When a game is described by the developers as containing “surly gelatinous characters, brutal mêlée fight sequences, and absurdly hazardous environments” with the action taking place in a fictional place known as Beef City, you know it’s going to be fun. This is Gang Beasts, and I’ve got some quick hit thoughts after playing a bit of the online beta.
I’m sure many of you have already played ARK: Survival Evolved the largely popular open world survival game with dinosaurs taming abilities. Well either way you’re in for a treat with ARK: Survival of the Fittest as it includes almost everything from the main game but in a much shorter more confined time frame. If there’s one thing that I don’t like about these new wave of survival games, it’s that it always seems to take forever to establish yourself on a server and get to the good part of the game where you’re defensible and not being picked on by every player you come across. ARK: SotF immediately blows that out the water with game tending to last between 45 minutes to 2 hours, yet still contain most of the good parts of these longer survival games.
If you have ever seen the film Battle Royale (or The Hunger Games) you will have a good idea of what to expect here. Every player essentially starts with nothing, but can craft weapons and armour and tame dinosaurs just like in the main ARK game. It’s then a battle between all the players on the server to take each other out until there is only one left (or one team left, depending on the game type). The video below should give you a better idea of what to expect.
ARK: Survival of the Fittest is free-to-play and has only just made it’s way to Early Access on Steam a few days ago so expect there to be plenty of updates and changes before the game is fully released.
I spent much of the past weekend playing the Call of Duty: Black Ops III multiplayer Beta on the PlayStation 4. While the Beta is launching on the Xbox One and PC at the moment, I just want to share some of my early thoughts of the game. Hit the break, and let’s begin. …
I’m not going to jump into a lengthy analysis of what this trailer for the multiplayer action in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare shows us, but I will say that when you hit the jump and watch the video, you will jump out of your skin with shock that it actually looks good. Jumping eh? Who would have thought… …
Competition; it’s hard-wired into many of us at a biological level. Everything we do has a competitive edge, whether it is immediately obvious or not. This has never been more true than in gaming, and more specifically, online gaming. …
In an interesting turn of events, Square-Enix have today announced that Hitman: Blood Money is now free to play in a web browser using their Core Online service which is currently in beta. The catch, there always is one, is that you have to watch adverts to get free game time. Your first 10 minutes is free, then you have to view an ad to get another 10 minutes of game-time. The game runs in HD and full screen is available, the image above is from a game I just started using Chrome.
After my first 10 minutes a message informed me that I would have to choose an ad to watch to get my next session, the choice didn’t appear and I was free to carry on playing. Bizarre, but to avoid the hassle I could unlock a level for $0.49 or buy the full game, ad free for $4.99. It is an interesting idea, and the game certainly played very smoothly, but I wonder how things would play out for a newer release and what image quality people would get for the latest titles from Square-Enix. Lara Croft: The Guardian of Light is coming soon to the service and Mini Ninjas is already on it. An interesting idea from the company, it is something I will be keeping an eye on.
The developers at Adventurine have decided, five days before it was scheduled to be released in Europe, to hold Darkfall Online back another month and instead release it on the 25th of February. In an attempt not to utterly fail at release day as so many MMORPGs do, the 22nd of January will instead be the release date of a free trial/beta. Not everyone will be allowed access on the first day, but apparently they will gradually increase the allowed number of people. This should hopefully allow for a relatively painless launch when the time comes. Due to the game’s relatively hardcore nature, its community is already close-knit and eagerly waiting to maul each other, so this can’t come as very pleasant news so few days before the promised release date.
I do hope they know how to take advantage of this: even juggernauts like Valve can fail to properly release a multiplayer game (remember the first week of L4D?), and MMORPGs have always been notoriously hard to open to the public.