It’s that time of the week again, let’s see what we’ve been playing!
Green Hell
Green Hell is a single player survival game set in the Amazon, at the moment there is the bare bones of a story to it in the form on a tutorial to get you going. It seems that you and your girlfriend/wife have come back to the Amazon in search of a lost tribe in order to try and make contact with them and learn more about them. Your wife is the one who really wants to meet them, you just kind of hang out back at the camp making fires and stuff. Then a metaphorical fan gets turned on and loads of manure is hurled at it, as Mia – your partner, contacts you in the middle of the night sounding very distressed. That’s where the prologue ends. From here on out it’s a pure survival game with no story.
The survival genre is densely populated that’s for sure, but it seems that most survival games are either online with PVP or a co-op affair. Green Hell is purely single player and I actually really like it so far.
Firstly the game looks really nice, the jungle is dense and vibrant, animals and ambient sounds constantly surround you, the rain makes you feel miserable as it rolls in and the nights are spooky. It has a great atmosphere and when building up my first camp I found myself wanting to stick very close to it and it’s small sputtering fire as the my first night closed in.
Crafting is well done with you being able to physically search through your backpack for items and drag them to a crafting area. The list for what you can craft is also very extensive from various sizes of camps, to beds, traps, weapons, tools and all sorts. I really like that it doesn’t try to hold your hand too much as well, it gives you a few things to craft, and some hints about how to make other things, but doesn’t just give it to you all on plate. There is also a nice system for managing wounds and injuries, you have to manually check your arms and legs for injuries and then apply bandages to heal you. It’s all very visual and physical and I like that it’s not just something that you do in an in game menu.
I’m intrigued by the story side of the game too, not many survival games try to do a story and I feel like this one could be pretty interesting. It’s pencilled to come early 2019, but that is obviously nothing concrete at the moment.
I’m still early in to surviving in the jungle but so far it’s a great experience, if a little unsettling – you never know who’s watching you through the trees.
World of Warcraft
MMO’s have always been something of an anomaly to me. Countless times I’ve tried to get in to them only to find myself a bit lost or a bit bored a few hours in. A couple of years ago I tried getting in to World of Warcraft, but something didn’t quite click with me, I’m not entirely sure what it was. Since Battle of Azeroth came out pretty much all my friends have been playing it and because I get intense FOMO with video games I felt like I had to try it again. So this weekend I installed WOW again and jumped back in starting a new character.
I’ve started off as Mage, although I was fairly certain I clicked on Paladin at first… but whatever. I’m currently level 12 and have actually had a lot of fun so far. For the most part I’m just running around doing as many quests as possible and my friends are all playing too, although they’re at the top levels. It’s quite nice having them online just to ask questions, but to actually play on my own doing my own thing. I don’t really know what’s different this time, maybe it’s just a mentality thing or something, but I feel like it might have clicked for me. One thing I don’t like is how much running there is and how slow you run. I can’t wait to get a mount so I can move around a bit quicker.
Destiny 2
Pretty much since Forsaken came out I’ve been grinding away for a few of the exotic weapons quests. Once of which is for Caydes hand cannon Ace of Spades. One of the steps of the quest was to get 25 critical hit final blows with a hand cannon in the crucible, and good lord did it take me forever. Prior to Forsaken dropping hand cannons felt really powerful to me, they were reliable and could hold their own against most weapons. But since the launch of the DLC there are a lot more viable options in PVP, with pulse rifles being very dominant and shotguns popping up a lot more. I don’t mind this at all, it gives players a lot more variation when playing, but it made my quest seem so much more difficult as I was constantly being out DPS’d from range by pulse rifles and taken out by shotguns up close. But finally, this weekend I got it finished and now have my hands on Ace of Spades.
The hunt for exotics in Forsaken has become a lot more difficult, with the drop rates for exotic engrams randomly dropping has been greatly reduced – I’ve only had two of the new exotics drop from engrams, and I know a lot of people have had none. It’s complete pot luck it would seem. The idea behind it was to make it feel a bit more special when they did finally drop and that has certainly been the case for the new Titan Gauntlets Ursa Furiosa which I recently got my hands on. Their special perk is that when you block incoming damage whilst your sentinel super is active you gain additional super energy, this means that if you block enough damage, once your super is done, it has the potential to be instantly recharged. I’ve been using them a lot in PVP and quite often I will get a double super out of them and sometimes triple, it’s pretty amazing and really does make the armour feel exotic and worthwhile.
I don’t think I’ve ever been having a better time playing Destiny and the fact that my friends are now getting back in to it is only making things better!
October is a good month for gaming because it usually means that these online MMO style games, or ‘online service’ style games get Halloween updates and Destiny’s Festival of the Lost will be coming back on the 16th October offering up some unique rewards to earn throughout the month.
-Will
