Geekly Review #123

Another week down and another Geekly Review to check out. Also GDC 2016 is this week, so that’s something to look forward too!

The Division is finally here

My time has mostly been spent playing The Division as you might have expected. After around 13 hours of play time I have to say that I really, really like it.

Firstly I want to talk about New York as an environment. I don’t think I’ve seen such a well create world before, there is so much detail in it it’s quite unbelievable. The roads are full of cars, rubbish, road blocks and other junk. Apartments that you can go in look like they’ve been lived in by people struggling to survive.

It also looks fantastic too. I know that people have been talking about the game being downgrading for ages, and they’re probably right, but that doesn’t mean that it looks terrible now. The weather effects are amazing, and the way snow builds up on your character as you play is a nice touch. The fire and particle effects look brilliant. The only things I think that don’t look too great are the sky scrapers, if you look up and really check them out, they look a little bland, but other than that it looks fantastic. I think that the disaster stricken city has been done brilliantly.

What about the gameplay? From what I’ve played so far I can’t really complain, it seems like a really well done third person cover shooter. It certainly won’t win any awards for gunplay, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s fun. There are a lot of weapon choices and I think they have a good feel to them with some of them feeling quite different to use. Each weapon also has a ton of customisation options which always leaves you tweaking and tinkering for that perfect combination.

Most of the missions have mainly been about going somewhere and shooting everything until it’s all clear. So I can see why some people might not be too enamoured by that, but I like it because it’s pretty fun (and more fun with friends).

Seeing as the game isn’t really a hard core RPG I think there are still some really good and pretty in depth RPG elements to it that let you tweak your classes on the fly. It’s also really good that you aren’t tied to one class i.e. medic/healer, you can completely change it whenever you want.

Up to now I’ve only spent around 30 minutes in the Dark Zone, so I’m yet to really get a good feel for that part. But you can immediately see the difference between the beta and full game. The number of NPC’s has been bumped up a lot and you constantly see the factions fighting each other. I only saw one other team when playing and the completely ignored me. It feels like the Dark Zone is very different to how it was in the beta and I’ll wait and see if that’s a good thing or not.

I’ve not delved in to the game to any great depths yet so it’s hard to really form a proper opinion on some parts and I will definitely be putting together some thoughts as I get further in to it. But right now I’m very happy with the game.

The only downside I’ve seen so far was the character customisation at the beginning of the game, there really wasn’t much choice, but there are a bunch of options for clothing as you progress in the game so that helps make up for it.

– Will

Lads Weekend

My wife went on holiday on Wednesday morning. As you’d expect as she was on holiday in the sun, I felt it only fair that I also had a break from work and took the end of the week off with the intention of playing computer games and having beer. Everything went to plan as of Wednesday afternoon their was practically none stop gaming and drinking with friends that came over as and when they pleased over the week.

We played Zombicide as you can see above, Jungle Speed, Dobble, WWE2k16, FIFA, WarioWare, South Park Chef’s Loveshack (yep the PS1 games had a runout) Mario Kart 8 & Micro Machines V3. In fact Micro Machines might just go down as the best session of the week / weekend as we started playing and drinking casually midday and before we knew it, it was approaching 6pm and we were running out of beer. Plenty of sport was watched too with the Europa League games and the Rugby. Saturday night was the one that ended the weekend of fun, and it ended it really heavy with drinking till the early hours of the morning followed by watching WWE Roadblock and spending Sunday recovering from a deserved hangover.

Captain America Civil War Trailer – Spoiler… A Wild Spiderman Appears

One of the biggest bits of news over the week was the release of Captain America Civil War trailer which finally revealed Spiderman. As you can imagine the Internet had a nerdgasm. I think Spiderman’s costume looks pretty badass and cannot wait to see this film.

More of the Division – UK’s Biggest 1st Quarter Launch Title

As you can see over recent weeks the Division has got hold of Will and won’t let him go. The hype for the game has been pretty astronomical, and as to be expected it turns out it’s everyone that was hyped for the release of Division (barring Murr). The Division can boast being the most successful UK 1st quarter launch title ever now. And something that surprised me and I had discussed with Will about is that the PS4 version sold better than the XboxOne. I honestly and genuinely expected the XboxOne version to shift more despite the gap in console sales.

The Division is the UK’s biggest ever game launch during the first three months of any year.

The online shooter’s arrival last week was the biggest Q1 debut for any game since previous record holder, PS2 racer Gran Turismo 4 back in 2005.

In the UK, it was Ubisoft’s third-biggest ever biggest ever game release – behind Watch Dogs and Assassin’s Creed 3. The publisher will hopefully be happy with the news – although after four years of development it’s likely Ubisoft needs the game to be a colossal success.

54 per cent of physical copies were sold on PlayStation 4, while 45 per cent were sold on Xbox One – a pretty close platform split. No doubt Microsoft’s marketing spend and promise of early access to the game’s DLC helped here.