Geekly Review #238

We may be in the midst of World Cup fever, but there is always time to play games!

Realm Royale

Well this game kind of came out of no where for me… Yes, it’s another Battle Royale game, but before you eye roll too hard hear me out! Realm Royale does actually bring a few new things to the genre.

Realm Royale is made by Hi-Rez studios who are the team behind Paladins. In this version of BR when you start a match you get to pick a class from five – Warrior, Engineer, Assassin, Mage and Hunter each of these classes has their own set of abilities and a special weapon that you can get whilst playing.

As with most BR games, you’ll drop in to the map and will start to loot for weapons and armour as a zone starts to shrink around you.You can also loot for the aforementioned abilities which can be things like a turret, shields, health bombs, actual bombs, barriers and a lot more. There is quite a nice variation. One interesting thing about Realm Royale is that there is also crafting. Spread across the map are a number of forges, at these forges you can craft legendary tier armour, abilities and soon to be again weapons (it was taken out for a short time). In order to craft items you’ll need shards and shards can be gathered from any unwanted items you might loot, you can just disenchant them and they will turn in to shards. It’s a really cool and interesting mechanic and makes for some pretty interesting fights as a lot of the time small groups will be fighting for control of a forge – but there are plenty around if you don’t want to get in a fight right away.

Another really fun thing about the game is that when you die, you’re not necessarily out just yet. Yes in most BR games you go in to a downed start and can be revived, but in Realm Royale you get turned in to a chicken! Yup, that’s right, a chicken. If you then survive for 30 seconds you will come back ‘alive’ and be able to fight again. If you get ‘chickened’ more than three times though, you are dead and out of the game.

This had caused some very funny moments when playing – especially one particular one where I was chickened but able to run around a tree dodging the guy trying to finish me off for 30 seconds, I then respawned and killed him.

As a free to play game Realm Royale is a lot of fun, it has a nice atheistic that kind of reminds me of Halo, it performs well, it’s fun to play and just a good laugh all round. It does enough things differently to stand out a bit from crowd too. Expect to hear more about the game in the next few months as I can see it growing a fair bit, probably not to the heights of Fortnite, but still pretty popular.

Jurassic World Evolution

I’m it’s probably been a dream of peoples to make their very own Jurassic Park at some point, I know I’ve had that dream! Well now we can as Frontier have released Jurassic World Evolution. Coming off the back of Planet Coaster you’d think that Frontier have a pretty good chance of getting the park creation sim right and so far it seems like they have.

Take on the challenge of creating interesting and existing dinosaur parks of each of the five islands off the coat of Costa Rica. Send out expedition teams across the globe to uncover a wide variety  of dino fossils to help you grow more and more dinos for your park.

I’ve completed the first island and have made a start with the second, both of them offer different challenges most notably with the weather as Isla Muerta is an island under constant barrage from storms.

I’m still to unlock the coolest dinosaurs and coolest buildings like the gyro things from Jurassic World, but there has still been a nice variety to play around with in the early stages. The game doesn’t go in to the depths of creativity like Planet Coaster does and because of that I’ve felt like the moment to moment gameplay has been a bit slow at times, sometimes you kind of find yourself just waiting for things to happen i.e. something new to unlock of build. Having said that, I’ve still really enjoyed playing.

As you might expect all the iconic dinosaurs are there and they all look really well detailed, you can get up close and personal with them by driving the ranger jeeps around – yes you can actually drive them yourself. I am seeing a lack of flying dinosaurs and sea/water dinos, it seems like they’re not in the game, which is a shame as making a sea world would be pretty cool – especially seeing as it was a fairly bit part of one of the films.

The game is fully licensed though and has all the cast popping up at various points to chat with you or offer you tips.

So far, so good, come back soon for the full review!

-Will