Geekly Review #122

Another week comes and goes and the Geekly Review is back for another round up of news and what we’ve been playing.

The Division, Get Hyped!

The Division is so close now and the hype train is on a none stop trip Post-Apocalyptic New York. Last week I was actually writing up a piece about end game content and the fact that there had been a lack of communication about what it would be. Lo and behold Ubisoft Massive go and drop the trailer for their plans for year one. In that trailer we got confirmation of incursions coming in April. It’s not entirely clear what an incursion will actually be, but it sounds like it could be similar to Destiny’s striker or possibly their raids, or maybe a mix of both. Either way confirmation of some end game content is great and there are still a lot of things we don’t know about like the daily and weekly events that have been mentioned before.

I think it’s safe to say that you can expect to see a fair bit over coverage of The Division on here over the next few months as I am very excited about it.

Halo 5 and the most useless team ever

I started playing Halo 5 again recently, mostly multiplayer but I’ve also started a co-op legendary campaign with a friend. It’s definitely not as hard as I remember previous Halo’s being on legendary and I think this is in part down to the fact that you have a team of 4 with you at all times and they can revive you from a downed state. For the most part we were able to get through areas with relative ease – all whilst remaining cautious and being a bit more sensible than normal.

It wasn’t until we met Warden Eternal that we struggled and eventually gave up, 1 because it was late, 2 because he was annoying us both quite a lot and 3 because our AI team mates were as useful as a chocolate teapot.  They’re just so dumb…. so, so dumb. There were times when one of us would be down and your AI buddy would just stand next to you doing nothing not even shooting anything, they’d just watch you slowly die. It was beyond frustrating when this happened. I didn’t really notice this when playing solo, that could’ve been because I played through on normal and therefore didn’t die too often. But on legendary, it’s pretty embarrassing how bad they are.

We just couldn’t seem to take him out and would more often than not, get killed by enemies just randomly spawning behind you without knowing. But we will be back and we will take him down…. one day.

The Culling

Over the weekend we got a little surprise from The Culling. The game was originally due to launch this coming week, but due to the success of the closed alpha, the developers decided to release the game via early access a little earlier. So the game is available to play right now. Check it out on Steam.

From what I played of the beta I thought it was a really good game that has quite a lot of promise. Plus Battle Royale game types are great!

– Will

Zombicide Black Plague Review

We’ve got the latest iteration of Zombicide, Black Plague and basically we loved it. Check out Will’s review of the game here.

Life Is Strange

I know I’m incredibly late to the party here, but on the weekend my physical copy of Life Is Strange arrived. I’d been wanting to play this game since it’s original launch, But I genuinely dislike the wait between episodes on episodic games like this, and I’m more of a fan of physical games than digital and always had a hunch this would release physical. Will had played a few episodes and would text me occasionally with his reactions to what happened in the recent episode he played. So I was glad to finally get to play this. I did a marathon session of it over the weekend completing Episodes 1 & 2 Saturday and the final 3 episodes on Sunday. I’ll avoid going into massive details here as I’m going to do a late to the party post about it, But will put a few thoughts in this weeks Geekly Review and will say this…

Holy Shit!

This game is a masterpiece. From the opening scenes of the game walking down the school corridor with the perfectly fitting soundtrack, clicking on everything and anything I could with Max reading everything out. It was such an incredible experience. Excuse me using this term, but it genuinely fits the game, It’s an emotional roller-coaster. And that is a genuinely damn good description of the game. I’ve since egged Will on to finish the game so I can talk to him about the ending, the decisions made and the decisions ignored which somehow still created different outcomes for different characters in the game.

 

Ghostbusters (Is it Ghostbusters III or Ghostbusters Reboot…We don’t know?)

During the week Sony Pictures revealed the first trailer for the upcoming Ghostbusters movie. I’ve had many a conversation with my wife about this film and my thoughts on it. There are some properties that sometimes should be left alone purely due to it’s legacy. Ghostbusters was one of my favourite things when I was growing up. Loved the films, loved the cartoon, had the toys and still do have them in my parents loft. And it kind of wound me up that this film was going to go ahead without the original cast. I know that they’d be too old for a 3rd installment and the sad passing of Harold Ramis meant that the original team could never be re-assembled. To put it bluntly I didn’t want anyone touching this franchise whether the new team was male or female.

The trailer came out, and I watched it. The opening part with the familiar music played softly with a piano gave me goosebumps (I ain’t afraid). And as the trailer went on the nostalgia of the logo, the music it all made me smile. I couldn’t believe it but there was something about it that I enjoyed. I watched it over and over a few times. And it genuinely was growing on me more and more with each watch. The ghosts are colourful, whacky and over the top which is exactly what they’re meant to be in a Ghostbusters story. The comedy wasn’t quite the same as the old movies, and I don’t expect it to be with Paul Fieg as the writer and director of the film. But there was something there that settled my nerves with regards to how this film could turn out. I take back any rants I had with my wife, It was me being protective of something that I didn’t want to change, It was me being stubborn that one of my favourite childhood things was being brought back in a way I thought I disapproved of. But I have to admit, It looks pretty okay from the trailer.

Enough of my rambling about it, Check it out and see what you think:

Nintendo Direct

Nintendo had their first Direct of 2016. It was to showcase their summer games for WiiU and 3DS. There was some new announcements such as Paper Mario Colour and Kirby Robobo, and some confirmed release dates such as Fire Emblem Fates and Star Fox Zero (which will now come bundled with an additional Star Fox game that was Project Guard). Check out our summary here.

– Murr