Recent reviews by greatcat

I haven't actually played Thrones Of Britannia yet, other than having a look at the menu options/settings etc, so I can't comment on the actual quality of this DLC yet - but........................if you are thinking of buying it, there's good news :)

If you haven't already noticed this on the store page yet, it will tell you the following -

This DLC is similar in scope to the Blood & Burning pack for Total War: ATTILA, sharing some of its effects. It will be available for free to players that already own that content for ATTILA.

So today, I just bought Blood & Burning for TW: ATTILA (£2.49), and it automatically downloads this DLC at the same time.

You're welcome!! :D

REAL BOXING........................well maybe?

For years now, there has been a distinct lack of decent boxing games available on consoles, and especially PC. This one hasn’t quite scratched the itch for me, but it’s pretty much the best one that I’ve played so far. I would describe it as a simplified version of Fight Night - basically, there’s not much to shout about in regard to the customisation of your fighters, and no choice of different weight divisions. The training sessions are very easy - simply pressing Q, or A at the right times, and I was surprised to find how the awkwardness of using a keyboard to control the boxers during actual fights becomes easily manageable after a couple of minutes. There’s an option to use up to two controllers/gamepads etc, but I haven’t tried this out properly so far. In the Career Mode options, there are no varying difficulty levels as such, but instead, three tournaments, starting with - the ’Roosters Tournament’, followed by ’Night Of The Champions’, and finally ’Boxing Legends’. I have only so far played through the first tournament, which pits you against seven other opponents in a league. After fighting each other once each, the top four face off in semi finals, then once you win the final, ’Night Of The Champions’ becomes unlocked, and this gives you seven more opponents of better quality, until you eventually will unlock ’Boxing Legends’. I am really hoping that the later tournaments provide more of a challenge than the first one did, as in the nine bouts that it took to win it, I won all of them by KO, and mostly in Round One!! Overall so far though, I reckon that it’s pretty much worth the £3.99 that it costs right now. Just maybe this will provide some pugilistic entertainment to boxing fans, at least until eSports Boxing Club is hopefully released at some point :)

This is kinda like XCOM for 12 year olds, but that said, it's not that bad for what it'll cost - under £5 at full price, and right now, it's on sale. The gunfire sound effects remind me of when you squeeze a plastic tomato sauce bottle over your chips, but if you are particularly fond of turn based combat games, then I'd say give it a try because with a good deal of polish, it could well improve. The current lack of an opportunity fire/overwatch option is a big drawback, and the fact that your squad members can be as close to enemies as if they were both in the same phone booth, yet can still miss with any weapon boiled my p*ss at times, but it's still a game in early access, so again - these things can maybe be added and improved upon I guess?? I have only played for 111 minutes so far, but unless these improvements can be implemented, then I kinda doubt that I'll come back to this one any time soon. 6/10 because of the low price, otherwise I'd have rated it at 5 in it's current state.

It looks like a great game, but I didn't actually get to find out because after around 15 attempts to get it past the loading screens without crashing, I reluctantly decided that to continue trying was more pointless than hitting myself in the face with a breeze-block, and I have requested, and been given a refund. There was a message that continually popped up onscreen after each crash, which somewhat irritatingly said 'Oooops, game crashed', and went on to advise me to 'fix' this problem by looking on forums etc, or sending an email to the developers containing a copy of various files in regard to the crash. Fair enough, some people might be quite happy, or at least willing to go down this tedious path, but personally, I am not one of them, although I AM quite happy to explain why - because I am not a software engineer, nor do I wish to enrol myself on a crash course at some kind of Nerd College in order to better understand screen after screen of boring data files just to make one game work properly! I am just a bloke who likes playing console and pc games, and while I do know my way around computers up to a reasonable standard, when I pay nearly £17 for something, I expect to receive a fully working product, and certainly not something that I basically have to put together myself from faulty components!! I have been a pretty (some would say not so pretty) avid gamer since around the mid 1980's, and not since the squeaking, whistling cassette games that we loaded via a Sinclair Spectrum have I felt the kind of almost nervous annoyance of sitting in front of a screen, all but actually praying that a new game will load up properly first time out of it's box, or at least eventually - until today that is, while trying to load this one!! I don't particularly enjoy thumbing a game down, but on this occasion, there was literally nothing to recommend! I liked the previous Door Kickers game, and I wish you all luck in getting this sequel up and running without the kind of complications which I truly cannot be a***d with - I just don't have that kind of patience! :D

I've only recently tried Easy Red out for around 2 hours, so therefore haven't really even scratched the surface of the game yet - but so far, I've been very impressed, especially with the sheer amount of content, and different options available in a title for which I only paid £2.99!! Don't be put off by the graphics shown in the trailers etc, which I would describe as similar to maybe PS2/early PS3 standard - this game has more than enough about it to compensate for it's older style visuals. There's one thing which I think could make this one better though - that would be the addition of an ability for your characters to adopt a prone position. It would certainly improve the chances of taking cover on a beach landing for a start!! MY RATING: 70/100 - which could well rise after more time spent further into the game-play.