Recent reviews by Netch Feverfew

My introduction to Volition was Saints Row. With Saints Row starting out by being a Grand Theft Auto clone to become an over-the-top version of Grand Theft Auto, Volition find its voice within the chaos. The psychotic anarchic fun for the last four and a half games showed that one can revolutionize gameplay by shifting its narrative tone, and letting the engine wreck itself through ragdoll physics and the idea of giving "cheats" as a form of power to the player. Saints Row IV showed how superpowers could become a thing so needed in the parody of our world. Gat Out of Hell pushed the narrative parody even further by pitting the player in a battle between good and evil.

Mind you, repetitiveness of gameplay whereby one shoots to solve all one's problems is still pretty much a problem. I accepted that with a game like Saints Row. I am here to see whether a game can make me laugh and make me connected to the characters.

I like Agents of Mayhem.

However, it is plagued with unimaginative level designs, tons of bugs, and poor writing.

Unimaginative Level Designs?

Taking the player to an East Asian destination like how Sleeping Dogs did is perfect. Volition gets kudos for that and the world-building exercise it took to make a near futuristic Seoul. However, this game suffers from poorly crafted level designs, specifically in lairs. Lairs have six to eight designs slapped together to make a lair. No matter how many times that you would finish one, the next one would look the same. There would some changes for major boss fights, but the overall design looks very slapdashed. It is very disconcerting when levels are recycled. This laziness reminds me of how Dragon Age II's cave dungeon level design had only two or three designs.

The greatest injustice to this game is that Seoul is too small. Stilwater, Hell, and Steelport were bigger. Instead of trying to craft a world that is futuristic that both above and below ground, they kept this all hidden in the underground lairs where these futuristic buildings seem to be built as a waste.

Don't get me wrong! There are still vertical uses in these buildings in some side missions. I just feel that with a game like this, you would like to use all the space, especially vertical ones to contain and conceal certain levels.

Bugs? What kind of bugs?

Speaking of side missions, there are some bugs that really tick me off. I will give you three big examples that I encountered.

1) When The Bombshells had their mission, I could not pass a certain level because the doors were locked. I think it was the second last room. A quest marker was showing me where to go, but the door was locked. I decided to restart it from a checkpoint. It took me to the same room with the doors still unable to open through "hacking" or walking through it as a checkpoint. I restarted it, and it took me to a "white world" where I could not quit unless I did it manually.

2) When there was a mission involving August Gaunt's cars. After activating all three cars, a doorlock appeared and was meant to be hacked. It was unhackable. I restarted the checkpoint and the door lock was still unhackable.

3) While recruiting Scheherazade, the checkpoint marker disappeared at a certain point and an endless stream of enemies appeared. I restarted the checkpoint and endless enemies still appeared.

I think there is a bug with the game at the moment that concerns the main mission and side missions. If a player deviates away from the line of main missions to do some side missions, the game becomes bugged.

Poor Writing

Saints Row isn't known for its hard hitting writing. It is no Grand Theft Auto V or Sleeping Dogs in the writing category. It is a farcical take on these types of third-person action crime game. It is a parody where everything is super inflated included the ego and psychosis of the characters within the story. From Saints Row 2 to Gat Out of Hell, the games were lighter in tone.

Agents of Mayhem somehow loses tha narrative. While the characters are interesting, the writing suffers due to attempts of trying to be funny instead of having the characters be funny. They respond to their quirks and their surroundings, but offer little substance towards their character. Even the character of Penelope Brimstone feels one-dimensional within her allure and mystique. What is sorely lacking is the farcical nature that the Saints Row series evoke. There are a lot of characters and they do interact with each other, but they don't feel like a team. They are merely a bunch of ragtag people called into a spy agency because they can shoot well while being angry, or have a revenge streak as thick as a lasagna.

It is unfortunate that the characters are unlike lasagna in their characters. There is no depth or layer. Their motivations are very shallow with the exception of two characters: Gat and Daisy. Maybe Volition's writing of anti-establishment characters is easier that actually writing well-rounded, layered characters with actual motivations.

Conclusion/TL;dr

Although I am giving this a no until they fix all the major bugs, this game is a buy if you just need anarchic fun. The story isn't well-done this time around, but the bugs are making this game unenjoyable. One can ignore the visual and audio faults of this game, but you cannot ignore the fact that the bugs made this game a 6/10 instead of a 7.5/10.

Volition: fix these bugs.

I love city builders. However, games like Cities: Skyline gave you complete unilateral rule like a dictator. Tropico was almost the same replacing certain buildings with the idea of zoning that are prevalent in the other games. What I truly wanted in a game as complex as Cities: Skyline was a council that lorded and hounded at every decision I made through the giant political machine hovering over my fair city.

Urban Empire was supposed to bridge that gap between city builder and political simulator. Marketed as “Be a Mayor Player”, whatever that meant, you had to develop the city through different eras and leaders through both physical development and the political challenges. You had to develop the city’s society through services while balancing the budget with the city council’s eye on your every move.

Oh, what fun I will have!

Or, was it a disappointment?

Barring you the description of how the “Wheel of Life” (supply/demand for societal expansion) works, let me tell what worked and didn’t.

I love the idea of a city council. Frankly, the only reason for me to get this game is because of the idea of city development through voting in a city council. The simulated cityfolk are still allowed to partake in the city’s market economy, but certain services in the Wheel of Life requires the city council’s intervention. Services like fire stations, parks, clinics, opera houses, schools and workshops require that the council vote over the improvement.

I also love that the city council has era-appropriate parties occupying the council. My personal favorites were the existence of three parties: The Freedom Party (aka the Nazi Party), The Pacifist Party (super left-wing and liberal), and the Green Party (same like Pacifist Party, but more environmental). Political maneuvering with various parties with different ideologies isn’t a walk in the park. Liberal policies will be unacceptable to some parties, but with the correct development and policies placed into the city early in the game, you can have conservative parties agreeing with leftists liberal policies. The game’s city council rewards players who know how to political maneuver themselves through the era with the easement of passing legislation.

However, even with such “coded rewards” written into the game, it suffers from a very counterintuitive user interface. My anecdote is with the idea of banning prostitution and the failed revocation of that law. While the game works on a dual axis binary of conservative/liberal and left/right which works to describe a political ideology, binary shouldn’t be used for your mayor’s decision on certain laws. Like real life, a law passes or fails through the vote of the city council.
However, your mayor can only push for a law ahead. If you were to personally revoke a law and convince political parties, they will not push for the revocation. What needs to be worked on are the clarification for the poltical choices of Pleading, Demanding, or Threaten a political party. The developers need to add an additional button to show whether a mayor is pushing to support or oppose if the player makes a mistake.

Speaking of mistakes, the performance of this game slows after building a lot of districts. As my trams in some districts zigzag their way through town, the scrolling speed to and fro the city is hampered as building textures load slowly or having serious graphical glitches. The performance has been problem since Tropico 4. Kalypso and the development team at Reborn Games need to calibrate and fix these issues if they were to create sequels. I understand the simulation games are the ones to usually suffer performance issues (like Cities XL), but albeit the game being playable, it becomes an absolute dread as the game stutters dealing with new simulations to compute. Mind you, I was also running my Performance Monitor next to my game and it is a RAM-eater, taking up 7 GBs of memory to run this game, even after adjusting graphic qualities to its lowest.

In conclusion, the only reason I am recommending this game is due to its uniqueness of it being both a city-builder and a political simulator. However, I would love the developers to start thinking of this game like a Paradox Interactive game, giving us greater freedom in creating a character and the political situation around the player. I would like them to solve the major performance issues that made this game somewhat unplayable in future eras of the game. Personally, I would return to this game again once they have patched some of the performance and UI issues.

Banished comes to mind when I played this game.

With Early Access, it feels as such as parts of the game remains incomplete. It is playable to a certain extent with resources being able to be extracted an absolute cinch. There are just a few complaints from me at this very moment. When the game is patched up a bit more, I wiil come back to this review to decide a new score.

The first complaint has to do with placement of certain buildings, particularly mines. It is quite difficult to discern where a flat terrain starts and a mountaineous region begins. The building rather follows the height of the mountain, making the mine impossible to build even though the required area to be on a flat land is already as such.

The second complain has to do with land purchasing. It is impossible to buy some lands that have mountains. It is bad enough the tutorial does not explain how to buy land, but buying some hilly land is downright impossible as the signpost is now hidden inside the hill, impossible to be clicked on.

The third complaint is about the laborer system and work queues in most working buildings. The masonry is used to build almost all the buildings in this game. However, there are sometimes the work queue for certain buildings disappear. If you delete the unbuilt structure, the other unbuilt buildings will appear in the queue. This is especially true for pottery workshops.

Also, at times, workers in the building will just disappear and appear later in the game. Is this due to the gender of workers?

The game is playable to an extent. Again, I will return to it at a more patched period for a review.

I used to play this game a lot when I was twelve years old. Already a rabid simulator, god, and tycoon game player at that age, this game brings back memories of arranging flights and watching the money pouring in. Taking care of oil supplies, maintenance, staff, and the company image makes this game feel like you are taking care of an airline company in this quirky version of our world. Parsed from spreadsheets like other sim games, this game harkens back to the era simpler simulated games. Already complex with the element of distance, plane range, maintenance, etc., this is still a fantastic simulator worth playin0g, even with its age.

However, that doesn't detract the fact that the game's age is showing. The crashes happening at the 4 hour mark reminds me of my youthful frustration of time sunk into the game and the real need of a more adjustable frequency of autosaves. The causes of the crash ranges from the music changing to just plain old, old coding that seems to be unfixable. Even with saves, you need to save multiple files and at various junctures to avoid creating cariables that ed to the crash in the first place. It is unfortunate that this game with it being almost two decades old does not have the developer support, but the undying love from the fans. (And this is with the advent of Airline Tycoon 2 which I will review at a later time, grouses and all.)

In conclusion, this is a fantastic game I would highly recommend even with my low playtime exhibited here. My childhood was this game. Almost became an airline pilot because of it. However, I prefer the cockpit than the mudpit during basic training leading to this inevitable review of me reliving a life of piloting the air.

Nostalgia of an Age of Empires game set in tumultuous 17th century Europe is not the reason to come back to this game. The simplicity of having an updated engine with better graphics with the same old fighting principles does not detract from the fact the game suffers from a number of issues.

Graphical crashes happen in the middle and at the end of the game in the main menu.

Then, there is the gameplay of it. I remember a horde of workers being able to build things quickly and farm things rapidly in the first two iterations of Cossacks. They have managed to make troop building, training, resource harvesting, and building to be tedious on a normal speed. Even in the fastest speed, it felt slow.

The developers have removed the fun parts of Cossack by slowing things down. Essentially, even a European grand strategy gamer like myself, are left with the historical troops which aren't sufficient to warrant a purchase in its still developing stage.

This rating will change once the full game is out.

As a child of a parent who succumbed to cancer a few years ago, playing this game was cathartic. In a snese, the pain that the Greens went through were several degrees worse than when my father fought for his life. Every hope and anguish is stiflingly recreated or recorded in real-life, making this game one of the most heartwrenching games for 2016.

Juvenile cancer doesn't lead to a punchline or a joke. It is an illness as frustrating as Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, multiple schlerosis, etc. that slowly makes one wither away from the living world. Every day, you hope for a cure and some sort of reprieve from the agony of the regular chemotherapy visits and the brain haze felt after radiotherapy. However, you are tasked to live with it, even if you are cured from it.

The Greens' experience as parents with two other healthy kids whilst facing this horrible, delibitating disease on their third and youngest after being born twelve months before has to be lived. The game does not serve as an epitaph to little Joel. The game serves to remind us that life is short and happiness can be found in the simplest of things. For baby Joel, it was feeding the ducks at the pond, playing in the playground, or just being with his "dah-dah." This will be the closest baby Joel will ever come to forming actual words.

The disease will ravage everyone you love and the person who suffers from it.

I remember watching my father fight it. He did what he did: buy a farm and tour the world with his family. He ate carefully, but still enjoyed the wine that flowed into his goblet. He lived his life fully for 2 whole years. His last six months were a torture on us and him. He was withdrawn as he began to feel the effects of the cancer that spread to his brain. The neuropathy was getting to him. The radiotherapy that was supposed to reduce the seizures make him babble incoherently. His lungs rattled up coughs violent in the night, giving the family countless sleepless nights. I had some regrets of becoming angry at him for instances that still haunt me to my very core.

The game isn't an epitaph for Joel. It is closure for the Green family. Whilst I was playing this game, I felt every nuance that a person who is going through this disease feels. Right now, TotalBiscuit who is suffering from terminal liver cancer has I think played this game. He might become a sobbing little whingey ♥♥♥♥♥ (see comment made by me at the comment section for clarification on this statement). But he too will begin to accept the inevitable. Whether he can fight this proverbial dragon called cancer, like little Joel, is really up to God. Even you don't believe in the existence of one, only the cosmos knows.

The game is not about mechanics. It's about a lived experience.

I highly recommend this game to everyone. Not as a tearjerker, but as a Bible towards finding closure in the face of a long fought battle against the tides of death.

I wish there was a button that said, "Yes and No" on Steam.

Let me begin by saying I'm not the biggest fans of action games. I feel Nathan Drake from Uncharted and Kratos from God of War are overrated characters that dwelled in the realm of fantasy. I liked Nathan Drake for being three-dimensional. Like a Doctor Who with feelings that is not bordering on whinging. Lara Croft from Tomb Raider left me with lurching feeling, even with the new, graphically improved version of her. That’s what I like about the new improved version of Tomb Raider. Kratos was one-dimensional. He sought nothing but revenge, just like the protagonist of this game.

This game suffers from several things: anachronisms, poor characterization, and repetition.
I will commend this game’s beautiful graphics. Remember that this game was originally released on the Xbox One so, the graphics are extremely pretty. With the setting focused on ancient Rome, every nook and cranny felt wonderfully crafted. Even when the game takes you to Caledonia (Scotland) and Britannia (England), the world crafting feels lively, following traditions of Roman mythology and perception. Everything was era accurate in terms of the world. The swords, the shields, the vistas, the villas, the marketplaces, the cloth that people wear and the Coliseum were all breathtakingly beautiful that I felt that I was there.

However, I was not. This game suffers from not poor writing but crap historical research. Without giving too much away, I will bring the name Boudica or Boudicea or whatever we are calling her now. She is a secondary antagonist in the game but her character suffers from such grand anachronisms that it makes me sick as a History graduate. Her father in the game is not her father. They bastardize her entire history to make this ill-conceived, water downed version of Boudica in this game. Sure, she fights like she is purported in the old realm of myth but I felt more slighted by the grave injustice they had done to her and her story.

Then, there is the player character himself, Marius or, as I had previously thought, Ryse. It might as well be called “Ruse: Son of Rome” because they did not even use that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ name, Ryse. Besides the dumb naming, he is such a one-dimensional character. Driven entirely by revenge, much like Kratos, he is pretty much like most Greek/Roman epic heroes. That’s why his character suffers because the linearity of the game only drives his one-dimensional characterization even further. They made Marius feel trapped and predestined for his fate in the game, which is like, again, most ancient Greek and Roman epics. Predestination in this game can be a great tool for characters to grow and it was unfortunate that the player character did not.

And what also did not change was the fighting mechanics. It was brilliant. It felt smooth, intuitive and responsive. Every action you took with Marius felt epic and fresh. However, after the thousandth time you do an execution move against your enemies, it becomes stale. The repetition of the battles is tedious that it becomes a chore to fight. Sure, the story is convoluted but the battle is blocking your way in unravelling it. But it is so boring fighting hundreds of people, by yourself, with a lack of variety in the middle to throw you out of the loop. They throw in some basic puzzles but that isn’t enough. God of War was exemplary, carving out times for battling and puzzle solving in the game because the Gods of that game were toying with their creations. And even though man created the problems for the sake of this story, this game suffers from some serious problems in terms of pacing.

Epic as this game may be, it is no Assassins’ Creed. It isn’t Tomb Raider, Uncharted, or God of War. It is a historically inaccurate game with poorly-shaped characters and repetition in gameplay. However, I am willing to give this a thumbs up, not because it is a good game but, because this was a test to stress the durability of one’s graphics card. The prettiness of this game in a historical setting made me happy. We rarely get a vision of the past in video games (except for Assassins’ Creed) but this game took it somewhere familiar.

We want a Ryse 2 but I hope not. I don’t want to see a sequel for another decade until Crytek resolves their storywriting division. They need to fix that.

Here is a game with lots of beautiful art, a linear story, many far-flung ways to end the story and numerous personable endings.

I think I've wasted two hours with a friend just playing this game. We were trying to find many ways to get the good ending or the worst ending. The countless ways the game has random storytelling elements, boosting (or lowering) your stats along the way was one thing that we kept praising. We even decided to let an 8-sided plus a 20-sided die to tell the story for our heroes.

This game is commendable for its replayability, its amazing art and most importantly, the sense of urgency.

"A week to make everything right and the people do not know what will hit them when the Yawhg comes."

Indeed.

Is best to left goat to professional.

ALL HAIL DEMON GOAT!

This has to be one of the prettiest open-world sandbox games. While others sandbox games fill themselves with the 2D or voxel art styles, this game concentrates it on the 3D world like another similar game, Windborne. While Windborne concerns itself within a magical realm and makes everything centered around building defenses for your new kingdom, Planet Explorers sets you down as a human colonist on the planet Maria. There's a more sci-fi/modern twist to an already saturated genre.

Also, there's an Adventure Mode. Minecraft lets you do whatever you want as they just plop you into the game mode. Planet Explorers is trying to give you a story. Since it's a beta, the word 'engaging' is far from it. The quests in Adventure Mode mirrors predecessors like World of Warcraft. Fetch, kill, escort, harvest - it's tedium faced from other games in a Single Player environment. The only difference between World of Warcraft and Planet Explorers is that there is the allowance of creativity that WoW cannot afford in its multiplayer experience.

I have yet to play the other two modes but when I do, I will give my full review here.