Category: Xbox One

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Let The Child Of Light Tell You A Story!

Child-of-Light

Child of Light was recently released by Ubisoft Montreal and published by their parent company Ubisoft.  It trades out the usual grim and gore of normal RPGs for a light and airy watercolor-esque world.  The game was too pretty for me to pass up, and I have enjoyed myself immensely.

The game starts off with a woman telling her child a story about a girl Aurora who become very ill and fell asleep, but when she awoke, she was in far away land.  She must free the land from the darkness that has gripped it, so she can return home, and be with her beloved father.  It will not be easy, but she will pick up friends along the way including a firefly by the name of Igniculus.

The story tries to rhyme the whole way through, but it is not successful.  I appreciate the effort, but I think they should have given up and just made the text more interesting.  While the story is sweet it is not overly gripping, but since they were going for a fairy tale story maybe that was on purpose.  Still it does its job and moves the game forward.

The game is a turn based RPG, with the slight twist of an added timing element, so if you finish an attack on a monster while it is gearing up for its attack, you cause it to loose its turn.  Likewise the monsters can do the same to your party.  Your firefly companion also gets in on the action.  If you have him hover over a monster, he slows it down, but if you have him hover over a member of your party, he heals that person.

There is a limited loot system.  There are the standard potions, health, magic, revive, and what-have-you.  Then there are oculi.  These are gems that you can add to your attacks or defense to change up your powers a bit.  Equip a ruby on your attack, and now you do fire damage.  Put it on your defense, and now you are guarded from fire.  You do your best to try and match your oculi to the type of creatures you are fighting for maximum advantage.  You can combine oculi to create stronger or varied bonuses.

Now for the moment of truth.  Is the game fun?  I think so, and I also found it quite relaxing which is a change from the norm.  It was nice to lean back and explore the world of Lemuria, and do battle with polite monsters that take their turn.  It is a shame the story didn’t pack more of a punch, and it is a little short at about ten hours, but for fifteen bucks that is quite alright.  It was a great change of pace for me, and I think it will be for you too.

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Titanfall Lands Upright!

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It wasn’t that long ago that I was talking about how excellent the beta for Titanfall was, well now the real thing is out, and I am glad to report that the game has delivered on its promise.  Titanfall by Respawn Entertainment and published by EA exclusively for Microsoft platforms, has made me love playing multiplayer first person shooters again.

Not much has really changed since the beta except that they have loaded the game up with more stuff: more maps, more guns, more customization options, more gameplay modes, and last, but definitely not least, more Titans.  Sure there are only twelve people per match, but the craziness that can happen with those twelve people over tenish minutes is amazing.

Not everything is perfect in the game however, I am not a big fan of the Titan versus Titan mode, and the main gameplay mode that was not available in the beta is what is known as “Campaign Mode”.  For most games this would be the single player, but in Titanfall they just use it to add story to the maps during multiplayer, and give you background in to the world that Titanfall takes place in.  This is a cool idea, but since the story progresses whether you win or lose the match, it makes you seem inconsequential, and then they are talking and stuff is happening in a small window in the corner of the screen, but you are way to busy fighting in a war to be paying attention to it.  I would like to see this idea fleshed out more for the next game, but this time around it was mostly something to do to unlock the customizable Titan chassis.

That may sound like I hated a major component of the game, but since I was playing Titanfall the whole time, it was still a lot of fun.  It was just the story didn’t integrate well.  It is a minor negative awash in a sea of positives.  There is nothing better then wall running on a building, shooting a sniper, and then landing on the back of a Titan and taking it down, sure that has only happened once for me, but it was exhilarating.

Xbox One finally has their system seller, yeah it was a few months too late, and then when they launched people couldn’t sign in to their new Xboxes, but this is a game to buy a console for.  I don’t know how much Microsoft paid EA for the exclusive rights to this game, but they got a bargain.  All I want to do right now is to go play Titanfall some more, and it has been a long time since I have said that about a First Person Shooter.

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Strider Is Back And In HD!

strider

Strider, the game from the now Amazon owned Double Helix and published by Capcom, was not really on my radar, but when I heard that it was a Metroid clone in the vein of Shadow Complex, I was very interested.  Plus I had several Microsoft Bing Points gift cards to use, so I went for it.

The story is really simple.  You are Strider Hiryu a future ninja assassin tasked with killing The Master.  First you will have to battle your way through a fictional Eastern European city gaining new powers, and slaying tons of bad guys and bosses.  The more bosses you kill, the more powers you get, so can advance further on your quest.

I guess there is more to the story than that, but it kept popping up in the bottom of my screen while I was killing hundreds of robots, so I didn’t really keep track.  But it has that awesome 80’s-90’s nonsensical feel to it, and as a child of the 80’s I can tell you that Soviet bad guys are right up there with Nazis in my book.  They are just so easy to hate.

What I love about this game is how fast it is.  You can attack as fast as you can press the “X” button.  The other attacks may be a little slower, but I never felt like I was failing because of the response time.  By the middle part of the game you get so many powers you really feel like an awesome ninja.  It is great.

I never really paid much attention to Strider when I was younger, but I do remember Ninja Gaiden and Shinobi, and Strider feels like their brother, so it kicks the nostalgia in to overdrive making the game just that much more fun.

By default since this is a Metroid-like game, there is a lot of back tracking once you get a new skill that opens up new doors and looking around for random power ups, so that can get tedious at times.  Some of the bosses can get a little cheap until you find their pattern, but those are just minor annoyances.

I have had a lot of fun with this game, and it is more than worth the $15.  It is out on just about every major platform, so if you are interested there should be nothing stopping you from playing it, and I recommend it whole heartedly.  Especially if you fondly remember your side scrolling adventure game days.

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Thoughts On The Titanfall Beta!

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So Microsoft, EA, and the developer of Titanfall, Respawn Entertainment, released the beta for Titanfall over the last weekend, and it was magnificent.  There hasn’t been a beta or a demo that has been this much fun for me since EA and DICE released the Battlefield 1942 Wake Island demo, and I think Titanfall is going to be just as important for the First-Person-Shooter genre.

For those of you that don’t know Titanfall is made by the original makers of the Call of Duty franchise who have left Activision and formed a new studio.  The game is about a war in the future, and it is fought by pilots who can call giant Mechs in to battle with them.  They also have jump jets on their backs so they can double jump and wall run over the cityscapes.

Titanfall plays like they took, Halo, Battlefield, Call of Duty, MechAssault, and Mirror’s Edge and shook really hard until just the best parts remained.  It is better than the sum of its parts, and they only released a little bit of it for public consumption.  I can’t wait to see what is left to discover.

If you like FPSs you should be extremely excited for this game, and even if you don’t this is a game that you are going to want to play.  Save your penny’s because Titanfall is a day one purchase, and something people will be playing for years to come.  Heck if they charged $60 for the beta I would probably pay it because it is just that good.