Geekly Review #137

Well that’s it, the biggest games show of the year has been and gone. It went by pretty quickly didn’t it!

Hard Reset Redux

Step in to an action packed Cyperpunk world with over the top action, a bucket full of weapons and explosions galore.

I’d never heard of the Hard Reset series before, but apparently Hard Reset came out in 2012. Now we have Hard Reset Redux, it may be new, but it certainly feels like a throw back to mid/late 90’s FPS games and really reminds me of Duke Nukem 3D.

The world as we know it ceased to exist. Humanity is at the verge of extinction, living in the last closed city of Bezoar. Mankind wages war against the machines controlling vast areas of what became the ‘Barrens’. Machines want to control and assimilate ‘The Sanctuary’ a network that holds billions of digitalized human minds. Our hero, Maj. Fletcher, is a soldier of CLN – a corporation combat unit, established to protect the city. Machines are constantly assaulting the walls of Bezoar. Fletcher moves in when Bezoar’s protective barrier is breached.

Kind of sounds a bit like the Matrix right? Expect there is no bullet time, no Neo and no leather – well not yet anyway.

I’m only a few missions in to the campaign right now, but so far so good. Sure, it’s not a ground breaking game and doesn’t really offer anything that you haven’t already seen before. But it’s pretty mindless entertainment and sometimes that’s exactly what you need.

It’s also not the prettiest game to look at – which isn’t helped by the drab looking Cyperpunk world, it just looks a little old right now, if it had come out a few years back you might’ve have thought it looked great, but now it’s just a mediocre looking. That isn’t a huge problem as graphics aren’t the be all and end all, if the game is still fun or has a good story then you can easily have a great time.

I guess it sounds a bit like I’m hating on the game right now, so let’s take a slightly more positive turn. The explosions look really good and there are certainly a lot of them to take in. The weapons and weapon customisation/upgrades are varied and fun to use. You can have anything from traditional machine guns, shotgun and grenade launchers all the way to an electric/plasma mortar launcher. What I like about them is that it allows you to approach fights in different ways – get up close and personal with the shotgun or launch AOE mortars and watch you enemies fry from a distance.

So far the enemies seem pretty varied to, with small and quick enemies who get in close for melee attacks, or just self destruct, or larger ones who rush you and stomp on you. Again they aren’t exactly anything new but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. I’m looking forward to playing a bit more of it over the next week and will come back with some more in-depth thoughts on it.

Overwatch

I’ve also been playing quite a lot of Overwatch and I’m loving it. The one thing I don’t like is that when playing on my own and just grouping with randoms it feels like I always get the people who just want to get kills and don’t really bother trying to play the objective. They just pick a class they like – usually Genji or Reaper, and go off doing their own thing. I feel like I’m always the one playing Support as Mercy or Tank as Reinhardt. So many times I’ve had to pick Reinhardt to try and escort the payload almost on my own as no one else seems to bother.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Another game I’m making my way through albeit a little slowly is Tomb Raider. I’n only about 20-25% complete right now, but I’m really liking it. The mix between action and exploring seems well balanced so far and I’ve been loving exploring tombs and completing the puzzles within them. I wasn’t really in any doubt about whether I’d like the game as I loved the last one and RotTR is kind of more of the same, so I’m happy!

– Will

With E3 done and dusted, my weekend activities were inspired by some of the events from E3.

Halo Wars

So, I purchased my PlayStation 4 on launch day in the UK. Since that magical moment I have not turned my Xbox360 on. It was unplugged and sent to my games room, not set up. Just sat collecting dust. Having watched all the conferences and getting hyped up by all the games coming out soon, I have to admit one thing on the Microsoft conference caught my attention more than anything else from that show. Halo Wars 2. I recall really enjoying the original Halo Wars on Xbox360 and after the trailer and a bit of reading up on Halo Wars 2 I was really in the mood to go back to this. So I set up my 360 and did all the updates to the console that were required after being offline for 3 years. I then put Halo Wars into the 360 and of course this game had several updates that were required too. Eventually though I got to play it again. I completed the 2 tutorial levels refreshing myself how to play it. Then jumped straight into a skirmish, a nice and simple 1 vs 1 to start with against AI (yes on easy difficulty). It was good fun. I’ll actually replay the campaign again to resolve my itch for Halo Wars, but it’s now increasingly likely that I’ll be buying my first Windows 10 game once Halo Wars 2 is out.

Resident Evil (The Movie)

Again with all the hype from E3 and the amazing reveal of Resident Evil 7 during the Sony conference, I had the urge to revisit Resident Evil. I’m yet to buy the origins collection for PS4 (it will happen), And while I took the time to set the Xbox360 up, I couldn’t be bothered to set up the Gamecube for the Resident Evil Remake (although looking back, I should have just played it on my Wii). So I opted to watch the films. I know they aren’t really all that true to the game series, and people genuinely think pretty negatively of them. But it’s still a good popcorn flick and holds some moments that remind me of the game. The obvious being the references to UMBRELLA and Raccoon City. I will say however the film has aged terribly. The licker scenes, wow they are hysterically bad.

Board Games

We do love a good board game session, and Saturday evening we had a great one. A long game of Ticket to Ride with 5 of us was very good fun. Unfortunately I was one yellow carriage card away from completing my 3rd route which would have given me 13 points. As it was I finished joint last with my wife. A complete contrast from the first time we played where she won and I finished second. A review for Ticket to Ride will on the site soon. We moved onto a classic next. We played Cluedo, but The Big Bang Theory edition. The premise is the same as the original, but there are some extras in this version. The Sheldon card which is essentially a bonus card to help you out, and you have a character perk card that can be used once only in the game. Then to see the evening out we played a few rounds of the bluffing game Skull that we’ve covered already in a review and Perudo as the final game of the night. Was a good night full of laughs. Skull in particular being a good part of the evening.

Boosting

Once upon a time ago I used to be very attached to my gamerscore on my Xbox360. I’d look to gain as many achievements as possible from games, and there was a bit of a competition between Will, myself and some of our friends involving our gamescore. Obviously I jumped ship at the start of this new generation to uncharted territories (Uncharted pun intentional) with the PS4. I hadn’t really boosted trophies and didn’t find a need to. However when looking over my Uncharted: Nathan Drake Collection trophies amassed from the 3 games, I noticed some trophies missing that could be pretty easy to attain. Kill 50 enemies with this gun, kill 3 people with one explosion etc etc. So I did something I’ve not done for 3 years. I went on a boosting session. I ended up bringing my Uncharted 1 score to 38%, an increase of 10%. It’s not something I plan on doing going forward with other games, but it was nice having a little mindless fun boosting session.