Geekly Review #215

Hello again, I was a little slack last week and couldn’t pull myself out of bed after 2 weeks of food and drinks celebrating Christmas and New Year. But back to business now. Just me this week as Will is off starting the year the right way in Bali on a late honeymoon.

Cities Skylines

So I tweeted a picture on Christmas day of the stack of games my mum and wife got me for Christmas, and I’ve made a start on getting through them all. The first one I installed and couldn’t wait to play was Cities Skylines. I know it’s an older game for PC, and consoles for that matter, but I’m all about physical copies of games, so to finally get this as a physical copy for Christmas was awesome. Goodness me is this game addictive. I made a start on one city figuring out the systems and such and ended up with a population of 30k in my beginning city. I decided once I’d got to grips with the layouts and importance of things to make a better and more thought out city. That one is currently at 18k population but I’m struggling with the initial road layout on that and finding traffic is an absolute nightmare. So I’m thinking I’ll be going back to a new fresh city in the not too distant future and really thinking about my road layouts a tad better. I’m much prefer going for the greener cities and have aimed to ensure my industrial areas are more so farming and forestry rather than proper dirty industrial areas. The one thing I wish I could work on better is the water treatment plants. By the time I reach a high enough population to built water treatment plants, my rivers or seas are filled with poo. It doesn’t look great, especially when you have a nice seafront town with piers and such built on poo water.

Watch_Dogs 2

I won’t delve much into this as I’ve just recently posted a Late to the party review of the game. But it’s another one that I’d been wanting to play and ended up getting for Christmas. It’s definitely a huge improvement over the first game. And I certainly was addicted to it as I found myself pumping close to 8 hours a day into it while off work. Some of the missions though were simply ridiculous. As said, check out the Lttp post about it here.

Until Dawn

I managed to sit and complete this game in one sitting of 7 hours. And I absolutely loved it. Again I won’t go into huge details here as I’m working on a Late to the party review of this also. But goodness me what an absolute gem for the PlayStation 4. Visually it’s incredible, especially for a game that came out quite early in the consoles life span. The suspense of the game is absolutely brilliant. I was genuinely on edge for the majority of the play-through. The way you can swing from despising certain characters to really rooting for them and hoping you can bring them to the end of the story alive is incredible. I only managed to succeed in bringing 2 of the characters to the end of the game, which I’m a little frustrated about. Especially as in the space of 15 minutes of poor decisions I had 3 of them killed off. I didn’t follow the simple rule of horror films, never split up and wander round somewhere on your own. My bad, but I genuinely thought I heard a survivor screaming for help. Oh well, poor Ashley.

There is an incredible twist in the game too, and once the twist does occur, the fear in the ramps up another level. Although to be honest, I think I preferred the premise of the game before the twist and the real enemies come to fruition. Anyways, no more to say on that. Be sure to check out the Late to the party review when it arrives.

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

As soon as I’d finished Until Dawn, I Installed Uncharted Lost Legacy. I felt I needed the change of pace and scenery. I’d read that this game was about as large as the mainline Uncharted games, however I ended up completing this also in one sitting. Taking just over 6 and a half hours. Granted I’ve not platinumed the game, but have completed the main story. I do plan on going back and picking up a few of the miscellaneous trophies too. Considering this was a standalone expansion I was thoroughly entertained throughout, and hold this in high acclaim. It definitely deserves its place in the Uncharted series. I’ve been blown away by it. It’s a weird thing to say, but I figure with Naughty Dog in full development of The Last of Us Part 2, that this development might have been rushed. But it certainly doesn’t seem that way at all. Even if it were developed by a B team at Naughty Dog, it certainly still screams quality. Chloe and Nadine’s witty remarks and somewhat forced conversations are really enjoyable, and Chloe is definitely worthy of being a starring role in a game in the Uncharted series. It was enjoyable hearing Chloe and Nadine namedrop Nathan Drake and their previous relations with him in the series. I was equally surprised to see a returning face from Uncharted 4 in the game too. The sort of open world approach for chapter 4 was a nice experience picking the temples to solve in an order I wanted, or to go off and attempt the side quest to recover 11 tokens of the kings. If Naughty Dog plan to carry on going this way with the Uncharted series, letting familiar faces star in the game I’d be more than happy with that as this was just as good an experience as them all.

The Orville

So, moving on to television. The Orville is a show I’d heard about a while back, and when browsing through catch-up on NowTV, saw that there were 4 episodes of this already available to watch. Apparently I missed the launch of this. The Orville is a Star Trek spoof created by Seth Macfarlane the creator of Family Guy, American Dad and the Ted films. So You can see what the style of The Orville is going to be like. I only watched the first episode but it introduced us to Ed Mercer played by Seth himself. He comes home from work to find his wife in bed with a blue alien that squirts blue ink from his eyelids in the moment they are caught out. From there you see a scene a year later where Ed Mercer is granted a position as the captain of a research vessel named the U.S.S Orville. It’s than an introductory episode to the crew that will be accompanying Ed on the Orville in what should have been a simple first mission together. An interesting twist though is that the admiral that assigns Ed as the captain of the Orville chooses Ed’s then Ex wife to be the second in command creating a very tense relationship on board the ship.

It’s certainly very cheesy and the script is very much a Seth Macfarlane script. The show just feels very much a project of his. Was surprised to see Jon Favareau involved in the show however, especially directing that episode. It’s not the greatest TV I’ve watched, but it certainly had it’s moments of humour thought (“Did you catch the dog licking his balls in the background?”,  “Literally the first thing I clocked!”). As there are a few episodes still on catch up, I’ll probably give them a watch too, if only to resolve the cliff hanger at the end of the first episode.

– Murr