Geekly Review #194

Sit down, grab a beverage and check out what we’ve been playing over the last week.

Fortnite

Fortnite is a co-op sandbox, base building survival game from Epic Games, where you and potentially some buddies (which at the time of playing I had no buddies *sadface*) will have to work together to scavenge materials, to build a base and fight of hordes of zombie type enemies.

I’ve half followed the development of Fortnite as I thought it looked pretty interesting and it is now available to buy in an early access/beta state. Although when the full game releases it will be free to play so be very aware of that!

The game has a nice cartoony art style and casual feel to it with constant little moments of comedy and ‘sillyness’ coming through the game. It’s clear that Fortnite isn’t trying to take itself too seriously.

I’ve only really scratched the surface of what the game has to offer and it’s pretty clear to see that right from the off it has a lot going on, but I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way. Your first few levels will act as a tutorial for the game and it’s a good thing too because there is a wealth of information to take in almost an overwhelming amount.

There’s resources to collect, buildings to loot, weapons to craft, ammo to craft, bases to build, traps to set up, heroes to unlock, hero classes to unlock, survivors to unlock, loot chests to open, skill tress to master, different currencies, XP boost items and Lama’s – yes, Lama’s, they’re bonus loot items – different to the chests for some reason… Oh and there’s also mini Lama’s because why not…. Confused? Yea, I was a little bit too.

Honestly the amount of information I was expected to take in within the first 20 minutes of playing was verging on too much. I just wanted to build stuff and shoot stuff. But without the tutorial you’d probably have no idea what to do, so it was kind of a necessary evil I guess.

Once you get in to the base building and shooting the game is actually pretty good fun though – probably more fun with friends too *sadface* again. The idea is that during the day time you’d gather items and build your base up in order to fight of waves of enemies during the night and the base building system really allows for a lot of freedom to create some mad things.

As I’ve said, I’ve only touched on what the game has to offer and I will be spending some time getting to know it a little better, so expect to see more later, but first impressions are decent once you get your head around all the ‘stuff’.

Peregrin

Peregrin is a story puzzle game where you play as Abi, a solitary traveller undertaking a voyage through the ruins of a lost civilisation seeking to fulfil a prophecy.

It plays a lot like a point and click adventure game, but with a little more interaction for things like combat.

The gameplay revolves around Abi’s ability to use ‘Arcane’ powers, this lets you take over certain creates and control them to do your bidding – essentially to solve puzzles like using huge ogre like creates to move huge rocks to reveal new paths. Each area you enter will have a number of puzzles you’ll need to complete in order to progress. So far they don’t seem that difficult it’s more of a logical puzzle like moving things in certain orders, or fighting enemies in a specific order to avoid getting killed. I’m usually a bit better with logical puzzles rather than thinking ones, so I’m finding it ok at the moment.

I really like the visual style of Peregrin, it has a very grand and mysterious feel to it all, with the (mostly) isometric view really lending itself to that feeling. overall it looks pretty stunning.

From the get go I feel pretty drawn in by everything the game has to offer, it feels like a great puzzle game and I hope that it can continue from it’s strong opening.