Review : Just Cause 3

Welcome to Olly's first post. The main things you gotta know is I tend to write a lot more about one thing and unlike Dan, I am one of those pesky console peasants with a subscription to online services and with it the selection of monthly free games. For PlayStation, August's top free game was Just Cause 3, the open world shooty boom bang game and I, in typical review fashion, have some thoughts. (Potential spoilers)

The main synopsis is that our hero Rico and his agency return to his home country to help a rebellion remove a militaristic dictator. Simple stuff, really. The game also thinks this is just enough to get you started, throwing you right into the middle of a battle and reuniting with all your old buddies that you've shared so many memories with. I was initially confused, but passed it off since I hadn't played the previous entries, I did a bit of research and yeah, no, this is the first time players have seen these people, despite them apparently being Rico's best friends and crucial allies. 

This quick and simple pace continues in the cut-scenes, always taking place in a one shot camera motion, which while keeps things interesting, gets a bit much when its mostly just characters talking to each other in quick succession, no time to breath. The general story is harmless enough, a couple of twists, lots of action and a few funny lines. I was always looking forward to destroying bases as it meant receiving a radio message from a kidnapped celebrity forced to explain why the military was getting rid of all their strongholds. This character improved even more when I realized he was voiced by David Tennant. 

The story was never the main selling point however, the game play is where this game truly shines. Right off the bat it gives you access to the majority of your weapons, vehicles and gadgets including an infinite para-shoot and wing-suit. Travelling the world feels effortless, just grapple upwards, get some air and your off. I imagine most players spending their time off the ground. (Especially as the majority of the vehicles handle reaaaally badly.) It's the most fun I've had travelling to point A to point B in a game.

The larger part of the game comes from liberating military areas and towns by taking out individual assets such as statues, posters, gas tanks and electrical equipment. And yeah, this is what the game is really about, because pretty much everything that needs to go will go up in a massive explosion. Everything explodes. And you have plenty to explode things with. Tethers, grenades, tanks, jets - oh it all blows up eventually. Yeah it gets a bit samey over time, most towns and bases kinda look the same, but it blows up just the same. You can just blow it up. Just 'cause (Oh I get it now).

The side content is a little lacking, split into two categories; collectibles, which will reward you with some special weapon or vehicle, and challenges, complete a certain task and you'll get gears out of five, the more gears, the more mods you can apply to your game play. 

These challenges suck.

They're immensely frustrating, including incredibly specific goals and bullshit consequences. I admit when I've made a mistake in a game, but if a challenge just puts you in a truck on the top of a mountain and the end goal at the bottom you'd expect some difficultly but some general method of getting down. Nah this is just "good luck, try not to hit anything on the way down because it'll send you flying in the wrong direction and you'll lose precious seconds on your top score." Added with the load times that take just a bit too long for current gen games, restarting challenges over and over will really wear you down.

And while the game really does looks great; vibrant colours, shiny buildings and those huge fiery explosions, it really doesn't carry all this very well. During my play-through I suffered countless frame rate drops, a few game breaking glitches and once had the whole game crash 4 times in one session. This game came out in 2014 guys, can't they patch a few things?

On the whole this isn't a game you should go into with grand expectations. It's certainly a good game and absolutely tons of fun throughout, but I would recommend only playing a few hours at a time, maybe after a long day at work, unwind by soaring through fields or blowing shit up. 

Olly

Review: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

When it was announced I was very happy, a new campaign, some additional layers of challenge, some special units belonging to both you and the enemy, seemingly freshly ironed of bugs, all wrapped up with some new mission types and some new voice acting to boot. Consider me hyped up. 

War of the Chosen (WoTC) came out on the back end of august. After sinking several hours into both the original XCOM and its expansion, as well as XCOM 2, I decided to buy it, cos if it’s awful, steam will let me have a refund, a feature that to date has been used once on a game I don’t care to remember. Thankfully, it remains unused as this game is good.

Now I want to make one thing painfully clear, it’s really unbelievably good. It takes all the good things about XCOM 2 and improves on them. I never got round to doing a review of XCOM 2 before it became redundant, but holy hell WoTC does an exemplary job of making me love the game more than I already did. The addition of the new fatigue mechanic as well as the AP and XCOM AP for special soldiers makes the game have a tonne more depth. Any of the Chosen actually present a threat and can easily beat up your best team if you slip up for more than a second.

The new classes do lend themselves to the occasionally overpowered moment, dropping whole ADVENT pods in a single turn. The Reaper is quite nice to play as they have a unique concealment mechanic called "shadow", that’s give them a chance to not be detected whenever they attack an enemy. The Skirmishers are just out and out lethal, in conjunction with a Grenadier I killed two high level enemies without even breaking a sweat. Their unique attack twice in one turn as well as their melee weapon essentially turns them into rangers on steroids. The final and favourite class of mine is the Templar, a psionic glass cannon that can end up being the single most powerful unit on the battlefield at any given time. I’m not sure what to call these, but they rely on killing enemies with a with a melee attack called "rend" to build focus, which in turn makes them stronger, but they can spend this focus to carry out some insanely strong psionic attacks, that in one of my missions killed all three members of a pod instantly. These classes are extremely well balanced with the rest of the game, and with the addition of the fatigue mechanic, it means that while they can be super-soldiers, if you don’t give them some rest time, they will suffer from a tonne of negative traits.

The Chosen are quite cookie cutter, pulling from a pool of abilities, some present in the base game, some added by WoTC. However the thing that makes them unique to every play through is that they have different strengths and weaknesses, and can develop new ones over time. They can be defeated, but respawn until you use one of the new rooms, The Circle, to hunt them down to their base and finish them once and for all. There didn’t seem to be a uniqueness to them. Sure they all look different, and do different things, but how beating the Chosen works is the same every time. Use their weakness against them until they die. Maybe if I had to discover their weaknesses and strengths whilst fighting them that would be better, as I would have to try literally every tactic to bring them down, instead of looking at the obvious neon signs telling me how to beat them.

Also am not going into any detail, as if you’re going to play this game, which I recommend you do, I want you to experience this for yourself. FUCK THE LOST. FUCK THE LOST AND ALL OF THE THIER FUCKING MISSIONS. The game added in the Lost, aka Zombies, which to be fair, are fucking quality. They provide this pressure, this unbeatable enemy, who forces you into situations where sometimes you have to decide which soldiers are more valuable, or if you want to fight advent, or you'd prefer to see your soldiers get ripped apart by some mouldy screaming motherfucker.

There’s several improvements to the research system. Namely the inspiration system, and breakthroughs. Inspiration makes research take a shorter amount of time, and breakthrough provided bonus that have to be priorities to gain them, otherwise the chance to get them goes. The Circle and its covert operations add use for soldiers who otherwise would never see the heat of combat, as well as a way to gain PCS's, weapon mods and supplies, and also give XP to your less used recruits. There is also propaganda system now, where you can make posters involving your soldiers, and their exploits.

Overall War of the Chosen is brilliant. It’s a well thought out, well executed, fun and generally rewarding gameplay experience. It’s made a game that was already quite enjoyable surpass literally every expectation I had, as I was expecting DLC akin to something like the previously released "Alien Hunters" or "Shen's Last Gift", and I was soooooooooooo fucking wrong. Honestly, it’s worth the £35 price tag, buy it.

Dan

Theres going be some changes...

So admist "The Other 99%" and University and a myriad of other games. I have deceided to implement some changes around here.

There will be a potetially large increase in the number of posts, mostly due to the new guy, how has been suffering alongside me in the 99%, who has finally grown some testicles and decided to publish his own stuff onto this blog.

There may also be some changes in the layout of the site, as well as the name, URL .etc as Level Up was personal to me, and to reflect the nature of this now becoming a joint venture, i feel that changing the name of the site would be A) more accomodating of other authors and B) also reflect the attitude that we wish to have towards it, as we both want to take this project more seriously, as we both have a passion for gaming, and would like contribute to the community we've taken so much from.

This isnt a full time project for now, and it might never be a full time project. We will post as much as we can, however we both value the quality of the posts above the qantity of the posts, so there isnt a strict schedule, so between the two of us, there probably will be atleast one post a week, however during exams season at uni, or when deadlines approach, the blog may go quiet as we will both be very busy trying not to drown under the pressure of coursework and exams.

Thanks for sticking with me for so long, if any of you have stuck around at all. I hope you like the new content and arent too put off by any future changes.

Thanks again

Dan

The Other 99%: Destroy All Humans: Path of Furon

This game, actually isnt as bad as i was expecting.

We have a few issues with it. The parts designed to be "thrilling" arent, and the weapons being mostly useless, meaning we ended up using roughly 3 of them in the course of our playtime, as the first weapons were the ones we upgraded and used the most. Not like it matters however, because DNA, the games currency, is thrown at you left,right and center, making getting upgrades a matter of when, not a matter of if.

I think the main issue we have with the game that its not bad, it doesnt leave us feeling baffled and angry and confused, however its not good ethier, its full of bad sterotypes, shoddily cobbled together action sequences and main character who sounds like a bad Patty and Selma impression mixed with the slug lady from Monsters inc, mixed with Jack Nicholson. The game is far too repetitve as well. Each area us unique, but they all follow the mission formula of mind reading mission, kill some shit mission, do some other shit mission, boss fight. Its too rinse and repeat. It feels rushed.

The script for the game is just "eh", theres some funny lines, most of which are not said by the main character, leaving the "entertaining, funny" Alien character kinda just wasted and lost on us, because all the line delivery was just bad, and the main character is just uninteresting.

I think my view on this game isnt helped that the games that came before it were actually decent, like the first couple of games were well designed and the played really well. This game is just clunky and badly optimised, as shown when in the Not-France area (Belleville) the boss fight cutscene screamed at us, screen tore and crashed five times, and then finally system crashed after the boss fight. We didn't even finish the fucking thing because it kept crashing after the Not-France Boss fight. Not to mention after three chop and change cookie cutter levels prior to it, Not-France was just downright fucking boring.

One of the key features of the game is destroyable citites, but when we leveled an entire city, the game lagged awfully, its just not acceptable for a game released onto a system where the hardware doesnt change, optimise your fucking game.

Easily the best feature of the game is mind reading. Like honestly, thats where we genuinely laughed most. Some of the thoughts are brilliant, and they are unexpected, and they add a level of depth to the game that we find pretty good. The incorperation of the mind reading into the missions actually makes sense and is enjoyable. 

In total, its not bad, i dont hate it, but niether do i like it, but as bad as it is, its leaps and bounds better than Retribution, easily, because i actually enjoyed playing this game to an extent. Unlike that pile of shit it was actually playable and had potential to be decent, but it was too rushed and badly optimised to be a good game.

Dan

The Other 99%: A new thing to pass the summer.

Hi,

Im not dead.

Uni is done (for now)

Im unemployed (also for now)

So in the months till i return to Uni, im starting a new thing, a sort of series, based off an experience.

It all started with this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWxEwdGpIPQ

"Ride to Hell Retribution (1%)".

Yes, that fucking awful dog-shite game. On a day out with my friends, before we parted for uni, We found it, tucked away on the pre-owned shelf in CEX. That fucking god-awful dog shite bag of wank game. As per request in the video, we bought it, yes, me and my friend Oliver actually paid money for it. We split it, I spent £1.25 for 8 hours of gameplay and over the course of 4 separate days split over a year, we played it and i shit you not, i still feel ripped off. 

During this we encountered 4 system crashes, too many terrible awkward sex scenes, and enough explosions to give Michael Bay an seizure. But we beat it, despite it nearly beating us, nearly over a year since it came into our life.

But as the credits rolled, We felt this vaccum. It got us asking a question "is there anything just as bad as it, if not even worse? and if possible could we find it?".

So join us as we spend money we dont have, on games that arent worth it, for no apparent reason at all.

Because any game, AT ALL, has to be better than that steaming pile of horseshit. Probably.

Dan.