This weekend I went solo to EGX 2018 in the Birmingham NEC, so obviously I’m going to chat about that!
EGX 2018
I went up on the Thursday late morning and after probably the wettest worst drive ever I finally made it to the NEC. I was pleasantly surprised to actually find it not that busy, or not as busy as I was expecting. After getting my barrings around the show I jumped on some games.
Flotsam was one of the first games I played after having my eye on it for it a while. Flotsam is a city building game set on the ocean where you will gather resources that float by and rescue other survivors floating by to add them to your colony. The more you gather the more you can build – as you’d expect from a city builder. The thing that I think sets the game apart is the visuals, it has a lovely cartoony art style to it that’s bright and packed full of colours, it looks great and I loved the short time I got on it.
The game I was probably most excited about playing was Metro Exodus. I think the previous Metro games were excellent and everyone should play them. The demo was mostly footage that we’ve seen before – sneaking around in a n over grown area that has some kind of church in it. Basically we were given 20 or so minutes to approach this area however we wanted. I tried to go stealthily, but my skills with a controller aren’t what they used to be, so I basically missed a lot of shots and had to resort to all guns blazing pretty quickly. We got to see a bit of the crafting in action, a few weapons and take in some of the beautiful environments. It was an impressive demo that has left me wanting more!
Starlink was another game I got hands on with and I have to say that I was impressed by it. Initially I wasn’t bothered about trying it, but after watching others playing it and seeing how the custom ships worked I was interested!
I can’t really think of any other way to describe the game other than Everspace meets No Man’s Sky meets Monster Hunter. The flying looks very similar to Everspace, going from space to planets reminded me of No Man’s Sky and when on the surface I had to track down a massive monster to kill. The unique thing about Starlink is the way in which you create your ship in game, you physically build it in front of you, then connect it to the controller and it instantly recognises it and it appears in game, it’s very impressive and a really cool little touch.
This does mean that it’s probably going to end up being an expensive game if you have to buy all your upgrades for your ships in real life. But at this time I don’t actually know how all this works. I played it on the Switch but the visuals of the Xbox One version looked really good. I can see if being a pretty popular game with kids.
There was loads more that I wanted to talk about with EGX but I’m going to save that for a full post, so for now I’ll leave it at that.
Breathedge
I picked this game up on a bit of a whim after watching one short trailer. I was kind of reeled in by it and thought it looked really fun with a good sense of humour to it. Breathedge is a space survival game with some story elements to it. The ship you’re travelling on basically blows up and you need to get yourself rescued and how you do that is kind of up to you. So there is this big sandbox area filled with loads to see and do, how much of that you check out is up to you.
I’ve been playing it on my YouTube channel, so if you wanted to check it out, take a look at the video!
Destiny 2
I’ve been slowly grinding away on Destiny 2 trying to get my light level up a bit. I kind of feel like at the moment there is almost too much for me to focus on, which isn’t a bad thing, but actually sitting down and focusing on one activity hasn’t been easy as I’ve found myself flitting between things not really achieving much. But this week I’ve specially made a point of going through the weekly tasks and getting them done to earn some powerful rewards and it’s been great. There is still so much I haven’t done since Forsaken dropped but it’s all been great fun. Now I just have to convince my friends that it’s worth coming back to…
That’s the problem with D2 and was the problem with D1 as well. The launches weren’t the best – although I actually really enjoyed playing both at launch. They both had their criticisms and rightly so, but D2 is now in the best place it has ever been, but trying to get back the players who’ve left is Bungie’s struggle. One issue is the cost of it all and I have to agree with the complaints. Yes I’ve paid for all the DLC so far, but I know I’m going to play it and enjoy it so I don’t mind. But having a season pass, a big DLC plus microtransactions is just not right and I think it needs to change. I think having all three of those ways of monetising the game is just a bit greedy. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like changing and for that reason Bungie will just have to accept that they will slowly keep losing players.
-Will
