because the AI can’t) which handles badly and very occasionally you get to ride shotgun during scripted sequences, which are the same as the rest of the game but you can’t take cover. That’s about it.

Now to be fair there are three other mechanics which Call of Juarez: The Cartel brings to the table like an oblivious fat guy bringing hot dogs to a vegan BBQ. The first is that sometimes you kick a door down, which starts a slow motion sequence (just like the Matrix!!!) where you get to shoot some guys with your pistol. Then there are some cover shooting sequences where your heroic partners lay down covering fire while you flank a machine gun, which basically consist of the game saying “GO GO GO” or “NO GO NO GO” at the bottom of the screen. If you go while it says NO GO then you take a billion damage very quickly. Then once you flank the machine gun you uh, shoot the bad guys and the game carries on. These sections have their own unique backing track which gets abruptly shoved into the music mix while they’re taking place, just in case you struggled to read the only text on the screen. Finally the real meat of the game so to speak, is the “hidden agendas” mechanic. In theory it’s pretty cool, in practice it’s badly implemented so… points for trying I guess? The way it works is simple, you and your two shady cop partners each have little side objectives to complete. BEN MCGRAW the stern, angry, cowboy guy is basically stealing things for a prostitute he’s trying to get clean. EDDIE the loud mouthed hispanic is also swiping things because he’s in a lot of debt because he’s a gambler. Finally THE GIRL (Evans?) is swiping drugs because her brother is in a gang or something. What happens is occasionally someone calls your character mid-mission and says “hey bro can u steal something xoxo”. Then you are meant to PRESS X TO STEAL THING while no one else is looking. The problem is that this is the only way to level up your character, which gives access to better guns. Therefore I can only assume that you’d have to be a dumbass to deliberately screw up your buddies ability to have better guns. In practice it doesn’t really matter, because the starting guns are pretty much equal to the unlocks anyway. Also, in reality the AI is really dumb as established earlier. As a consequence, they are either following you (making this almost impossible because you have to do it sneakily) or are really far away. So you swipe things when they’re not up your butthole, which can be triggered by moving forwards to the next batch of baddies. I’m not sure what my partners in crime thought of me randomly running away during a bunch of gunfights only to return 2 minutes later with noticeably enlarged pockets, but hey whatever I wanna level up. I assume when playing with real people you basically steal them to look away for a sec, although my understanding is that you can gain XP by stopping them from stealing things. Again though doing this when within punching distance of the guy who actually bought the damn game is probably a bad idea.

So with the handful of “new” mechanics basically being the same as the rest of the game, we have an issue. Due to the fact that the core shooting isn’t great and that everything else is basically just a novelty, Call of Juarez: The Cartel struggles to really distinguish itself. Which if it were an honest to God cowboy game, wouldn’t be a big problem because there aren’t many of those. Unfortunately the series was trying to become a contemporary shooter, and there were a lot of those. As a result Call of Juarez: The Cartel got middling reviews and was deemed forgettable enough that it’s the only game in the series to be delisted from sale. I would complain about how seemingly every damn 7th generation console game seems to be suffering this fate lately (including Devil May Cry 4 and Spec Ops: The Line at time of writing) but that is par for the course now. If you don’t buy a game within 10 years of it being released, then it’s a total crap-shoot as to whether it’ll still be available for sale, or have received a half-arsed remaster, or just deleted entirely outside of piracy. I guess I should elaborate a bit on the plot, if only because there’s very little else to discuss other than the obligatory 7th generation totally dead multiplayer mode that no one cared about. So I’ll note that your three characters are each from different agencies, all of them are frankly a little but suspicious and all of them specialise in different weapons. In real terms this last bit doesn’t matter at all, but if you want all the CHEEVOS you’ll need to beat the game 3 times (once with each character) and then invent a time machine so you can go back to 2011 and maybe play this game online. The character dialogue is about what you’d expect, in the sense that it’s very silly and trying itself very seriously and has 3 stereotypes (Stern cowboy, goofy Mexican, sassy independent Black woman) yelling at each other because they’re all a bit crooked. Fortunately as mentioned the plot has a couple twists, that aren’t huge but are enough to keep things interesting and ensure that you can’t be certain as to what the heck is going on. It’s not amazing, but having news reports during the loading screens blabbing about what you’ve been up to is amusing and the game does a decent job of conveying it’s central point. Namely that the institutions your characters are serving, are just as dysfunctional as they are.

Now I could briefly mention that the driving sections are annoying because you keep getting shot constantly but can’t really do anything about it, or that the weapon selection is pretty boring, or that you have the ability to dual-wield your pistols (which kinda sucks honestly), or that you have a very limited “slow mo” concentration mode (with laughably bad “quips” that get used when you activate it), but honestly who cares. The game is fine. It’s a 7th generation console FPS with all the issues you’d expect, a slightly above story and the ability to play it in 3-player co-op. That’s about it, the plot is largely what you’d expect from Crooked Cops vs Cartels and neither the graphics nor soundtrack are noteworthy. In conclusion then, Call of Juarez: The Cartel is a mediocre 7th generation FPS with an OK plot and serviceable shooting. If you didn’t play this game, you didn’t really miss anything. If you want to play this game on the back of glowing review then you’ll need a 360 or PS3 (or just pirate it who cares, UBISOFT of all people won’t even sell it on PC). Would I recommend the game? No. Did I have a terrible time? No. It starts off badly and then becomes OK and has some occasionally interesting moments. That’s about as far as I’ll go, much like the series.

The post Call of Juarez: The Cartel appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

After finishing up Half Life 2 I realised that it’s actually fun, if you can withstand the glacial initial levels. As such I decided to give the episodes a shot. Now I know this won’t be a surprise, but they’re generally fine even if they don’t change much. In Episode 1, we essentially repeat a bunch of Half Life 2’s more memorable moments. While in Episode 2, we actually get some new features and ideas, even if they’re not particularly mind-blowing. There’s one thing to bear in mind across Half Life 2: Episode 1 & 2. Namely that they weren’t intended to be the last parts of HL2. Instead they were really just teeing things up for HL:EP3/Half Life 3. As such they’ve got fun little chunks of gameplay. Yet as they didn’t have a huge amount of development time we don’t get much in the way of substantial changes.

Starting with Episode 1, we basically get a few new ideas interspersed among three different scenes. During the first part of the Episode we’re back in the combine’s citadel, amidst the newly liberated City 17. You’d think our job is over, but now we have to prevent an intergalactic meltdown. This involves dealing with one new “enemy” type who aren’t hostile, before we successfully prevent a core meltdown. After this glorious use of Gordon’s scientific background, you then get a quasi-Ravenholm section which drags on for a while. This is where we get the only new enemy introduced in this episode, namely the Zombine. Which is a zombie, but a combine. The main twist is that they have wayyyyy more health and also try to suicide bomb you. This section involves a lot of using the flash-light, alongside a platforming puzzle where you hop over a bunch of radioactive goop. Eventually it culminates in a holdout scenario where hordes of zombies keep spawning and trying to eat your dork ass while you wait for a lift. After all that nastiness, you waddle around City 17 helping rebels, checking out a hospital full of zombies and eventually lead a bunch of rebels to safety via the train station. These rebel sections are probably the most entertaining, although I did quite like the hospital section. Oh and for die-hard RPG fans don’t worry. Because this section repeats the strider battles, and a gunship battle. Some might consider this a bit lazy. But again, Episode 1 was bashed out in a little over a year so I’m inclined to be relatively forgiving. Generally though Episode 1 is… just fine. Nothing particularly special and outside of a few pieces of characterisation there really isn’t much here. One new enemy, one new quasi-enemy, a bit of lore and a couple of memorable set pieces hidden amongst the three-ish hours of content.

Then we’re onto the second of the two episodes, which starts off with your bb girl getting stabbed to fuck. No you didn’t teleport to Glasgow, instead you were assailed by a new type of enemy. Don’t worry though, because you spend about an hour fannying around an Antlion hive. This is done so you can get the doohicky that will save her. During this section, there is a cool idea where you need to avoid an Antlion guard on steroids without killing it. Alongside a bunch of slightly boring sections where you have to deal with another new enemy. This one being an antlion with a ranged attack! That also damages you if it’s too close to you when it dies. So that’s… cool. There’s also another hold-out section, but this time against loads of Antlions. You then escort a Vortagaunt around for a bit, before getting to play a driving section. Now you might remember how the vehicles were kinda jank in the first game. Fortunately they are exactly the same. Yay! Then you fight the aforementioned Antlion guard on steroids alongside his friend, before dealing with a shorter zombie section and a bit more driving and then you eventually get to the rebel base. Up to this point, there really isn’t that much new outside of that annoying acid spraying Antlion.

Then the episode abruptly comes to life, at least a little bit, as you survive an ambush containing those new hunters that were teased so much. In terms of gameplay, they’re a cross between the Antlion guards and normal combine because they have plenty of health and a range of strong-ish attacks. Much like the base game, this DLC has a somewhat slow start with all the Antlion cave nonsense but picks up towards the end even if it hits many of the same notes. Ambush, Sniper fight, Gunship fight, Strider fight set piece, abrupt ending. Bish bash bosh. There’s also some plot shenanigans going on where the G-Man basically says “hey once you’re done with this Episode some crazy shit is gonna happen”. Why? Well that’s a fair question, basically the Combine (not the Zombine) are going to open a super portal and screw up Earth… again. So you need to shoot a rocket into space to stop it. This will apparently have “unforeseen consequences”, which apparently means the cancellation of Episode 3. So as of the time of writing, I can safely and definitely conclude (at least temporarily) that Half Life 2: Episode 1 & 2 are more of the same. I don’t hate them, although I have to confess that they have reduced the shine of Half Life 2’s last chapters a tad. You see, while the narrative is still interesting and definitely has it’s moments, knowing it ends on that unresolved cliff hanger dulls it’s impact. It’s a great hook for the next instalment, but alas that instalment will seemingly never come.

With all that being said, the weapons are still a bit rubbish. While the handful of new enemies are a mixed bag. The Zombine are just zombies, but if you leave them for too long they’ll try and suicide bomb you. The Antlion guardian is just a guard, but with more HP. The acid spitting antlions are just antlions, but a pain in the arse. Finally the hunters are an interesting idea for a stronger, hybrid enemy but frankly they manage to be both over-used and not used enough. You see they’re an interesting addition to a squad, but often you’re only fighting them. Generally speaking, while the extra levels aren’t bad and do have their moments, there’s rarely much that’s special. I mean these episodes serve as vehicles for the plot. But the plot doesn’t get resolved, so only the gameplay is really left. And that gameplay is both very similar and yet slightly tweaked. Alas those tweaks are only really good when it comes to the set pieces. Which are still entertaining, and the dialogue is still good but… In many levels you’re basically just standing in an area, waiting for enemies to stop spawning.

So in conclusion, it’s hard to recommend Half Life 2: Episode 1 & 2. If you are looking for more Half Life 2, then it’s a no-brainer but you don’t need to tell you this. The writing, set pieces and world design remain as strong as ever. At the same, the combat, weapons and variety are fairly weak. These episodes are primarily made for existing fans to hype them up for the next instalment, so if you aren’t an existing fan then there’s not much to recommend here. There are some nice scenes, but we all know it’s not going anywhere. If you really wanted more Half Life 2, then here it is. Otherwise I wouldn’t really bother. Either way, Half Life: Episode 1 & 2 are available for just over £1 during the Steam sales so I’d grab them then (and only then) if you are interested.

The post Half Life 2: Episode 1 & 2 appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

Quick Note – Snapshot has two technical issues that you might want to be aware of ahead of time. Firstly the CHEEVOS do not stack, so if you want all of the completion achievements then you’ll need to either deal with downloading saves from the internet or only do the bare minimum before gradually re-watching the ending for each of the completion milestones. Also if you’re playing the game on PC and have a zoom level above 100%, then this will screw with the game and you’ll need to reset your display settings to have zoom at 100%.

Oh Snapshot, you little scamp thinking you could cower away behind all those games I didn’t get in a bundle over a decade ago. Thinking you could avoid the CRITICAL GAZE of my all mighty blog and it’s dedicated following of uhm… 5 people who don’t even read most of these “reviews”? Well you were wrong buddy, because after vaguely remembering a good friend’s recommendation I’ve finally decided to track you down and figure out why the hell he thought you were a good game. Which sounds harsh but honestly, while I enjoyed the first hour or so of the game I spent most of my 6 hours wondering why everyone seemed to be leaving nice reviews. After all, a mere 2% of players actually bothered finishing this game even though someone in a rush could easily bang it out in a couple of hours. Like any good flatterer, I’ll start with a positive and note that I really liked the central concept of the game which is a puzzle platformer where you can snapshot (GEDDIT???) various items within a stage to then place again somewhere else. This means that finding and getting items constitutes much of the level design, with many items often being blocked by “no photography” zones that prevent you from snapping a quick pic until you’ve done something – generally involving hitting a switch or putting a box on something. These little puzzles are never too hard, but most of the time offer a modest little teaser of challenge and for those who aren’t satisfied, each stage has both a bonus “objective” of sorts to snap a pic of, plus there are time trials for every stage which are genuinely pretty tough.

With all that being said, the fact that the puzzles are kinda easy is a tough sell for a game that bills itself as a puzzle game. After all, if you bought a book of crosswords or Sudoku puzzles and found out that they were all a piece of piss you’d probably feel smug for a couple minutes and then be a tad disappointed. While Snapshot has a couple of puzzles me and my COLOSSAL intellect found a bit challenging (they took MINUTES to solve I tell you), most are pretty basic to be honest. The game’s real challenge is instead not the puzzle part of this puzzle platformer, but the platformer part due to a combination of finicky controls with weird momentum mechanics and how annoying it can be to need to take a picture of something at the perfect moment for it to “solve” a puzzle. To give examples of both, our plucky protagonist can’t just step down from a ledge without flinging himself without gusto, meaning you need to jump for these small little gaps and frankly the jump momentum is also kinda screwed up especially once you start needing to bounce off various objects. As for the snapshotting, the principle is sound but sometimes (i.e. more often than you’d like) you’ll need to do something like place an object while you’re doing a jump so that you can bounce off it or not drown in lava like an absolute loser. Unfortunately this is harder than it sounds because your lovely little camera not only needs to capture pictures exactly, but remembers where things were within the boundaries of the photo, which will then occasionally cause it to refuse to place an object where you actually bloody wanted it. To add insult to injury, you can rotate objects but it controls like absolute arse and you may as well shove a tablet stylus up your bunghole and control it that way for how intuitive it feels. This becomes especially apparent when you need to rotate the objects your deploying, for them to actually be useful. Sometimes you need to remember the momentum of a falling object, so you can rotate it at an angle to use it to shoot upwards so that you can then knock something over. A task which should be easy but due to your pedantic camera rushing to let you place objects, and the pain in the butt rotation controls this can quickly become surprisingly annoying. When playing Snapshot I frequently knew the solution to a puzzle, but would still spend minutes trying to persuade the controls to let me just solve the damn thing and move on with my life.

As mentioned earlier, there is also an additional “objective” within each stage – namely to take a photo of a random object. These are fun to hunt for and generally require either a bit of exploration, but a bit of extra puzzle solving. There are two catches with them however. Firstly you need to hang on to that photo(!), so now you can only have 2 usable photos for capturing and placing objects at a time as opposed to the normal 3. Secondly the game doesn’t believe in checkpoints, I can only assume because the Berlin Wall had checkpoints and nothing related to that odious symbol of Stalinist tyranny can EVER be allowed to infest fun little indie games. As a consequence I quite often found myself 4 minutes into a level, after having spent most of those minutes pissing around persuading to do what I wanted, only to see the optional bonus objective area and scoff. No thanks buddy. I’m not braving insta-death spike walls for the off chance that I can get a picture of a dohickey that doesn’t do anything, in a game where the completion achievements are totally broken anyway. Other than these little bonus objectives, the game doesn’t really have any content outside of the stages of which there are 3 per level, with 9 levels per world and 4 worlds for a total of 108 stages. Which sounds good but honestly they could’ve culled the bottom third and been better off for it, fortunately you can skip around 4 levels (so 12 stages) per world without any consequences. With that being said, you must ALWAYS do the first level with it’s 3 stages otherwise you will be verboten from playing any of the others in that world and thus BANNED from getting the ending.

So why do I think that they could’ve just had less stages and ended up with a better game? Well the simple reason is that most levels follow the same pattern: Introduce gimmick in very short stage 1, implement gimmick in a fun way for stage 2, implement draw out level for stage 3 to prove MASTERY. Which in and of itself is fine, but when the gimmick sucks it means you just get fed up around the end of stage 2 because your character is just ever so slightly annoying to control and the gimmick isn’t fun and now you’ve slipped on some stupid jump so you have to do it all again and half the level is waiting for shit to happen and you already figured out the goddamn solution 5 minutes ago and ugh. My personal “favourite” examples would be any level from World 4 involving the magnetic push/pull because it’s imprecise as fuck and annoying because those levels are riddled with insta-kill spikes, in stages where the gimmick is that you have magnets messing with your momentum. They’re not all BAD but as a gimmick it just kinda sucks. Same with the cloud focused stages, which were fun-ish at first but man once you manage to fall between them it just feels like a slap in the face because it looks like there’s no gap there and then WHOOPS do it all go again lmao. Then sometimes you get a gimmick like the big bombs you can jump off that are just fun and kinda silly but before you know it, you’ve done that level and there are no more big bombs to play with, because we’re onto another shit gimmick at breathtaking speed. My point basically is that it feels the devs came up with like 80 ideas for some puzzles and threw them all in the game, instead of sticking with the best dozen or so. There are meditating monkeys that cause a platform to move between them for example and those levels were actually really fun, because you had to account for obstacles and the platform timing while being able to move those amiable apes around. Then they stopped being in the game 20 minutes later so we could have a bunch of shitty ass magnet levels. To each their own but this is the indie puzzle equivalent of sticking the whole pot of pasta at the wall to see what sticks.

Yet in spite of finding a lot of levels to just blow chunks, I’m not going to be too mean to an indie game that was very cheap like 10 years ago and honestly was done by people who just wanted to make a fun game. I think the fact that they have a thoroughly paltry 2% finish rate is indictment enough, but I don’t Snapshot. I don’t get who is earnestly recommending it either, considering that it’s a real hit or miss smorgasbord of an experience that has been forgotten by the gaming industry but you know, you could do much worse than Snapshot honestly. At least the graphics are nice, the game has a cutesy air and a very minimal plot that’s still enough to keep you semi-interested in carrying on. The levels are sometimes bad, sometimes good, sometimes bland but overall there’s enough good stages that it’s worth a quick bash for the curious. As for the soundtrack it’s just pretty good, so thumbs up to the music man. I wouldn’t listen to it outside of the game and it’s not OUTSTANDING or anything, but it’s pretty fitting and pleasant enough. As for the amount of content, well you get over a hundred stages which often have bonus objectives and the time trials are seriously difficult so if you wanted to be an obsessive, this game is actually damn good value for money. For the more casual player, you’ll just get bored before finishing it to be totally honest. You really have to be either PRO-INDIE GAMES YEAH INDIE DEVS RULE SCREW THE MAINSTREAM MANNNNNN or just love puzzle platformers to really care about this one. Yet like I said, I don’t hate and just wish they’d been more prudent about which levels they actually bothered to release. Hell they could’ve just said “here are the main stages, and here are the bonus stages” or something and it would’ve been fine. Sometimes less is more, like if I’d eaten less pies I’d probably be more attractive.

In conclusion then, Snapshot is a game I don’t really recommend despite not hating it and enjoying some of the levels. Unfortunately it’s just kind of a drag for many stages, and while the visuals, soundtrack and the like are charming they’re not enough to push me through a game with some annoying controls. Like WHY does my freaking camera cursor MOVE WITH ME (so now I can’t take a picture of the bounce jump I’ll need again once I land) and why does this then IMPACT MY MOMENTUM FOR JUMPS who the fuck thought that was a good idea???? In all seriousness though Snapshot is an OK/10 puzzle game from a bygone era when indie games were still kinda new and exciting and as a consequence I can forgive the bad levels in favour of the good ones. The developers had to put into making this game a reality because guess what, it’s not yet another goddamn UE5/Unity game. Which means I gave it the benefit of the doubt, played through it til the end with 51% overall completion and… honestly I don’t know if it was worth it. Therefore Snapshot does not get a recommendation, but I’m not gonna give it any particular hatred either. It’s just an OK game. No more, no less, if you got it in a bundle maybe take a look, otherwise meh don’t worry about it.

The post Snapshot appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

Quick Note – While this game was initially designed for Android and iOS, it’s only available on PC as of 2018. No console ports were ever released.

Considering the rough-and-tumble reputation that Deus Ex: The Fall received in the brief period of time in which it was relevant, you’d be forgiven for asking why I even bothered paying for it. Of course as my 5 (count em, FIVE) subscribers know I obviously didn’t pay any significant money for the game and it cost me around 150 pennies, but still. I could’ve bought a sausage roll, or a can of Stella Artois or something instead of what is widely considered to be the worst Deus Ex game – much to the relief of Invisible War. As ever my morbid curiosity got the better of me, as I have memories of trying Mass Effect: Infiltrator on my Gen 1 iPad back in the day and I just couldn’t get past the recurring idea that maybe those Android and iOS games from the 7th generation would’ve been fine with a normal control scheme. DE:TF kind of supports my theory, as once you play it on PC (which is now the only option!) it’s not a bad game. In fact if I were the type to dish out scores I’d give it a 6 because I was genuinely disappointed that it abruptly ended after a mere 4 hours of gameplay. Sure 6/10 isn’t a great score, but Deus Ex: The Fall is a valiant attempt at porting a great game to a lousy platform (sorry mobile gamers) and it largely succeeds, with a couple of big fat caveats.

Before diving into the issues though, I think it’s important to consider what’s actually been carried over largely intact. The core gameplay of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided has been ported over, with a decently sized weapon roster, fully functional weapon upgrades, levels that have multiple routes through them, unlockable augmentation upgrades that enable further routes and the lethal/non-lethal split for combat encounters. The game also retains the dialogue system and it’s associated upgrade, alongside e-books, a fully working port of the hacking mini-game and decent stealth gameplay. Of course there are some limitations such as some missing augmentation upgrades, smaller levels, less multi-choice dialogues and the like but the core systems are largely here and immediately identifiable. So if the core systems are fine, what’s wrong with DE:TF? Surely we should all be DTF (Down To Forgive) an ambitious and affordable game that successfully carries across most of the gameplay systems to a weaker platform of systems.

Well the first and most forgivable of the game’s issues would be the graphical limitations that come from it being designed first and foremost for mobile platforms over a condensed development cycle of only a year. While the game generally looks fine, it’s pared back significantly from it’s bigger brethren and the most noticeable cut back has been to the facial animations, with hair and eyes looking particularly janky. A considerably larger issue with the game that’s very quickly made apparent is how small each area is, from the single over-world hub that’s split into 5 areas and multiple buildings each with 0 overlap, to each of those various buildings that often feature multiple floors that are again split up by loading screens. This wouldn’t be an issue, but these areas have distinct AI and as such if you’re alerted in a building you can often just sprint past every enemy and then enter the next area. Alternatively if you take the stealthy route, you’ll often only have to deal with between 4 to 8 enemies between each loading screen. Sure the game remembers if you took down or avoided the enemies, to the point of even saving their alert status but it’s still a significant limitation. On the subject of the AI, it’s really terrible and has myriad issues. The stealth detection system doesn’t quite work right half the time and enemies manage to be both blind and surprisingly aware at the same time. Even if you’ve been detected though, the enemy is incredibly stupid and can often by tricked by simply moving slightly or even just remaining totally still on various occasions.

Perhaps the biggest problem faced by the game though is that it’s both incredibly short, with a run-time between 3 and 5 or maybe 6 hours for completionists. Short games have their place of course, but the real spoiler for Deus Ex: The Fall is that it ends on a totally unresolved cliff-hanger with a vague “TO BE CONTINUED” which comes almost as a bit of a shock. There’s even a warning that you won’t be able to finish any side quests in Hub #1 if you proceed which is true because the entire game just ends with a short cut-scene. The promise of a whole new batch of quests, essentially entire narrative and even a subplot featuring a nemesis from our protagonist’s recent past all end up going nowhere. To this day if you boot up the game there’s still an option for “additional content” on the title screen which when opened promises more content coming soon, even though it never will. So while the plot and characters are decent and make use of a rich setting, it never really gets to go anywhere and indeed will never go anywhere. You’re left with the first third of a potential game and everything, from the balancing to the story has been crafted with the intention that there will be considerably more content than what actually got made.

There are some other weird little niggles with the game that belie it’s roots as a mobile game, such as the fact that enemy “corpses” begin to disintegrate around 10 seconds after they “die” whether they’ve been taken down in a lethal or non-lethal fashion. This means that there’s no risk to having enemies be woken up by their colleagues, while non-lethal takedowns still give more XP so you get the reward without much of the risk. There’s also an in-game store, which is accessible from anywhere at any time via the menu and which enables you to buy basically anything. I can only assume the iOS/Android versions let you buy things with REAL MONEY but in the PC version it basically means that at any point you can just some more ammo, or an EMP grenade or whatever. You’re never really short of cash either, unless you’re aiming for the big ticket items so resource management isn’t much of a concern. As previously stated though the game was clearly balanced around having 3 separate acts, so I don’t think it’s possible to gain every unlock or item within the relatively small world of DE:TF. Finally it should probably be mentioned that the game has barely any enemy variety, you’ve got guards, guards with shotguns, guards with assault rifles, some rare robots (I counted 3), two turrets and a type of guard that goes invisible when they spot you. Oh and there’s a big boss robot. So basically 98% of the time you’re up against normal guys who have crap AI and anyone you knock out melts into pixels shortly after “death”. So it’s a pretty easy game, with the only real risk being that you could get caught while reading an in-game book as doing this doesn’t pause the game.

In conclusion then Deus Ex: The Fall is an ambitious game, that ports over all the core systems while botching the execution in various ways. It has a good story that abruptly ends a third of the way in, decent graphics that are let down by some poor posing and details, adequate combat that’s let down by poor enemy AI and variety, and so on. There are some decent story beats and the occasional cool moment, so I can’t be too mean on the game especially as it was made by a small team with a tight schedule for platforms with limited power. In fact the resulting game in the form of DE:TF is actually pretty impressive considering they gave about a dozen people a year to bash this out. Unfortunately though it’s hard to recommend, especially at it’s normal price because it’s just not finished. In spite of my inability to recommend the game however, I still had some fun with it and with the right mindset towards bargain bin gaming I’d say this is one to considering giving a shot. It’s nowhere as good as the main games, but of course it bloody isn’t. Most people will get this in a Deus Ex franchise bundle, and once you’ve played the bigger games this one is a fun little diversion. If you haven’t played the rest of the series, or take a dim view on deeply flawed games then obviously give this one a pass. But I personally have played much worse games, some of which I’ve even “reviewed”!

The post Deus Ex: The Fall appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.