Last night after work I played about an hour and a half of Horizon Zero Dawn, and I’m pretty impressed so far. It looks downright amazing on a PS4 Pro and a 4K HDR TV. I also really like how they try to make the tutorial into something that actually has a narrative, and is more interesting than following prompts on screen. Things really get fun once you’re given control over the adult Aloy, and I’m really enjoying the combat so far. The bow feels like it has real impact when you land a shot on a critical part, and everything just looks and sounds great during combat. It’s especially thrilling to get into a scuffle with several enemies as once, and the music during these instances works to amp up the adrenaline as enemies close in on you.
I’m looking forward to putting some more time into Horizon Zero Dawn as the week goes on, but I can already tell it’s going to be a great time. The last thing I’ll say is that the game has a real polish, and I’ve run into zero bugs or hiccups so far which is rare for games on their release days lately. I can’t wait to play more!
It’s been one of the most exciting years for fans of first person shooters in the history of video games. So many great AAA shooters have released this year, and for the most part they’ve all been hits. We’ve had Overwatch, DOOM, Gears of War 4, Battlefield 1, Titanfall 2 and now Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. The last 30 days alone have seen the rapid fire releases of Gears (Oct 11), Battlefield (Oct 21), Titanfall (Oct 28) and Call of Duty (Nov 4).
It’s been an unbelievably good year for those who enjoy first person shooters. There’s an incredible amount of variety in the games released this year, and there’s something for everyone.
I’ve been trying to check out all of the shooters that have released recently, however I think the ones that I’ll continue to play over the next year will certainly be Overwatch, Battlefield and Titanfall. That said, last night I rented Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare from Redbox and played for a few hours and wanted to share my experience so far.
One of the first things I noticed once I started the campaign was that Infinite Warfare is certainly unlike any Call of Duty that came before it. The view of Jupiter above was not something I expected to see less than five minutes into a Call of Duty game, but it was certainly refreshing.
I had a good time picking up a variety of guns during the first few missions, and found the variety of enemies to be refreshing as well. Most of the guys are just random soldiers, but it’s interesting to see robots thrown into the mix, and even some larger bots that take a little more effort to bring down. I also enjoyed the hacking mechanic a great deal once it was introduced. Basically you can take control of an enemy robot while you’re tucked away safely in cover, and use it to take out as many bad guys as you can and even initiate a self destruct mechanism (it’s fun to run into a group of enemies and explode D.Va style) before you lose the signal during the hack.
The space combat featured in Infinite Warfare was certainly interesting. The first time you ascend from a planet and transition into space I got an eerie No Man’s Sky vibe, but you certainly have less control over your spaceship. You’re sort of guided along a set path as you ascend, and in all reality you don’t have that much control, which isn’t necessarily a complaint, it just felt weird. The same goes for landing sequences. I could basically land my ship with hardly any input, as the game guides you along a highlighted path onto the carrier. Besides all that, the space combat was a nice diversion, but I felt that it dragged on a little longer than I would’ve liked.
Some of the cutscenes look really nice in Infinite Warfare, and one of the things that stood out was the quality of the character’s hair. It looks quite realistic, especially as you can see individual strands, but unfortunately once the cutscene ends it transitions back to being more of a blob than realistic looking hair. Someday video games will give us good looking hair! Again, this isn’t a complaint and it’s something I wouldn’t have even noticed had I not been blown away by just how good it looked during the cutscene above and had it contrasted with the gameplay sequence to follow.
Overall I’ve mostly enjoyed the campaign (I have a handful of missions left), but I did have some difficulty with it at times which made it more frustrating than it should be. After breezing through much of the campaigns of Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2, I’ve died more than I have in both games combined during Infinite Warfare. During some sections I died as many as six times before reaching a checkpoint and getting past a particularly hairy section. I tried turning the difficulty down, but even that didn’t help and it became annoying to replay the same section over and over again just to avoid dying by a grenade or exploding car I didn’t happen to see quick enough.
How does the campaign compare to Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2? I don’t think it’s on the same level. Call of Duty campaigns have gotten more and more stale over the years, while its competitors have really stepped up their game. Titanfall 2 features easily the most enjoyable FPS campaign since Halo: Reach. The writing is excellent (mostly the dialogue of BT), the platforming in-between shooting sections has a Portal level of polish and the shooting feels great, whether on foot or in a titan. Infinite Warfare definitely tries to do things a bit differently, and at times it felt like I was playing more of a sci-fi shooter, but during its most routine moments it feels like everything we’ve done again and again during Call of Duty campaigns. I feel no drive to finish off the last four missions, and if I do it’ll only be for the achievements, not because I’m necessarily enjoying the game.
The multiplayer doesn’t fare much better. I haven’t enjoyed Call of Duty multiplayer since Black Ops II (MW3 is still my favorite) and Infinite Warfare feels like more of the same. It’s eerily similar to Black Ops III, and most of the time it’s just felt like a skin and some new maps over that gameplay. It just hasn’t been enjoyable for me at all. I just want to go back and play some more Battlefield or Titanfall. In fact, if you tend to enjoy the futuristic combat of Black Ops III but haven’t checked out Titanfall, I would highly recommend Titanfall 2 over Infinite Warfare. Even Jeff Gerstmann, a long time Call of Duty enthusiast over at Giant Bomb, has seemed to have drifted away from Call of Duty. Instead, he has been overly enthusiastic about Titanfall 2, which he scored a perfect 5 in his review.
What made the Infinite Warfare experience even worse for me yesterday, was its community. I experienced behavior that I haven’t experienced since the Xbox 360 days during my time with the game yesterday. During one of my first matches I happened to die a lot (I didn’t play a lot of Black Ops III or Advanced Warfare and needed to get used to it), and mid match I got an all caps message instructing me to “STOP DYING!!!!!!111!!”. I took the time to respond that I certainly wasn’t dying on purpose, to which I received a series of insults and a note saying they recorded my gameplay and will be reporting me for dying too much. Good to know.
But it didn’t stop there. It seems like so much of the Call of Duty community is so concerned about their K/D and winning that they’ll get violently angry at anyone who isn’t playing to their standards. I never experience this with Battlefield or Titanfall. Maybe it’s just the day one players who are the most hardcore, but I played Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2 a lot on day one and everyone I encountered was all about having fun.
Overall, I don’t think I can recommend Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare to anyone but the most hardcore of Call of Duty fans. To even those fans I would recommend checking out Titanfall 2 if you haven’t. It’ll provide a similar experience with a much better and more refreshing execution, and I think the games industry would benefit from the increased success of the other shooters on the market.
Hey there, just sharing a couple of recent Twitch streams I’ve done recently. I’m trying to get back into streaming more often so I can have more video content to share. I don’t yet have a Kinect adapter for my Xbox One S, so the Battlefield stream is gameplay only (I tried running it through my Hauppauge HD PVR 2, but couldn’t get it set up the way I wanted it). The Morrowind stream was sort of a test stream for my future streams, to include the Skyrim Special Edition stream I intend to do tomorrow morning (around 11AM MST). For some reason there’s no game audio in the Morrowind stream, so I still have to iron out the kinks before I stream tomorrow.
I don’t think anyone expected much from the new DOOM game that released last week. For starters Bethesda didn’t send copies out to reviewers, which is usually a surefire sign that a game is either going to be outright bad or perform below expectations. Yet once DOOM went live almost everyone reacted with pure joy. “DOOM is back!” people were saying.
I’ve never been really into DOOM, but I recognize its importance and its impact on the modern FPS genre. I could never bring myself to play the game back in mid nineties, but I did enjoy watching others play and it was a stressful experience watching them try to survive through each level.
I was able to get a copy of DOOM for the Xbox One on release day from Redbox, and after it installed I jumped in, still not knowing quite what to expect. I was impressed by how quickly the game gets you going, and I’m glad there’s no tutorial or slow start that most games feature these days. The game basically throws you into the thick of it while offering helpful information via tips that pop up on screen in the early moments. Hopefully this is something more developers will replicate as I had more enjoyment during the first few minutes of the game than I have just about any shooter in the last ten years.
The shooting and non-stop action of DOOM are incredibly solid and it was a joy to mow down enemies while keeping in constant motion, grabbing health packs and armor as quickly as possible. You won’t get very far trying to take cover and play it safe in DOOM, you need to run in head first and be moving constantly if you want to succeed. DOOM plays differently from most modern shooters in this way and it’s actually quite refreshing (despite it being a throwback to how FPS’s played 20 years ago).
The music and environments in DOOM are exceptionally well done and help continue the throwback to classic shooters. You won’t find lengthy dialogue or cut scenes while you’re playing and the game is divided into actual levels with entrances and exits (and also plenty of secrets to find in between).
This brings me to the one thing that kept me from truly enjoying DOOM, and that’s the puzzle nature of its maps. Quite a few times during the first three levels that I played I found myself lost and going in circles again and again trying to figure out where I needed to go next. True there’s an objective indicator, but I still couldn’t figure out how to progress in the direction I needed to more often than I should have. Even looking at the map didn’t seem to help, as the 3D overlapping maps made it hard to figure out how I could get to where I needed to be.
I got so lost on Foundry that I ultimately decided to give the game a rest for now. I had killed all the enemies I could find, and yet couldn’t figure out how to get to where I needed to be. I went in circles at least seven or eight times before I decided to end it all by jumping into the lava and taking the game back to Redbox.
DOOM is definitely a great game, I’m not trying to say it isn’t. If I didn’t have the issue of getting lost I probably would have finished it in one sitting and would be telling you that it’s one of the most enjoyable games I’ve played in years. Unfortunately, I can’t sit here and say that just yet. I get frustrated easily with games, and after having so much fun shooting and tearing apart enemies, the lull of trying to figure out the puzzle of the map just took the joy out of the game for me.
I’ll probably end up giving DOOM another shot in the near future (probably on PC this time), but for now I think I’ve had my fill.
On Tuesday I ran Vault of Glass for the first time (on hard) and later that day decided to join another group to try it again. I know it’s absurd to spend so much time in one day playing a video game (I’m a little ashamed to admit) but I had so much fun working together with a group trying to conquer the raid.
The second attempt didn’t quite go as well as the first, however I streamed the ordeal on Twitch as a guide on how to be a complete and utter noob in Vault of Glass. We made it to the end of the raid but could not conquer Atheon, and ultimately everyone had to go so we left the raid unfinished. Despite the failure, I had just as much fun playing with this second group of people. The Gorgon labyrinth section was especially fun because even as we repeatedly failed everyone was laughing, fooling around and having an all round great time. I’m glad I got to run Vault of Glass with such a great group of people, and am glad I captured it all (well minus all the conversation).
Hey there, just wanted to pop in and let you know I’m about to give Elder Scrolls Online some more time and I’ve started my Twitch stream over at Twitch.tv/jdh5153. Feel free to swing by and check it out. Hopefully ESO will start to grow on me!
I just finished playing through the first couple of hours of Dying Light. Not bad. Well okay, some things about it aren’t great, but overall it’s competent.
Developed by Techland, the people behind Dead Island, Dying Light is an open world zombie game that focuses heavily on parkour traversal and melee weapon combat. The combat feels a lot like Dead Island, with weapons that degrade as you use them, and it feels pretty solid. The parkour, on the other hand, hasn’t impressed me. I found the parkour tutorial section frustratingly difficult to complete. Maybe it’s just because I suck at most video games (especially platformers) but I kept falling over and over again which wasn’t fun. Even once I got out into the world, the climbing and movement felt clunky and somewhat annoying. Having to try to make a jump four or five times is not fun.
So far the story seems cool, and I’ve enjoyed running around the world and fighting off zombies. Once night started to fall I felt absolutely terrified because I’ve already seen what awaits after nightfall in Dying Light (super strong, agile zombies that will rip your face off). Luckily, I was still in the opening sequence and I’m pretty sure the game was waiting for me to get to the safe zone before it became completely dark. It was still quite nerve wracking though.
I’m not sure why I’m trying to play this game. I get scared and anxious enough when night falls in games such as Skyrim (I ALWAYS sleep until daylight) so I’m sure I’ll never be able to handle the night in this game. Heck, I’ve gotten rattled enough just having zombies close in on me during daylight hours in the game. I don’t know how much more I’ll play before I get too stressed out and give up. I probably shouldn’t have purchased the digital version of the game, but I guess I’ll try to push through it.
I managed to get into a co-op game, however the player I was matched with was just standing around unresponsive so at that point I decided I had had enough and should let my heart rate return to normal. I’m interested to see how the co-op works in Dying Light as I enjoyed it quite a bit in Dead Island.
Hopefully I’ll get around to playing some more Dying Light during daylight hours (in both real world and in game). Until then, you can watch my first two hours of the game that I streamed on Twitch.
Are you playing Dying Light? What do you think of it so far? Have any advice for me? Leave a comment!
I’ve enjoyed console billiards games since Side Pocket on the NES, and Pure Pool is the first pool game available on current gen systems. On the 360 I enjoyed Pool Nation quite a bit, and hope it’ll make its way to the Xbox One, but for now Pure Pool will have to do.
The first thing you’ll notice with Pure Pool is that it looks quite good. Pool Nation was very flashy and overly shiny, so it’s nice that Pure Pool sticks to more lifelike visuals. The balls, table and backgrounds all look nice and they aren’t trying to be too fancy.
The game plays quite well and making shots feels great. You have to aim from behind the cue ball (you can’t aim from an overhead view) which makes across the table shots a little difficult to sink. This makes the game a bit more realistic when compared to other pool games which make it too easy to line up shots that should be difficult to make.
The career mode is enjoyable with some side objectives along the way that keep things interesting. For example in the speed mode you’ll be given a time in which you have to sink all the balls to gain 3, 2 or 1 star. You use those stars to unlock more tournaments along the way where you’ll face more skilled opponents and more difficult challenges.
I attempted to try out the multiplayer, however didn’t have much luck so far. I got into one game of 8-ball but my opponent left the game less than a minute in (giving me a win). After that I was unable to find a match. After about 30 seconds of searching the game says there’s no one else looking for a match and suggests I play against an A.I. opponent. Hopefully there will be more people playing Pure Pool in the future, as I’d like to go head to head with challenging opponents over Xbox Live.
The only thing I can say I don’t like about the game is the mellow music that most pool games over the years seem to have. Pure Pool is a great game to play casually while listening to a podcast or watching TV on the side, however, so I can’t fault it too much for the uninspired soundtrack.
For $12.99 Pure Pool will easily sate your appetite for billiards.
Last night I celebrated the return of the SWAT playlist to the Master Chief Collection with a ‘Halo and Brews’ Twitch Broadcast where I enjoyed a couple Square Mile Ciders and saw my performance get worse and worse through the night. Enjoy!
(Apparently Twitch muted the second video due to copyright, so there’s that. I guess I’ll throw some YouTube music into it or something in a bit)
Gumballs Plays Games 