Geekly Review #177

We’ve just spend 3 days at EGX Rezzed in London, so naturally that is going to be taking up this week’s round up.

We spent all the days at the event – although had to leave a little early on the Saturday to catch our coach home, and we had a blast! It was our first Rezzed event, but we’ve attended the ‘main’ EGX event a few times before, I think I actually prefer Rezzed. The venue – Tobacco Dock, was really good, a lot smaller and a lot more chilled out. There weren’t really any queues that were crazy long, the longest ones we’re probably for getting food.

Over the course of the event we got to play probably 70+ games between us, which is pretty incredible really.

We have a lot of content planned for the next week or so around what we played and did – including a vlog! But for now I will just give a quick run through some of my favourite games from the show..

Ruiner

Ruiner is a cyber punk style action shooter set in the year 2091. You play as a wired sociopath who lashes out at a corrupt corporation in a bid to uncover the truth and rescue your kidnapped brother. The game is played in an isometric view and it looks gorgeous. The action is fast and brutal, the visuals slick and stylish and it’s easy to pick up, but difficult to master. I played for around 15 minutes and to try out various weapons and moves – it definitely left me wanting more!

Tokyo 42

Tokyo 42 has been on my radar for a little while and I was very happy to see that it was making an appearance at the show, we actually got to speak with Paul from Mode 7 Games, who are publishing Tokyo 42. It’s described as a cross between/ homage to the original GTA’s and Syndicate. It’s another game with an isometric view, but this time the camera view is pulled way back and you can also rotate the view to reveal new routes and paths. You get framed for a murder you didn’t commit and then basically become an assassin. It was really cool!

Antihero

Antihero was a game that I hadn’t really been following, although I had heard of it. I think it was actually the first game we played and I was really impressed with it. It’s a turn based strategy game where you play as a thief and must infiltrate, steal, and assassinate your way to becoming the best thieves guild in town! You can recruit, thugs to fight for you, street urchins to infiltrate places or break in and rob houses of gold. It was a really fun game that had a surprising amount of depth to it with various upgrades to purchase and a lot of routes to gain victory points. I will definitely be keeping my eye on it as it approaches its release in July this year.

Battalion 1944

Battalion 1944 was probably the highlight of the show, or very close to being the best and it was actually the first time (I think) the public have been able to play the game – which is probably why it was so busy the whole time. We were booked in to have a play session of it, so didn’t have to queue which was nice!

Battalion 1944 is like going back to the good old days of Call of Duty, back in WW2 when it was awesome and before we had jetpacks and wall running. We only got to play one round, but it was very memorable. It was crazy how familiar it all felt, both me and Murr picked the game up really quickly and ended up having very good games.

We got to have a chat with one of the guys programming the game which was really cool – more on that later.

I can see Battalion 1944 turning in to a really good game!

Those were just a few of the highlights of the whole show, we’ve got so much more to talk about so keep your eyes out for that! Overall EGX Rezzed was an awesome show  with  so many great indie titles to play and in the spotlight, we got to meet quite a lot of the developers of games – including Dean Hall (DayZ creator), it was just a great time and we can’t wait to go back!

Destiny 2

No Destiny 2 wasn’t at EGX, but I can hardly do this week’s round up without mentioning it the reveal trailer. Honestly, it got me pretty damn hyped, I wasn’t expecting it to, but it really did. Plus the fact that it’s coming to PC is very, very good news! Check out the trailer below.

-Will

As Will mentioned above, we did indeed spend the weekend at EGX Rezzed, playing a plethora of new video games. And like Will I have to say I think I actually preferred Rezzed over the traditional EGX. It opened my eyes up to some great new games that I perhaps might have originally over looked in the past. What set this apart from the traditional EGX for me was the interaction between the player and the game developer. If you wanted to, you could chat to the developer or developers for ages if you really wanted to.

I spent a good while chatting to the guys behind Fear Effect SEDNA while Will played Tokyo Dark. I wanted to chat to them because I remember playing the original Fear Effect’s back in the day on PS1, so was keen to congratulate them, if you will, on a successful re-launch of the franchise. And due to the smaller scale of the games on the show they’re really appreciative to hear the feedback, so much so that they gave me a free Fear Effect T-Shirt.

There were many highlights for me too and we will be posting plenty of content over the days as we go through our lists of games played featuring our best of’s, biggest surprises and what games exceeded expectations. But till then here are a few of the highlights from me (they will be featured in more detail).

Megaquarium

This game I simply caught a glimpse of while passing through the many sections of Rezzed. With one glimpse I wanted to go check the game out so we made a stop at the booth. Megaquarium is comparable to Theme Hospital, except that you’re main goal is to make a successful pet fish shop. You build your store, build your tanks, hire staff for the store to clean and feed the fish and the tanks. The more you look after your initial fish and sell, the more fish and equipment becomes available to sell. But there is more to it than that. You need to look into the attributes of each fish to ensure you put certain types together. If you happen to put a fish species that are hostile into a tank with passive fish species, well the result is that the passive fish will be killed.

The demo was very brief and unfortunately the developers said the game is still many months away from complete, with next year looking to be a likely release date. But so far the game from Twice Circled is looking very promising.

Ooblets

When looking through the list of games, Ooblets was described as a crossover of Harvest Moon and Pokémon, so what isn’t there to like about this game? I had only the quickest of play’s on this game, but I can see it becoming a very addictive title. My brief play through had me setting up the initial stages of what I believe would be my farm? I planted a few seeds, watered them and the next morning harvested my crops. Within my crop I apparently grew a new Ooblet which is a little creature, so had 2 Ooblets follow me around. With the crops I grew I could also level up my beginning Ooblet. So it seems like you’ll be farming in aid to upgrade your Ooblet creatures. And gaining new ones my farming? I’m not sure what you’re levelling them up for, but the game seems very intriguing and will be one I watch going forwards.

WWE Takeover Orlando & Wrestlemania 33

And away from the many video games we played, this weekend was Wrestlemania weekend. I could make a very large and lengthy post about both PPV’s, But I’ll reframe from that and leave more detailed thoughts for Shoot Talk later in the week.

I will say that the main show Wrestlemania started off very positively and had some great matches to lead you to believe that it’ll be a good PPV, but then about halfway through, everything seemed to get rushed and matches that should have been good seemed to not live up to expectations. Roman Reigns main event against The Undertaker left many people scratching their heads, but based on the result and the outcome of the result, it makes more sense to give The Undertaker the send off. Bray Wyatt and Randy Orton felt terribly rushed, based on how large the build up to this match and how much potential it had, it felt cut very short to make room for the main event.

All in all the show dragged on till 5:15am – it started at 10pm, bare that in mind. Rather than give extra time to matches we had Pitbull and Flo-Rida perform instead. Terrible decision as the Bray & Randy match deserved more time due to it’s incredible build up.

We did get a very brilliant surprise addition to the RAW Ladder match. New Day took to the stage to say a 4th team had been added to the match, and when they began querying just who that could be? The Hardy Boyz music hits and the biggest pop of the night happened. Brilliant moment.

It’ll be very interesting to see how RAW goes tonight, the draft and shakeup of the rosters needs to happen pretty quickly to try and freshen up the mess that was the end of Wrestlemania. I’m looking forwards to the NXT callups tonight and tomorrow too. Nakamura seems like a certain to go up now after a very entertaining main event against a brilliant heel Bobby Roode.

-Murr