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