Recenzii recente de Quitch

I've finished my Uber run after 15 hours and 56 deaths. I would describe it as possibly the best FPS I've played since Half-Life 2, certainly since the original Modern Warfare.

It has some of the modern sensibilities baked in, like a cover system, and the ability to stealth kill people, but it's very much an FPS in the Half-Life vein. And like Half-Life 2 it's a superb game despite the shooting not actually being that great and the story being by-the-numbers and an excuse for cool set pieces.

You see, where this game excels is in everything else. There is great enemy variety and they all feel distinctive and you handle them in different ways. The guns handle differently and you will use them in different circumstances. And despite the shooting not being great, these elements combine to bring you that great feeling of the classics like Doom and Half-Life, because you will choose the right gun depending on the encounter you're in.

And it works in newer stuff really well. OK, I could live without the cover system, but the perks give you a great incentive to try out different ways of playing, without feeling like a necessary burden. Get lots of throwing knife kills? Here, have an extra knife slot. It's just fun. Stealth provides you one alternative to many encounters, and in addition the game will often provide you another route which you can discover to make life easier. You feel like you have options, and on the top difficulty I felt like I needed to explore them to win. It even has some replayability in that you make an early choice which bumps you into one of two timelines.

Uber difficulty felt just right to me. I could die, but generally it felt like I'd messed up. Maybe a couple of encounters towards the end where I felt I had to play off advance knowledge, but generally I was just deadly enough but a slip up could cost me dearly.

Collectables have been nicely updated. I was doing my best to track them down, but finding them didn't feel like it ruined the pacing. They're not obnoxious to find, yet surprisingly difficulty to spot, but not in an unfair way. Hell, they glow and I still managed to miss some. Never quite figured out what causes them to get marked on my map sometimes and not others though. I thought it was collecting the level map, but apparently not.

But the real jewel in the crown are the characters and the story telling. As I said, the story itself isn't anything to write home about, it's just an excuse for lots of big set pieces. However, this is the first FPS in a long, long time where I have been invested in the people. The game paces it perfectly, you learn about these people, get to know them, and you care about what happens. It's the equal of any Valve game in this respect. And it's all set against this monstrous backdrop of war crimes. In a way it's odd to have this contrast between over-the-top nazi robots and mad scientists, and then these mundane yet horrific crimes and psychopaths. But it works.

There's some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I have, but they're not worth getting into because overall this game is just plain good. It leaves itself open for another in the series, and were it developed by MachineGames I'd put down for a pre-order.

As someone who bought KoA during the sale, allow me to say that Skyrim is the better game in almost every respect. KoA had a combat system that's more fun at first, but it's obviously way too easy and suffers from a real lack of breadth in terms of options in the early levels. Every enemy I encounter I've tackled the same way. Frankly, I'd rather be stealth sniping enemies in Skyrim at this point.

What's unforgivable is just how soulless the game is. The NPCs say a lot, but no one has anything to say, if that makes sense. There's not a memorable character thus far, and it has a naming scheme cunningly designed to ensure you forget everything immediately. I run from objective to objective, but I'm not invested at all, there's just no reason to care. MMO in single-player form is what I've seen it called, and apart from a much more player skill orientated combat system, this seems spot on.

Big fat thumbs down from me. You spend huge chunks of time holding down W, and occasionally jumping. There's little danger, except when you miss a jump and it wastes your time. There's so little game, yet a lot of walking to do.

The problem is that even with the limited mechanics it could perhaps make up for it in immersion or atmosphere? But it doesn't really, other than a pretty decent score. I don't know anything more about me or my mission in the last 3 hours than I learned in the trailer. It hasn't developed any character or given me a reason to give a ♥♥♥♥ about anyone. But it's called Lifeless Planet, so you think the planet would be the star, but it's just such a boring place to be. The story itself has been pretty meh so far, and the collectables dull so finding things isn't a reward, and generally it takes so long to trek anywhere off the path that you won't want to bother.

And what's the point of the oxygen mechanic exactly? You're running low! Quick, get to the container that's really close and probably on the main path!

Fantastic trailer though.

Planetary Annihilation is part of the Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander RTS sub-genre. It focuses on large-scale battles, favouring macro over micro. Of the two it has more in common with Total Annihilation.

To summarise some of its selling points:

• Planets - Play on spheres not flat planes. No corners to hide in, attacks can come from any direction.
  
• Systems - fight across multiple planets with different terrain types, and their orbits affect transit time.
  
• Orbital - A whole other layer in addition to land, air and water. Attack from space with lasers.
  
• Super weapons - Forget experimentals, you fire units across space, smash planets into one another or even build your own Death Star to blow up other planets with.
  
• Active ladder - Unless you're in the top 10, your ladder queue time will be minimal. The ladder maps are both diverse and extremely well balanced. We've gone from top players having one or two generic opening builds to multiple builds per-map.
  
• Active developers - A day doesn't go by on the official forums without a post from the developers. Sorian even works on the AI on his days off.
  
• AI by Sorian - If you're into your single-player then you're getting an AI from the guy behind the infamous Sorian AI mod for SUPCOM, who was also recruited by GPG to "fix" the SUPCOM2 AI.
  
• Scale - The game can be as small or epic as you want. You can battle over a tiny moon for ten minutes, or you can battle for hours over up-to 16 planets. Planets can vary massively in size, with the largest giving you more than enough space for a couple of hours fighting, if not more.
  
• Mods - There's an active modding scene. The game was built to be moddable, and the PA Mod Manager gives you access to all of them. From graphical mods to UI mods to total conversion mods. Whether you want coloured explosions or to fight with nothing but Boom Bots with a massive Boom Bot birthing new Boom Bots where it walks, the modders have you covered.
  
• Powerful map editor - The System Editor allows you to create almost anything you can imagine. Planet shaped like an hourglass? Check. Planet with holes in its side you can hide in to escape bombers? Check. Planet with an outer ring which is also playable[forums.uberent.com]? Check. The community is letting its imagination run wild.
  
• Active scene - There are constantly streams[www.twitch.tv] and events happening. The game has Twitch support built into it, so someone is always streaming something, and there are events and tournaments[exodusesports.com] happening almost every weekend! Many of them feature cash prizes. And of course there's the community IRC[irc.lc] too if you just want to chat.
  
• Procedural campaign - If you're into single-player you have skirmish, but you also have the Galactic War which is a rogue-like campaign across a randomly generated galaxy. Fight across different systems (each of which plays like a standalone skirmish) against an increasingly difficult AI, unlocking new technologies to help you, and upon winning you unlock new loadouts for your future campaigns.
  
• Server-client mode - Remember how your multiplayer match in SUPCOM lagged when someone with a low spec machine hit their limit? There's none of that here. No matter how crappy your opponent's machine everything is run on the server so they can't impact your experience. The game scales far better in multiplayer. It also means people can't cheat.

What PA doesn't have:

• A story campaign - Seriously, if you want a story campaign this is not the RTS for you.
  
• Interactive tutorial - There's an in-game user guide, but no walk through tutorial.

Planetary Annihilation was funded through a Kickstarter campaign in 2012. As with any Kickstarter campaign there were numerous tiers, with the higher tiers getting you access earlier, $90 for alpha and $60 for beta respectively. For $20 (or $15 if you backed early enough) you would receive the game on release.

When Uber put PA on Steam under Early Access they didn't want backers to feel punished for buying in early. Indeed, without those backers the game wouldn't have been made (see Human Resources). Thus the Early Access followed the Kickstarter pricing, $90 for alpha and $60 for beta. Only when the game passed the expected release date of December 2013 did the price get reduced further and all Kickstarter backers were given access.

Since then it has been priced, and put on sale, in line with any other game on Steam.

Uh, no. Developers are posting every day on the official forums[forums.uberent.com]. As I type this there's a developer in Twitch chat on the stream of ZaphodX[www.twitch.tv] talking about what changes are coming in the next Player Test Environment (PTE) release.

I develop an AI mod for the game and all my questions are answered by Sorian, much as other developers have been on hand to respond to the queries of other modders. Meanwhile balance changes are released to the PTE, often to deal with issues raised by the community through the forums or identified by the developers in community tournaments and streams. Players test the changes out, revisions are made and eventually it makes its way from PTE to the live environment.

You can switch between PTE and live any time you want, either through the Uber launcher or Steam beta opt-in.

Yes, it did. There's no denying that the game wasn't in the shape we'd have like to have seen.

But it's not release any more, it's months later and the game has been hugely improved since then. I'm more than happy to say it's in an excellent state now. The last major release was just before Christmas and more changes are already on the way.

Reviewers who have revisited the game have been very positive[waywardstrategist.com].

The game allows you to buy commander models from an in-game store with real money. These are purely cosmetic changes with no gameplay impact. All the commanders are ones designed for $1000 Kickstarter backers who have not only approved their commanders being sold, but are also getting a cut from every sale.

The reason for this is to allow PA to be a long-term investment so Uber can continue to make further content releases well into the future. And you can ignore the entire thing if you want, it's not in your face, it's all tucked away in the armory.

The Orbital Factory is T3. But if you mean experimentals, then no, PA doesn't have experimentals. It has super weapons.

You can.

Yes, absolutely yes. The only other active game even vaguely in this space is Supreme Commander Forged Alliance Forever, and the two are different enough that I cannot see why you wouldn't want to try Planetary Annihilation.

It's a game that's actively supported, has developers who listen and respond to the community, and it's getting better every day.

It won't be for everyone, but no game ever is. It's not Total Annihilation and it's not Supreme Commander, it's both a spiritual successor to them while also being its own game.

It's not often that you play a game that feels fresh, but it's a magical experience when you do. CONSORTIUM is one of those games. You're plunged into a world you don't understand, hearing terms you don't recognise, encountering a ranking structure that is unfamiliar. You get the greatest feeling you can get in a game: the need to explore and learn more about this fascinating universe.

Suffice to say the opening is excellent at drawing you in and the music of Jeremy Soule is well utilised here.

It's a game about people and relationships. You will spend most of your time walking around the ship interacting with the crew, and every member of that crew has their own voice, personality, relationships with other crew members. Everyone feels like a real person, there's no lazy stereotypes here, no accented characters firing off lines about "in my homeland" or anything like that. They're just people.

The dialogue system helps with this feeling of a living vessel. Conversations don't pause the game or take control away from you. You can walk away, they can walk away, people can interrupt, other conversations carry on around you, they keep working on whatever task it was they were doing. Rather than taking you out of the game, conversations draw you deeper into it. And, hallelujah, keyboard shortcuts for dialogue options!

This game is part one of three with a larger meta arc straddling the series, but this game features a central mystery around a traitor aboard the ship. And this is my favourite bit: whether you discover who that traitor is is entirely up to you; you can end this episode not knowing. And it's not easy, you will most likely fail. How awesome is that?

It's reasonably short with about five hours of gameplay (though there's tens of hours of material in the console if you want to read it all), but it replays well. You're going to miss events, things play out differently depending on your choices, conversations might not happen, characters might not appear. I think you could easily get three playthroughs out of this without feeling bored. While I wouldn't recommend browsing the achievements before playing this game, they give you a good idea of the number of different things that can happen and how many of them you've missed.

The game isn't without weaknesses and there are a few biggies:

1. Combat isn't great, primarily because the entire episode takes place on the ship and the ship makes for a really poor combat environment. There's not really any cover to work with or great ways to maneuver, you will generally just hold down the trigger or find ways to cheese the AI for the tough bits. It is supposedly possible to make it through the game without firing a shot though. I've almost done it.

2. The inventory doesn't feel like it has a reason for being and is incredibly clumsy. It has that Mass Effect vibe of existing because people expect to see it.

3. The game just sort of ends without any feeling of closure. Sure, it's part one of three, but games like Mass Effect and The Walking Dead have shown how you can be part of a larger arc while still managing closure at the end of your game.

4. I have concerns with the meta element of "you are playing a game" which is being worked into the story. It works in dialogues in a jokey "are you mad?" kind of way, but it seems to be becoming a larger part of the plot in a way I'm not that keen on.

All-in-all though I'd recommend it. It feels new and exciting, and setting the whole game in one location works really well.

The best open world game Bethesda have released. A world full of quirky things to discover, with mini-adventures in every building and stories told simply by the scenery. The wasteland has a wonderful Zen quality to it and it was a pleasure to explore and unearth all its secrets.

Another open world success! Hundreds of hours of gameplay lie within. Really, when it comes to the open world experience no one does it better than Bethesda.

A fresh twist on the adventure genre and doing something interesting with episodic content, introducing choice and carrying consequence from one episode to the next. It remains to be seen whether this amounts to anything worthwhile, but I respect Telltale for trying something new.

It takes all the great stuff from Half-Life 2 and then wraps it around the best (one of the only) FPS buddy adventures made.

Despite the many problems with the AI, and the fact that you really don't have a lot of flexibility beyond the early game as to which victory you wish to pursue, this really is a "just one more turn" experience.