Geekly Review #131

Just me this week as Murr has been away on a stag do. So let’s check out what Geeky stuff I’ve been up to!

Overwatch

This past week saw the Overwatch Beta hit consoles and PC. I’ve had my eye on  Overwatch for a little while, I’ve never been overly excited for it, but I thought it looked good so was keen to give the beta a go.

I was playing it on Xbox One and it was… OK. It ran really well, looked really good and played nicely but there was just something lacking from it, but I don’t really know what it was. I know at times I felt like it took too long to get back in to the action as you spawned so far away and with the slow player movement this kind of exaggerated it.

I think I would like to play the game again and play the full release of it, but I don’t really want to spend the money on it. If it was cheaper then maybe I’d be tempted, but I don’t really see myself wanting to play it enough to warrant the purchase.

But it’s clear to see that Blizzard have created another good game, I think it just wasn’t got me.

Parkitect

Another game that I’ve been following a lot went in to Early Access last week on Steam – Parkitect. It’s a Theme Park sim and has a very similar feel to the early Roller Coaster Tycoon games and I love it. Unfortunately I’ve not had the chance to play it half as much as I would’ve liked, but from what I’ve played I do really like it.

Whilst Planet Coaster is looking to completely re-invent the genre, Parkitect is keeping things a little more simple. That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of depth to the game though. Even though I’ve only scratched the surface I can already see that Coaster building is massively customisable, you can create themes, jazz up your park with a whole multitude of options, it really does look like a solid game and I can’t wait to play more of it – expect some more in-depth views on it later on. It’s also great to see that it has been really well received on steam so far with 97% recommending it. I also took a little look through the negatives and it seems like people are complaining about there being no tutorial… Not exactly that big of a deal…

Rust

Finally, I’ve still been spending a lot of time on Rust.

There was a server reset last week, which meant all buildings were wiped and a few new updates were introduced. This also meant that our group had a chance to create a base in an almost empty land. It was really weird seeing Rust so empty at first, there were only a few buildings dotted around when normally I’m used to seeing one every few hundred metres. Anyway We built a base up and it got raided whilst we were offline. We then built another one, and it got raided – this time we were online. I’d only just logged in, but the others had been on for a little while, all of a sudden we heard a number of footsteps outside and then rockets started to hammer at our walls, within seconds they were down and gunfire was raining in our base. We put up a bit of a fight – managing to take out a couple of the raiders, but it was clear we were heavily out gunned. Another base gone…

I get that raiding in Rust is a huge part of the game, but it’s just annoying when you’ve spent all that time making a base and it’s then gone in seconds. But mostly I was annoyed because we were at the point where we were thinking of going raiding, but now we can’t. Luckily though one of us (Well done Ross) managed to escape whilst we were being destroyed and he took a lot of our most precious materials with him, so hopefully we can get back up and running soon!

I mentioned last week about us getting raided and that I was going to put together a video of it, well I did, so here it is.

Battlefield 1

Finally we got to see the first trailer for the new Battlefield game and as a lot of people though it is set in WW1.

Personally this looks a lot more interesting than Call of Duty, and I’m defiently going to be keeping my eye on it as it progresses.

-Will