The game has been release for PC, XBox One, Nintendo Switch and will be available on Playstation 4. I’m running the PC version and have purchased the game on Steam.
Gameplay
Are you familiar with Advance Wars? This game works in the same way but let’s not be lazy and let’s elaborate on that.
This is a turn based strategy game where you control units and building, you have a base and/or a commander and you must not lose either of them.
There are villages you can capture to increase your income. With your income you will craft units in barracks.
The game features a campaign, an arcade mode, a puzzle mode and multiplayer with crossplay. The game also features a built-in map and campaign editor.
Full mouse, keyboard and controller support is available. There are also accessibility settings for color blindness. So much care has been put in the game.
The “Groove”
Each commander has an ultimate move called the “groove”. For example this move heals Mercia and all surrounding units by 50% when used, or Valder can summon a skeleton from the dead.
These moves can make quite the difference but are not necessarily game changers, unlike ultimates in Overwatch for example.
Difficulty curve
The tutorial does a great job explaining where to get information and how to advance but most of the work will be done by the player and it’s a challenging game. I have yet to get 3 stars in a mission that is not a tutorial during the campaign while playing on the normal difficulty. I am not a smart person maybe.
No need to be smart to have fun.
“Ragna challenged you to a battle!”
Special thanks
I would like to personaly thank Chucklefish for bringing this game on multiple platforms and not making it exclusive to any store and also because of crossplay enabling games from everywhere, with every kind of hardware, to connect and play together.
Thank you for making Wargroove the way it is.
Conclusion
I’m not very good but I’m willing to learn from my mistakes. The game looks good and I do enjoy it very much.
Metro Exodus, part of the Metro series, was up for preorder on Steam. But then it was taken down because Epic slapped lightly Deep Silver with dollars bills. While the early preorder will be honored this is bad for PC gaming as a whole.
Exclusivity is not competition
When the Epic Games store had been announced they promised a much bigger share of the sales to the developers and even promoted exclusivity deals.
Painting Steam as the bad guy with 30+5% are we?
Being able to earn 88% of a sale instead of 70% is good for the developer, especially the one that wants to maximize its revenue for less sales. But is it consumer friendly ? It’s not when it can’t be bought everywhere.
This exclusivity is unfair and unhealthy to the PC gaming community.
Metro Exodus
The Epic Games store has the advantage of giving a larger share of each sale to the developers/publishers than Steam, this is good for developers, but making the game available on Steam and then pulling out for a one year exclusivity deal is unfair to players who have preordered and to those who were planning on buying it.
While I’m not concerned about spoilers and I actually have my own opinion about the value of spoilers and how I experience media, I can wholeheartedly say that I will not care about a game striking an exclusivity deal like that.
I made the decision to protest this by not getting the game (legally or not) and I will probably not even bother once it’s out on Steam.
The Steam store page currently has a notice posted:
Notice: Sales of Metro Exodus have been discontinued on Steam due to a publisher decision to make the game exclusive to another PC store.
The developer and publisher have assured us that all prior sales of the game on Steam will be fulfilled on Steam, and Steam owners will be able to access the game and any future updates or DLC through Steam.
We think the decision to remove the game is unfair to Steam customers, especially after a long pre-sale period. We apologize to Steam customers that were expecting it to be available for sale through the February 15th release date, but we were only recently informed of the decision and given limited time to let everyone know.
Source: Steam store page
Even Mike Ybarra, XBox Vice President, has something to say about it:
What a time to be alive. Is this how this great platform ends?
Steam isn’t getting killed, it’s actually not even dying, but PC gaming is hurting.
We already knew for The Division 2 being exclusive to Epic, but having Metro Exodus advertised on Steam during a long preorder period and then making it unavailable for purchase for a whole year is scummy at best.
Time to vote
It’s time to vote with our wallets.
I will personally not stand for this. Games that will be exclusive (or even time exclusive) will not get my attention. I take pride in my Steam library.
GOG and Steam are both much more consumer friendly than what is Epic now, and even when Epic will become friendlier I will still not support it. The only thing I might use the launcher for is the engine since I’ve always wanted to try making some games, but I’m still quite turned off.
The Epic Games Store
While it can sell games and microtransations for Fortnite it lacks forums, players are encourages to go to the Steam forums for interaction. It also lacks groups, wishlists, user profiles, user reviews and Linux support.
We have seen recently that user reviews have been used to review bomb, or protest, the lack of user reviews hurts consumers. When a bad or broken game comes out we can usually get an idea about what it’s like with user review in the store but this isn’t the case here.
While we could search for reviews on YouTube or on any famous gaming news website, there’s no guarantee you will get the whole picture and avoid spoilers (if you care about that), unlike store reviews that can be moderated and voted as useful.
Epic will most certainly not offer any better DRM than Denuevo.
GOG and Origin
GOG and Origin are currently the two other stores that work pretty well.
GOG is great for having DRM free games and older games adapted to run on modern systems. They have a few first party games with the Witcher series and will be getting Cyberpunk 2077 (hopefully not a timed exclusive).
They have a service used to add games to your GOG account depending on the games you own on Steam: GOG Connect.
Let’s give credit where it’s due, EA has many first party games to build their store with exclusives such as Star Wars, FIFA, Battlefield, Dragon Age and many more. They are not poaching any other stores (at the time of writing). While exclusives are still bad they still produce many first party games.
“Sorry, we only serve DRM-less games here.”
Conclusion
Epic Games doesn’t have the perfect record they should have, for a couple of months prior to this post, I’ve been receiving emails about failed login attempts and the recent account theft vulnerability triggers some many red flags when launching their own store that I have no interest in giving it a try.
I’ve invested time and money into Steam and I’m happy about it.
I’m sad to see PC gaming becoming like console, where we all run x86_64 code but not the same software. They would be a great competitor if they were not aggressively pushing exclusivity like that. You can read more here:
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has been released on December 7th 2018 and boy it’s good. The last game I’ve played was the 3DS version, it was fine and ran pretty nicely for the hardware.
I’ve purchased the collector edition with the GameCube gamepad and the adapter.
The game
As announced the character list is massive with over 70 characters in the base game and only the original roster unlocked on a fresh save, there are many characters to unlock and to fight with and against.
The menu is what you would expect since Brawl, you’ve got the main modes which are classic and versus, and you’ve got the adventure mode, World of Light.
Versus and classic are basically the same, with classic replacing bosses depending on the character you are playing.
World of light is the new adventure mode where you will be able to literally go on an adventure, more to follow below.
“Will it hurt?”
Performance
With the lowspec hardware of the Switch, one would expect that great engineering went into optimizing the game. It feels as smooth as it gets and look very nice while not dropping enough frames to notice.
There doesn’t seem to be more input lag than on the previous entries from what I’m used to with the GameCube controller.
Victory!
Controls
Being used to the feeling of the XBox 360 gamepad and the Joycons, I’ve rediscovered the Gamecube controller and have battled with it a bit. The good thing about the controls is that they are the same since melee, the bad thing is that we need the adapter which requires being in docked mode or a hub.
Adventure: World of Light
The trailer does a pretty good job showcasing the adventure. You start with only Kirby and you’ll smash your way through to awaken your allies in the quest to take down Galeem.
The adventure lasts at least 20 hours and has a couple of different challenge based around fighting. This isn’t the adventure of Melee.
When you win a fight you will earn a spirit that can be used to set certain skills on your fighter and buff his attack and defense.
Online versus
As experienced with Super Smash Bros 3DS the online experience will be different for everyone and against everyone. You can feel even the slightest lag and the game doesn’t seems to have proper matchmaking at the time of writing.
The experience can be really bad if you are stuck in a fight that is lagging so much that in game time is slower than real world time. No one wants to have a minute extented to 5.
As an example here are two fights that provide two different experiences. The first fight is a laggy fight, not really fun but it gives you time to see what you did wrong.
The second fight is what you should expect, performance wise, of a good and faire fight.
On the bright side of things you can have pretty good fights when everything goes well.
Conclusion
This game is fun. While I’m not very good I have enjoyed the adventure more than expected and I was surprised. The new characters feel really polished and I’ll be playing Ridley more seriously.
The changes to the already existing fighters are good, Link feels much more interesting to fight with his new bombs.
It’s quite wide. The joycons are not the most comfortable and need some serious getting used to, especially on games such as Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate!
The pro controller is not cheap at all, but since I didn’t buy it (yet?) I can’t speak about its comfort. It looks much better for using it while the console is standing or docked.
The triggers are awkward to use, the sticks are not placed ideally. It’s looks like a hot mess at first and getting used to it is part of the learning curve, not that it’s a good thing.
I’m a trained soldier though!
Get a glass screen protector
The screen glass is low quality compared to the smartphone glass, it will keep your fingerprint like the police just arrested you. It might scratch really easily too, especially if the dock is used a lot.
Any tempered glass screen protector should improve the screen durability, the biggest challenge will be placing it correctly with no dust or air bubbles. I have yet to master this skill.
No memory card included
As expected there’s no micro SD card included, I’d recommend getting at least a 32GB if you plan to screenshot a lot and purchase games from the eShop. Just to list storage requirements for a couple of games:
Super Smash Bros Ultimate: 14.7GB;
Zelda: Breath of the Wild: 14.5GB;
Xenoblade Chronicles 2: 14GB + 4.5GB (DLC);
Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate: 12GB;
Mario Odyssey: 5.6GB;
Stardew Valley: 1GB.
No one is safe from storage heavy games anymore.
The Nintendo eShop
The eShop should learn from other stores. There’s no way to get easily a list of free games or demo without resorting to the search features and ordering by price.
Sometimes by going back through the prompt instead of pressing B will throw you back to the eShop home, not what I though would happen when I started downloading a couple of demos.
Album
When saving screenshots and short clips of 30 seconds they are sent to the album which is the screenshot folder where nothing seems to be sorted. The only way to transfer these files is by ejecting the micro SD card, which is a fine option.
But there’s no way to upload videos to YouTube!
It’s possible to only share screenshots and videos through Twitter and Facebook, or you could buy a card reader and turn off the console then dump the micro SD card’s media onto your computer.
Not every screen can be screenshot and the output format is always JPEG, not the best quality.
Regrets
The red joycon doesn’t look red like on the pictures. It’s closer to a neon red than a bright red color. I’m nit-picking because I really like red. The controls are not as comfortable when getting started too, it’s like there’s a break in period for your hands.
Accessing the other region stores, like the Japanese one for Phantasy Star Online 2 Cloud (to get the Breath of the Wild items), requires adding another user. If you keep that user on the Switch you will be asked to select a user to launch at game… I’d prefer a default user in this case.
There’s no option to upload videos to YouTube as of right now.
Conclusion
As I have not had the opportunity to play a game online I can’t comment it just yet, same goes for cloud saves and any of the advertised features of the subscription. I just really hope that the sales won’t be lock behind the subscription since I don’t plan on paying until I get a game that can be played online (like Smash).
I’ve bought Super Mario Odyssey with the console and got Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu when it came out, for now I feel satisfied since they are both great games and the upcoming line up is great.
No matter how old I get I still love these games. Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee are the latest games of the Pokémon series. Everybody knows about Pokémon, it’s like the Coca Cola of the gaming industry, but healthier.
You will walk 10Km to hatch that egg!
The screenshots and video recording are all done through the Switch’s feature, thus we are working with low bitrate video capped at 30 second, low quality JPEG screenshots. PNG lives matter!
Mainline game or spinoff?
This game is like the 12th time we had the opportunity to visit Kanto but it doesn’t get all that old. The game is solid and definitely is a mainline game. It plays the story like Yellow with come additions.
It’s not even my first time
Capture
The capture mechanic is the same as Pokemon GO at the exception of the way you throw the Poké Ball. You feel like you have less control than on the mobile game and it doesn’t always feel rewarding because you don’t battle Pokémons to catch them.
The wild Pokémons roam the world, no more random encounters unless they spawn on you. You get what you see.
In handheld mode you just press a button, but it seems you can aim the view with the gyroscopic features of the Switch. In detached mode and Poké Ball Plus you swing to send a Poké Ball.
Of course if there’s no battle mechanic that means that you can make wild Pokémons sleep and make catching them easier and that’s really a shame.
This is the core mechanic from the series.
It’s simple
Starting with generation 2 we were able to make our Pokémons hold items, this is missing. Since forever we had PC boxes to store Pokémons, this has been replaced by the bag.
This game seems to start on something new with Combat Points showing a value that represents all the stats of a Pokemon.
Poké Ball Plus
The Poké Ball Plus contains mew. It’s a 50€ piece of DLC and game controller. As a DLC is easy to use, just get the mystery gift inside it and you are done. As a game controller it’s not the best at all… It tends to rotate in the hand and some menus can’t be access since there are only two buttons.
While it’s possible to shake it to trigger a “third button” you can’t get more details on your moves during combat with it.
Against wild Pokémons you can swing it to throw a Poké Ball, just like with the detached joycon.
It also has more features, you can place a Pokémon on it and use the pedometer to gain more experience and some reward for walking around. When it’s linked to Pokémon GO you can have it vibrate when it spots Pokémons… Depending on your location it won’t stop vibrating.
I took Pikachu on a stroll and played some Pokémon GO
What’s missing?
So much is missing… First of all there are much less tactile interactions. You can pat Pikachu with the touchscreen and that seems to be it. You can’t navigate the menus or send Poké Balls with the touchscreen.
The abilities from the 3rd generation are missing too. This is good to avoid some of the weird quirks you’d face when battling certain Pokémons (like heatproof).
The Global Trading System (GTS) doesn’t exist, that’s a shame because it helped completing the Pokédex. No Wonder Trade (WT) but it’s not a big deal for that.
Trading and all other online features are locked behind a subscription.
Not as expensive as the others, but do we need that?
Conclusion
The game is pretty well made, going back to Kanto feels good and the additions in the story are not bad. I regret not being able to battle wild Pokémons to make them easier to catch though.
The framerate of the game feels smooth enough, this was hard to achieve with Sun & Moon and is really nice to look at.
I hope that the next entries to the series will bring back fighting wild Pokémon.
Monster Hunter World is the latest entry in the Monster Hunter franchise that is design for modern hardware. It’s not cheap since it’s basically matching the price of the console version but at least we are able to get it on the superior platform for once.
I’ve purchased the game on the 10th of August.
What’s good
The graphics are quite stunning and the framerate is smooth. Some quality of life changes have been made compared to the 3DS versions too.
The loading times are actually quite good for spinning rust, A.K.A. mechanical hard drives.
While the zones can be confusing when starting, the map actually does a pretty good job at representing the entities (harvestable points, monsters…) and you will not get lost.
Fighting at 60FPS+ is the best improvement and walking away from a fight while chugging on a potion (spamming X because your life depends on it) is better than in the previous games. You will not pose when you have finished drinking a potion.
Aborting healing is also a tactical advantage and choice you might appreciate.
While sometimes you’ll be slaughtering small monsters, most of the game is a boss fight game and it’s really enjoyable when two bosses collided and start fighting each other.
“I was hungry!” – Grimgar
The pacing of the game is the usual where you usually end up tracking the target and then taking it in (capture) or out (slaying). Sometimes you will have multiple targets.
What’s bad
It’s not possible to have more than one Palico unlike Monster Hunter Generations.
Graphically the game is very blurry with TAA, go with FXAA if you need antialiasing. The textures are really low quality for a game that came out in 2018 and the graphics do not justify the performance for a high end computer.
Can you see the blur?
The tutorial doesn’t seem to be all that useful for the newcomers. It would be great if it was optional since it just feels like playing Final Fantasy XIII when you start the game. Cutescenes need to be skippable if I must absolutely play the tutorial.
The male characters’ faces don’t look very good. The female characters look better but that’s to be expected I guess. This is more the style of the game than trying to pull a Mass Effect Andromeda or pulling some experimental motion capture.
It’s original and the effort is appreciate. We will get used to it.
“Didn’t cart more than once.” – Rookie Hunter
DLCs
The amount of DLC on the page can be quite surprising for a newly released game. None of it seems required at the time of writing but it can be seen as cosmetic microtransactions.
Cosmetic items are part of the Monster Hunter franchise
Running on older hardware
I can sadly not test it on my laptop since it keeps crashing when starting to play. Even though the game was ported from console, decent hardware will be required.
The only drivers compatible with my G750JM will always crash
DRM
As previously stated on the Steam page (with Steam Enhanced) the game uses Denuvo. The impact is currently unknown but we can only hope that they minimized the impact and that the Intel i7 3770 they ask for on the recommend hardware isn’t because of Denuvo.
Launch issues
As with just about any games that come out there are issues. Some issues are quite minor and some are major and gamebreaking.
Gamepad not detected
If you are using an XInput gamepad such as a wired XB360 gamepad you will be surprised that it might not be detected by the game when Fraps is running.
Simply turn off Fraps. Thanks reddit. But be careful, starting Fraps might crash the game.
Lightning drops the framerate
Having a hunter equipped with lightning weapons will make the framerate drop significantly. The Kirin must also affect the framerate.
Cheating
Cheating is already starting to happen with amplified damage and inventory editing. Some would think that there would at least be something to do about cheating such as implementing a known anticheat but they did not.
Cheating is not impossible on console too.
Raw gameplay
Since I like capturing the raw gameplay with no commentary or any editing here is the video showing what the game is from the point of view of someone with a hundred or so hours in Monster Hunter Generations.
The game crashed once so the video will restart and I just stitched the video files together for the full experience (crash included).
Conclusion
This game is a bad port. If your war machine can’t handle it then you should wait for them to optimize it a bit more. It wasn’t worth waiting 6 months for this kind of results.
On the bright side though… The game is enjoyable as expected. It’s still aimed to the Monster Hunter fans since the tutorial will not be the part that will hook you onto the game. But if you like boss fights then this game franchise is made for you.
A bit more than 60 hours were needed to complete the game’s story and all available optionnal quests. Some farming was done because it’s a Monster Hunter game and equipment must be crafted.
Dark Souls III is hard and fair. This game will always be fair to you but it won’t give away chances to be easy. There is no difficulty setting.
Rising from your coffin
You start the game after a simple intro video that doesn’t do much of explaining why and what. You rise from the coffin and make your way to Firelink shrine: the main hub of the game.
In the shrine you’ll be able to upgrade your weapons, level up your stats and interact with some NPCs. You’ll learn the story through your interactions with some key NPCs and by reading the item descriptions.
Your next destination will be Lothric’s high wall and your objective is to bring back the lords of cinder.
Prithee be careful
Dark Souls is known for not forgiving. But it’s quite fair to be honest.
Your character has life points, attunement points for casting spells and endurance for performing actions.
Mashing your way through hordes of undead doesn’t work well when you have no endurance and an oversized sword, but that doesn’t mean you cosplay as Guts and wreak havoc wherever you go. Just get good first by learning the game.
Don’t tell, show
Learning the monsters pattern, learning parries, learning from failure. This game shows you everything you need to learn. Dying is part of the experience.
The plot will never get in your way, except maybe once. You might not know where to go at first but you’ll always end up by finding a path that you didn’t explore before.
Backtracking through shortcuts is also a very important part of the game even though you can fast travel between bonfires.
Everything you see in the skybox can be explored too.
Your style
You will be able to choose what kind of “class” you will start as but nothing is set in stone yet and you will be able to change to whatever suits you best. If you’re more of a mage you will be able to learn sorcery throughout the game.
If you live the way of the sword you will have multiple choices ranging from the straight sword, to the great sword or even some katanas.
Do you need a shield or are you confident enough to dodge the attacks? You play the way you want to.
Online mechanics
The first online part of this game is integrated through messages that either warn or troll.
The second part is combat. You will either summon or invade.
Summoning brings help for a boss or an invasion while invading sounds just like it’s spelt. Invading is a big part of the game that is optional.
You might feel like you are bullying other players (or getting bullied) but you will more often than not learn tricks by watching other players attempts them.
The only unfair part of this game is the player interaction, it can be disabled in the options. It can be tiring to invade a group of players or be the only one of your group of invaders actually attacking your foes.
No regrets
It runs well while being locked to 60FPS, the game is gorgeous.
Conclusion
Dark Soul III is a hard game. It’s my first Dark Souls and it will not be the last. The controls are satisfying with a gamepad and the fights are really good.
This game kept me occupied during the start of the year.
Player interaction can be pretty boring though after getting invaded or invading a group.
You first run will probably take some time, I spent nearly 50 hours before behind able to initiate NG+.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is, at the time of writing, the last game featuring the characters from the Metal Gear universe from the mainline of games.
This game is an open world game, like many games that came out in 2015. It still contains the main elements from a Metal Gear game like sexy posters, cardboard boxes and fun stuff (the hamburgers of Kazuhira Miller).
How about having a late review?
The hospital
Waking up to some music and a nurse tending to us we get to enjoy the cinematic experience of Metal Gear Solid before being thrown into a tutorial. In this part we won’t learn much of the game and will have to basically follow the corridor.
This will introduce some basic mechanics though like healing certain injuries and cover. Not much else…
Afghanistan
After escaping Snake will travel to Afghanistan in order to rescue Kazuhira Miller. The game starts and throws you into the open world experience where you will learn better how to use the new game mechanics to sneak around.
OctoCamo is not yet a thing in 1984 so you’ll have a hard time hiding in plain sight like in MGS 4 but the enjoyment is still here since you have the whole world to hide in.
As yet another open world game you’ll be able to do some gathering. Gather plants, resources and people. Yes. People are a resource and can be kidnapped fulton extracted to expand the skills of your staff in Mother Base so you can develop new weapons and tools.
Mother Base
This is kind of the main hub of the game where you will return for every major events, take showers, beat up the moral of your staff and upgrade it to generate more resources, send more teams on missions or just relax.
There not much else to do and you will spend most of your time in Afghanistan or in Africa.
Main missions and side ops
The game has few modes you can access through your iDroid:
Main missions: story missions;
Side operations: side missions.
The way you progress in the story is straightforward until you run out of story missions and you are “forced” to play side ops. This might be a way to make the game somewhat unpredictable. Sadly it feels forced and will end prematurely missions you are playing.
Overall there are enough missions spread out over the world to sometimes encounter an event that will lead to a main mission or a side op like falling face to face with an armored unit or a sniper team of highly skilled soldiers.
But as expected of an open world game several of the side ops are the same that will just take you into another location.
Unlike other games the story doesn’t force you very often to play some events and you will be able to roam freely every time unless your actions have advanced you to a certain point where some missions are unlocked. This is a rare occurrence and will not block progression on previous missions.
Game performance
Playing the game on PC can be a challenge with the badly ported controls. The controls feel much better than those of MGSV: Ground Zeroes. There are still some issues like some keys that can’t be rebound (slowing down on the rocket punch) and the frame rate is locked.
The FOV can feel tight and the draw distance is quite low. Other than that the game looks good and performs well.
I have played the whole game with a mouse and keyboard.
Instead of giving points or stars I’d prefer to give regrets or bullet points that will list and maybe explain why I (might) have felt regret.
The story doesn’t feel finished;
Walking is slower on a keyboard than with a gamepad;
Can’t rebind all the keys that have prompts.
Conclusion
The game still doesn’t feel finished, some plot points have not been ended and there’s still some things in the wild that shouldn’t be there anymore. It feels like there’s still some things left to do to wrap up the story and (try to) explain what happens next.
The text scroll that recaps the whole series is great and helps to situate the events correctly but that is not what we are used to. There’s at least an hours and a half of cutscenes missing.
Since Hideo Kojima is not working at Konami anymore and that Konami will never be able to produce a true successor (instead of remaking MGS3 as a pachislot) we may never see a true conclusion to the series.
Playing a nearly 3 year old game that doesn’t feel too outdated was a good experience and I really felt engaged. This is currently one of the top two games I have played in 2018 that have come out during the last couple of years (the other being Dark Souls 3).
I’m happy I was able to purchase this game, the experience was good and I kinda felt addicted (like for Dark Souls 3).
I have logged 70 hours and just finished “The man who sold the world”.
